If you’re a company and you haven’t launched your own Wordle-esque two-minute game, are you even really in business? It seems to be a rite of passage for agencies and social platforms to devise addictive little time sinks for which people can reach when they have a couple of minutes to kill—and Long Story Short, launched earlier this week, is a company called Sheets.Works’ contribution to the genre.
The game works like this: you’re provided with a 12-word sentence, and you have to choose five of those words to convey all the original sentence’s information. The starting sentences are deliberately verbose (or, at least, I hope they are.) Today’s example is this: “The famous high profile trial was delayed while the weary judge deliberated.”
I won’t spoil the answer, although it’s pretty straightforward. But that answer does illustrate a couple of frustrating things about this game. If I had to reduce that sentence to five words, I’d probably end up with something like, “Judicial deliberations delay prominent trial.” But you can’t change the words in any way, which means you’re stuck with either “famous” (not really the right word in this case) or “high profile” (better, but it’s two words, which means 40% of your sentence is a compound adjective). You also can’t change the part of speech a word is filling (so the noun “judge” can’t become “judicial”) or even the tense of a verb (so “delayed” can’t become “delay”.)
Ultimately, though, the biggest problem with Long Story Short is that it’s an inherently subjective exercise. With, say, Wordle, you’re either right or wrong. A letter is either part of the answer or it isn’t. That’s not the case here. In fairness to Long Story Short’s designers, they do seem to appreciate this, and the game provides its reasoning for the chosen words once you’re done. In this case, for example, it doesn’t like retaining “deliberated” because that’s “what judges do every day.” But there are many reasons why a judge might delay a trial beyond having a good long think.
And here I am, thinking way too much about how to edit a sentence. A generation ago, I might have applauded the ingenuity of a game that honestly couldn’t have been designed better to appeal to journalists and editors, but frankly, I doubt that anyone’s thinking that way in 2026.
What’s the point of this little game anyway?
If there’s any underlying motivation about which to wonder, it’s this: I do hope that this game doesn’t serve to teach brevity and concision to large language models. One of the aspects of AI writing that still gives its non-human provenance away fairly regularly is its propensity to waffle on without saying anything in particular. LLMs often produce writing that sounds like a high school student trying desperately to meet a minimum word count, and it’d be awfully disappointing if this ended up as some sort of crowd-sourced exercise in teaching it not to do so.
To be clear, I have no reason to believe this is the case. It’s just that… well, to cut a long story short, as it were, it’s that after a couple of years’ worth of watching the work of writers and editors being slurped up wholesale and without compensation to train the godawful chatbots that are still merrily assisting people to harm themselves—and creating unprecedented environmental strain while they do so—I’m perhaps a little more cynical than I used to be. Sorry. But not really.
But, y’know, whatever. This is a fun little game that teaches you to edit sentences. Knock yourselves out.
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