IF Competition 2014

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#23

I suppose if you’re looking for someone to disagree, I’ll take the bullet… You said this in your first post:

“But… but as a result, the Comp that should, theoretically, showcase the best of the community ends up giving us some people who never really did it before and decided to start here.”

And I thought to myself that I never considered the Comp to be about showcasing the best of the community. I consider the Comp to be a place to showcase IF, for anyone to get their work in front of the eyes of the community in a real way that off-comp release might not. In other words, it’s about visibility rather than about arriving at a pinnacle.

I’ve seen a certain pattern in various places I’ve been involved - when you have a creative endeavor, the more people you get involved with it, the lower the overall quality becomes. That’s just the way it is. The law of averages applies. (I’m not sure if that’s the right way to phrase it, but it sounded good!)

I was part of a writing website called Storiesmania.net. The site’s creator wanted only quality pieces. So in order to get a writing posted, it had to go through an editing process, where pieces not good enough were not posted. Long story short, the site had a brief burst with a small but devoted community, but when those drifted off to other pursuits, the traffic dried up. The site no longer exists. Another writing site which has no such restrictions, where anyone can post whatever they want no matter what, is thriving and growing.

A similar problem is happening with the Quest IF tool. Lowering the bar for entry (by making it easier to create something) has created a larger quantity of titles. Reality dictates that quality will tend toward the average rather than each piece being the pinnacle of IF achievement. And that’s not a bad thing. It means more people are involved, more people are trying things, more people are dipping the toes in the craft’s wading pool.

What it does is shift the problem from barrier of entry to post-creation categorization. And that’s where the comps come in, in my opinion. It’s good that the bar is high - someone needs to be confident in what they have created to submit it. That provides an initial level of self-filtering. But after that, it’s up to the judges (as the voice of the community) to weigh the merits of the pieces submitted. As much can be learned by a failing submission as by a successful one, and that feedback is beneficial for everyone.

I think all this talk of smaller comps leading up to larger comps leading to the pinnacle of comps is premature. It would make sense if the number of entries to IFComp was some factor larger than it is now (e.g. if the entrants were in the hundreds or thousands). That would be necessary just to keep it manageable, from a logistic point of view,

But I think saying IFComp should, even in theory, only be the best games is to miss to some extent why it exists to begin with: to allow someone - anyone - to have their pieces judged. To say to the IF community, a very informal collection of individuals, in a more formal setting, “What do you think of this?”

It means that someone like me, who has never posted a game before, can have a direct line to the people in the community who are the best ones to judge its merits. In other words, I see it existing more for those taking part than for those watching from the sidelines.

That’s my take anyway :slight_smile:

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#24

And a welcome one it is, too!

I see what you mean, and I’ll clarify that I also meant IF, not just the community. And I always felt that a place to showcase something would have, well, games of a certain quality to showcase, otherwise it’s not showcasing much of anything. I don’t mean to say I abhor low-quality games in the comp and they should be dipped in acid for a thousand years; I just get worried when half the games I play (I haven’t played many yet, and this is an accurate average) are… well, of varying degrees of low quality (talking about parser games here, haven’t played Twine yet).

It goes back Evouga’s listing of the IFComp’s roles. As a player, I guess I see it differently than as an author. Personally, I think the author’s POV is more important - they’re the ones participating - but the player’s POV is also worth considering; I wouldn’t like it if newcomers to IF as players checked out the Comp and went “What? Is this the best of the lot, the entrants in the showiest event on IF?”.

That’s definitely a good thing, it only fails to happen in places where the communities are kept closed and then they go stale. We don’t want that to happen here. But is the creative endeavour here IF, or the IFComp? Quality of IF" lowering outside the Comp is not a problem at all - no one’s keeping tally, we just want to encourage authors to get better. “Quality of IFComp” lowering, given its visibility, is another issue.

I thought of Quest many times during this discussion. They do have one amazingly good thing: a very open community where anyone can dip in and start doing whatever they want and be welcomed for it. That really encourages people. But I always thought they lacked a bit in proper criticism, which is also necessary to get the games out of the “excited doodling draft” phase and into, eventually, the “seriously good” phase.

The Quest games I remember seeing in Comps were pretty solid, “Dream Pieces” in particular I quite enjoyed, and Moquette, despite some shortcomings I read about, was definitely a quality piece in presentation if nothing else, so Quest is really not an issue as far as the Comp goes (there’s a Quest game this year, isn’t there? Haven’t played it yet, no mobile terp). Maybe because they have that huge playground to play in and get better?

Not really, because we’re not talking about official comps. Not even talking about the occasional SmoochieComp or DinoComp or ToasterComp. This is just about the SpeedIF phenomenon, which requires way less organisation than an actual comp, can be held at any time, and takes up two hours of your time to write the game. It’s like a writing club where suddenly someone starts a story and it goes around the table being completed by everyone. Quick and dirty good fun.

Not quite what I was saying, and I think after this post you’ll realise why. :wink: I think IFComp should showcase the best of the community, or IF if you will. One game I really liked, Enigma, was spot-on here - it showcased a new way of doing IF (I disagree with the author when he says it probably should have been a hypertext game, but that’s a personal opinion). I think IFComp should have games of varying quality (when I said “varying quality” in my first post I was trying to be polite; I meant bad or unfun or below average games, I was just trying to smooth it out). And I think that the IFComp itself doesn’t have to change what it’s doing; maybe the community instead could change in order to make newer members feel more welcome, and write more games, however small and dirty. That is the only way to get to the big stuff.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5647&p=40827&hilit=Lex#p40827

(my fault as well, at the time of that post I was an active member of the community)
This was a person who submitted their first game. There were zero replies, no feedback at all. The link is now dead. The only reason the game isn’t lost is that I saved it, pack rat as always, and recently submitted it to the archive. It’s an interesting experiment, and the sort of thing we want to encourage in newcomers. But no one said a word (I’m guilty too), and apparently this person just went away quietly.

I think that if we address that, we’ll eventually have a IFComp with an overall higher average of quality.

#25

I can get on board with that.

I myself am a more recent newcomer to the IF community. I played games when I was younger, but I only came to discover this thriving group in the past few years. For me, as the forums all seemed informal and IFDB seemed vast, IFComp seemed the best way to get a new work visible and get feedback. I know the forums have places to announce new games, but that dfidn’t seem to guarantee any response - whereas IFComp would, as the games are being put forward to be judged. (I just missed IFComp this year, so I’m not sure how my own game launch is going to fare,)

I think from an author point of view, feedback is what is most coveted, especially as we grow in the art form. Otherwise, there is no direction and no growth. Just our own personal feedback loops (and we can see where that gets us!). If there were a place to get that feedback (and perhaps the forum can be it with the right game - I don’t know), then that would mitigate needing to necessarily use IFComp as a launching point.

I think I’m just leery of creating a whole slew of tiered comps unless the real goal would be to encourage people to take part who had been put off by the overall scariness of the full blown IFComp.

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#26

I just realized we’re totally missing the obvious solution: You don’t want to bother with games of inferior quality and want them screened to be considered in the comp. How about waiting till after the comp (which is screening the games for you) and then playing only games that score in the 6-10 range?

Problem solved!

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#27

I think you might be missing the point. I do make a point of playing every game. I do not want them screened to be considered in the comp, that’s what I’ve been saying all along. And that’s not solving a problem, that’s avoiding it (assuming it exists - we’re back to that).

Even if it doesn’t exist, I do think the discussion covered good points and was worth having. Despite how it may have come across, it was overall a very positive, growth-encouraging discussion.

#28

Evouga,

The strongest, but most time-consuming, way to encourage people to do things the way you want them is to test a game. Let programmers know what works, what doesn’t work, and what direction their game should go in. Post on July 1st, after Jason McIntosh opens the IFComp for entrants, in the Beta Testing thread to say “I’m willing to help test parser games. This is an open-ended offer, and the earlier you give me something playable, the more feedback I can give, and the more chance you have of tweaking things so people like your games.”

You may get a few games you find hard to play & it’s hard to be diplomatic. But people just knowing that a tester has their backs is big–trust me here.

Testing is hard work but it is appreciated and you do form relationships with the people you test for and give transcripts to. You may be able to pass on some things you find obvious but others don’t, and that can be a huge boost for them.

Nevertheless it’s a nontrivial investment to test even one game. But sometimes an author gets a lot of mileage over “what if you try this…?” especially if they get something July 15th–they have 2 months for an a-ha moment to make a jump that makes their game that much nicer or cleverer.

#29

That is great advice – while my time is very limited I ought to be able to test the occasional game.

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#30

That would be awesome! I would say that being a committed tester for one game may be more help than doing scattershot stuff for a bunch. But if you don’t have the ability to commit to giving a few transcripts, that is okay too.

Even walkthrough testing is a huge help. I mean, the programmer for parser games should be using a TEST command that helps them through the whole game, to make sure there is a path. A walkthrough-tester can just play devil’s advocate and make sure exits, scenery, etc. are clued and even try small branches. Often it helps the programmer catch even more, because they know their world and say “I bet I missed that too” or "I should fix X when I implement it.

I find I need a combination of people who grind through without one and people who use one.

Oh, one other thing! Sending authors transcripts during a comp is a huge help. They don’t have to be annotated that muck, although

; typo Is’nt -> Isn’t

is helpful. Just a few lines of general impressions or main things to help with a post-comp release can go a long way.

Of course, your donations to IFComp are unquestionably a Very Good Thing, too.

#31

Nifty little link:

(thank you vivdunstan)

One of the very first paragraphs says:

The annual Interactive Fiction awards are taking place right now, showcasing the very best new works

Rather neatly ties into my whole argument. :wink:

#32

Right, Peter, as always. Journalists are never wrong, nor do they ever spit-polish their phrasings to support something. I have now been completely convinced to stop entering comps until someone blesses my work as “the best” and will encourage others to do likewise.

#33

I seem to have missed something important.

I now realise you felt personally affected, possibly attacked, by this whole line of argument, partly because you were a competitor in the Comp, partly because of other reasons.

If so, I apologise. Sincerely. I did not mean to cause you such discomfort. I also wasn’t saying - please try to understand this, because it’s the whole root of my argument and the bit I’m not sure I was able to communicate yet - that we should screen the Comp, or anything. After a little back and forth - after I felt able to express a disappointment that was at least as real as what you’re feeling now - after I got a few replies and they got me thinking…

…after all that, what I concluded and proposed was simply that, by having more and smaller comps, quick and dirty, SpeedIF style, we might raise the level of the Comp.

Nor do I mean that the games are crap. There are pretty damn good games this Comp, as there are every Comp. But when I started playing them, I quickly - too quickly - ran into games where the bar was just too low for the IFComp, I felt. I don’t wish to exclude those authors. I wish for those same authors to have a chance to make games outside of a big comp like this, and get feedback, and get better - so that when they get to a big Comp, they are already better. They’ve already cut their teeth.

And whether or not you like what journalists say, it’s a pretty big thing - it’s apparently how this Comp is viewed, and there are people who might not have known about it and now do and have already started off thinking that the Comp is the place to showcase the best games. If we ignore that sort of thing we ignore the outside world and IF gets stagnant.

EDIT: Also:

My main point is, that might be exactly what we need to change. :slight_smile:

#34

Peter, don’t apologize. You won me over. Your argument worked and I agree with you. I finally understand your reasoning. It makes total sense not to clutter up the Comp with sub-par entries.

Since I can only control what I do, not anyone else, the only minor way I can pitch in to improve the bulk quality of Comp entries is to stop contributing to the needless volume with my own.

Upside: I’ll get a lot more sleep. I can’t believe how many social activities I turned down this summer to stay in and write. Writing takes a lot of time, and I’ll have no trouble taking a good chunk of it back by just writing for my own enjoyment whenever I feel like it.

#35

Just so there’s absolutely no doubt about it, I consider this reply to mean that I’ve had a very negative impact here; where I intended for people to start thinking about giving newcomers more feedback and more opportunities to write, I accidently turned competitors away. Not my intention at all.

I hope you reconsider. I haven’t seen many reviews of your game yet, but the ones I’ve seen are very positive. I’ll get around to playing it - I’ve a huge library, and am playing them all alphabetically, and since yours is under T and I’m currently between L and M, well, it’ll take a while, but I’m looking forward to it. (I’m savouring the time it’ll take me to get to Trinity the same way; there’s a few titles I’m quietly appreciating the wait, knowing I’ll get something good in the end).

I hope to see you (and many others) again in other Comps, despite what you say here. I don’t think you, the author, has to worry about the “level of quality of the overall comp”, so I don’t think you have to stop yourself from turning in your work - that’s baaaad. Seriously, that’s horrid, and I really am sorry I made you feel that way. If it’s anyone’s “fault” (using the term loosely) it’s the community around the comp (raise hand) who failed to provide enough feedback outside of the comp to new authors. New authors are like babies - lots of enthusiasm, but obviously they weren’t born knowing some things. If they’re nurtured, appreciated, even slightly chastised at times, it’ll make them grow. If they run amok unheeded, they won’t reach their potential.

Anyway, you’re hardly a newcomer. I guess I never thought you could think this’d all apply to you. I’m sometimes thick that way. I’m sorry.

EDIT - To go back to an analogy I know more about… if a singing student does badly in a competition (as I’ve done many times, no doubt lowering the quality bar of the competition myself), it’s not for the student to say “I’ll never enter again until I’m better” - the student will surely never enter another competition ever again. It behooves the student’s teacher (and no one else) to consider what went wrong, and to keep working on it, and send the student (as I’ve been sent) to smaller, less visible competitions, where a screw-up won’t be as visible as in, say, Operalia.

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#36

Sorry, I’ve been meaning to throw in my two cents since the beginning of this thread, but I’ve done a lousy job of keeping track of exactly which things I wanted to comment on.

The IF Comp has never been a showcase of the best-of-the-best. Besides having a long tradition of “My First IF”-type entries, it’s had its share of “My First IF”-parody works. In a perfect world, the XYZZY Awards would get the same attention as the IF Comp, as that is for the best-of-the-best, but whatever, the IF Comp has that “new games smell” and the attention-grabbing name.

That said, there are always things we can do to improve the comp experience. Initially, I was shocked when authors could revise games as the comp was going on, but really, I think it’s a great rule. Too many games will never be touched again once the comp is over, and keeping notes and sending them off to the author will improve the chance that the best version of that particular game will end up on the IF Archive one day.

Writing reviews is good, too, but I get the feeling they don’t help the authors as much as they benefit the community.

If the IF Comp doesn’t represent the kind of games you like to play well enough to your tastes, there are really two main things to do about it. Of course, one of them is, hey, if you have any aspirations towards game-writing, throw your hat in the ring and do it. It’s likely there are others that would appreciate the same kind of game- even if fans are sadly not very vocal about it… but that ties into the other thing.

The other thing is: take the time to send personal e-mails to the authors of the games you DO like. A lot of years, my favorite games are usually ones that place mid-pack or lower, and you can be fairly certain that these authors are not receiving a lot of praise for their work. You see something you like; you let them know!

The other year, I met Jim Munroe at PAX East. He said it was my support for “Punk Points” that kept him writing IF (of course, he went on to write several more games, several which were more community-embraced than "Punk Points). Of course, I felt like he gave me far too much credit, but I still completely acknowledge the importance of writing people and saying, “Hey, I liked that!”

You can do it with people with works from years ago, too, but most people move in and out of IF in phases. Authors in the IF Comp have IF fresh on their mind, so it’s a great time to stoke the creation of future works!

3 Likes
#37

Never too late for a post like that.

Yes, it’s difficult for IFComp to bridge the gap between “best works” and helping new people get visible. Unfortunately, stuff like IntroComp or SpeedIFs or Spring Thing don’t get enough publicity, and those things help people have fun and try to get better. I have to say, IFComp intimidated me when Wade Clarke said he’d enter it in 2010–but then seeing some bad entries gave me confidence I wouldn’t be barred. So there’s that. But we still do need some sort of farm system for fun stuff that isn’t a total blow-off. Events like EctoComp getting 24(?) entries last year are a good example of what works. Some people from there stuck around.

Good (e.g. cogent and non-“let’s pick wrong bits apart or complain how newbie X doesn’t know this or oldbie Y still doesn’t know that”) reviews helping the community come back to helping out the authors. The community feels more comforting, and they can walk in there and participate. Authors can look at them and enjoy them.

I totally agree about personal emails. I try to send them when they can. Even an under the table “you missed this bug you don’t deserve to get stung by” is 1) encouraging and 2) now within the rules to help authors fix. I can say more about the revision rule, but it’ll have to wait. The email I send is “I liked your game. Thanks for writing it. If you’re interested in developing it further, I put minor concerns after a semicolon. But it doesn’t need touchups.”

That story about Jim Munroe is awesome. I think the future nice mails prompted him to add a cool ending to Guilded Youth. I wasn’t ready to quit after 2011, but 2 of the top 3 placers saying legitimate nice things to me without huge motivation (the 3rd was a friend before the comp, so I can’t quite count him) helped me do better in 2012. In fact the whoe authors’ forum has a great example of what writing textadventures or, well, anything, can be. People helping each other with bugs and aesthetic issues and even stuff for a post-comp release. We need something like that the other 46 weeks. We may need several pods of, say, 15 people to sit and create and revise and not worry about The Critic. I suspect the oldtimers have something like that. I bet the newer twine writers have that, too, and it’s helped them.

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#38

For the record, I am not going to ragequit the community, but I did legitimately experience every single emotion that I expressed. I was being a bit overdramatic to prove my point. There’s no problem with having opinions and trying to improve the community in any way that you can, but I hope you can understand that expressing that a segment of potential IF creators should be excluded from a comp whose rules specifically solicit new authors and new content while the comp is currently occurring is quite poor timing.

I consider myself a new author. I have only started publicly showing my work in the 2013 Comp. But I have been an avid fan of IF since Infocom in the 1980s. I have tried to make my own adventures from as young as age 14 in BASIC, with the original AGS, and I have probably tried every other creation tool since then. I’ve seen the crash of text IF, and the steady resurgence of it with Inform as a total lurker, and the burst of new blood that Twine has encouraged. Despite me occasionally being that Muppet who slams his forehead onto the piano keyboard, (“OH I’LL NEVER GET IT! NEVAH! [blonnngngnkeyboardforeheadthud]”) I’m probably not going anywhere for long.

I can understand that you, Peter, are probably the equivalent of an audiophile in the music world. You know what you like, and you have a strong opinion of good or bad, and sometimes feel like you needn’t even bother with material below your quality threshold because your palate is that refined. I and others have expressed that there are ways than anyone can positively contribute to the renewed growth of interactive text as a legitimate gaming form: you could write your own and lead by example, you could start your own “invitation only” comp for writers you feel are above a certain level, you could start a blog and review lots of IF and write articles about it, or you could contribute to Patreons of writers you enjoy.

I can only interpret that you seem to be worried that some random person will somehow read that a comp puts on display “the best of the best in current IF” (which is a very common means of advertising any kind of contest, whether it be opera singing, hog-calling, or butter sculpting) and upon discovering that it’s a contest and not specifically a “showcase” will somehow be permanently discouraged about the entirety of IF and we’ll lose a “customer”? I think that’s wrong in a “teach a man to fish…” sort of manner: If we have the opportunity to either inspire one potental creator and turn away one potential consumer, or hold onto one consumer while discourgaging one potential creator, I believe the former is the better choice.

You’ve stated your point and I get it. I’ve expressed that continued piling on to your point in an effort to be right causes me to feel like you are targeting me personally due to current circumstances (as many people including myself can often only ingest any undirected general criticism in terms of how to better their own personal self). My point is that your continued expression that we need to somehow exclude a new segment of the community could have a net negative effect on potential game creators and turn them them away for good–as you believed I just now might have been.

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#39

I want to make a good quality game, but am not particularly experienced, and agree that a friendly environment for constructive feedback would be welcome year-round. It’d be helpful even at the early stages, when you are trying to figure out if a concept for a game is likely to work, and you’d rather not put your half-baked ideas out there in front of all the critics. Or when you want feedback on something spoilery. Either way, it would be nice to be able to do this somewhere other than a totally public forum.

#40

Well, minicomps like Shufflecomp work well. All authors had pseudonyms & testing was assigned randomly. It wasn’t really a competition–just, 10 games got commendations. The overall quality was high.

I think Carolyn VanEseltine is organizing ParserComp as well, if you want to write parser. But there’s nothing official yet.

#41

Yeah, well, see, that’s the thing, I’m very sorry if it came across that way, but to my mind I never expressed that. But, I must have, otherwise you wouldn’t have felt it. I’ll be more attentive to what I say in the future, and especially to how I say it :wink:

Hey, I probably played your games! I used to collect AGS games as avidly as I collect IF. What AGS games did you author?

Again, is that what I did? I really have to watch myself in future. :frowning: I I kept repeating it because you kept bringing up that I wanted people to be excluded… which I don’t, and I never felt that was clear.

I do have a tendency to stretch every argument way past its bedtime, as long as I feel there’s something worth saying, and usually until in my mind I can either evolve my point of view to strengthen it or to change it or abandon it completely as a result of what people tell me. It’s been known for me to vehemently argue one point to utter exhaustion, until suddenly the other person comes up with a single argument against my point - and I realise that, on the strength of that point, my argument falls to pieces, and then I’m glad to concede, because I learned something. But until that happens, if it happens, I enjoy the exhange of ideas and arguments and the freewheel thinking.

Definitely going to have to filter what I say in the future, though. I guess I’m a nerd, and have the nerd-filter on, and should work on the normal-people filter, hey?

No hard feelings, please? Pretty please? :slight_smile:

#42

I didn’t publish anything until 2013. I played with AGS way the hell back, but had neither the fortitude to complete a game, nor the internet (bbs?) connections to distribute one.