i’ve been working on mine for months and i don’t expect it to be done for next year’s ifcomp… o.o
What do you mean, gallivanting in meadow?!
It’s the central mechanic of the game.
Gallivanting is an action applying to nothing. Understand "gallivant" as gallivanting.
Check gallivanting when the location is not a meadow: say "You cannot gallivant here." instead.
Carry out gallivanting...[etc]First of all: Yay! Go jmac. Looking forward to this year.
I’m thinking something that might be cool is a pre-release button for authors, so when you’ve got your blurb in and your picture, there is a page which shows the ‘entries so far’ with just the blurb and the piccie. Just to whet appetites sort of thing…hmmm…is this a good idea? I’m not so sure.
I’d be interested to hear what others think of that idea.
From my POV, the “Christmas morning” surprise of all these titles, blurbs, and authors’ names all appearing at the same time together every October 1 is a defining characteristic of the IFComp. Providing an official route to let people peek through the wrapping paper feels like it would work against that.
To be fair, nobody has to look at pre-comp information about upcoming games. People who enjoy the surprise of having all those games showing up together all of a sudden can still get it.
The traditional way the IF Comp works (which has influenced IF community culture and the way people behave even in other comps without those explicit rules) is that you work in monk-like silence until the work is done, and then you remain quiet until the judging period is over. I’m not sure I can personally articulate the value of that (not to say there isn’t any), but there are at least two problems:
First, the lack of any sort of traditional hype cycle makes the competition harder to publicise, especially outside of traditional IF circles. To people who are not involved with the IF community year round, the IF comp feels a lot like a blip - all those games suddenly appear. Having concrete news show up in the run up to the competition (people announcing games and so on) would make it more of a presence, perceptually.
Second, it kind of swims against the current of how people do game dev today. So much of it happens out in the open - screenshots on Twitter, Choice of Games’ WIP forum. Nowadays, people actually live stream game development during jams. IF culture has less of this than indie game development culture at large. Partly this is certainly due to the fact that screenshots of IF are not naturally exciting most of the time, but I think the Comp had a lot to do with developing that culture. So much so that when Zarf announced an upcoming game with very few details recently, a move that is standard hype-cycle stuff for anyone, it seems a bit unusual because it’s not really done in IF. And part of the reason why is that so many of the major IF pieces were comp submissions, meaning they never got an announcement or discussion before their release.
Maybe there is value to perpetuating those expectations, but I’m not really seeing how anyone’s experience (author or reader) is improved by the 2014 rule against talking about a game in development.
Since we have to submit intent to enter, occasionally I will put up just a weird placeholder for a game that I may or may not finish, or I’ll put up two titles speculatively if I’m not sure which I will complete. I wouldn’t want something like that publicized beforehand.
So long as the authors have a “CONFIRM FOR IFCOMP” checkbox of some kind so we have a bit of control over what is pre-publicized, I have no problem with it.
(On edit - reread the original post and I missed the “give authors a pre-publicize button” so that totally works)
Alternately, perhaps just wait until intents to enter closes, and publicize the list (with requisite spoiler tags for those who like Christmas morning) in the month leading up to the comp opening and game release. (Also, notify authors to have their blurbs in public shape at that time as well.)
I had simply assumed the point of such rules to limit the influence of Who’s Best At Publicity on the rankings… though granted, if it was really about leveling the judging field, I guess everyone would be required to use pseudonyms and the talking-about rules would be stricter.
Anyway, as a matter of personal preference, I enjoy that IF blogging and such tends to be content-heavy by proportion – analysis and reviews and assorted thinky bits – rather than dedicating as much space as video game blogs do to announcements about New Project!, Coming Soon!, Preorders Open!, Trailer Released!, Almost Here!, Today’s New Releases!, and then maybe a review or something. But I realize that commercial success etc. would have different priorities.
I am proud to announce I have just finished main work on my FIRST EVER GAME… It has been “completed” in under six hours. I’m just fiddling with it now but it’s pretty much good to go.
Please look forward to my game. It will be submitted to IFCOMP 2015.
And I will answer (pretty much) all questions you may have about it… except if they’re spoilers.
And only AFTER IFCOMP 2015 has ended, of course. [emote]:)[/emote]
Wes Lesley presents: [CENSORED DUE TO SPOILERS]
The requirement that voters vote on a substantial proportion of games would seem to solve that already, I think.
i wouldn’t say “solve”, but “limit”.
if EVERYONE wants to play the new Emily Short game that’s gonna get a lot of voting and maybe even a lot of bias, in either sense, so … yeah.
if my game only gets a dozen votes and by random chance three of those are negative, then that’s gonna have a bigger impact than when someone gets a thousand votes and, say, ten negative ones.
so it’s still there, but limited. I’d say.
If the comp has 15 must-play entries from well-regarded authors and 15 entries from new authors, this can indeed create a situation where the first 15 are played a lot more than the others. But this isn’t a typical situation. If a thousand people want to play and vote on Emily Short’s game, probably about five hundred of them will play your game.
One can also argue that the people who already have the most brand are exactly the ones who benefit least from publicising their work.
It’s worth noting at this point that Emily has repeatedly stated that she will not be entering the Comp again, for reasons including those mentioned above. (There are other big-name authors for whom the same points hold.)
I agree that there’s a risk of the Comp falling prey to the Best at Publicity dynamic, but it’s not a major concern - certainly less than it is for the XYZZYs.
That’s a good deal easier said than done. People who are publicising their games don’t put their publicity into little hidden boxes where you have to explicitly opt in in order to read it. They broadcast as widely as possible. I could ignore social media and Planet-IF and the forums for a few months in advance of the comp, I guess, but that would be a lot to expect of anyone.
(See also: 'I don’t want to read comp reviews until I’ve played and scored the games in question. I try this every year, but inevitably some information trickles through by about the halfway mark.)
True, but you can still not read posts about someone’s upcoming IFComp project. Is it too much of a “spoiler” to know that someone will be entering a game, and what it’s called?
Reviews are somewhat different: if someone tweets “Miserablist Sunrise, in the current IFComp, is amazing”, that predisposes you towards the game in a way that a tweet of “Here’s a screenshot of the BitBucket commits on my upcoming game, Miserablist Sunrise” doesn’t.
It could be argued either way, I think. In my opinion, I really like the not-knowing before the games are released. I like the attempt at confining chatter about WIPs and I like authors who don’t chat about WIPs because that way we all sort-of get the same experience of the games being released and discovered at release time. [emote]8-)[/emote]
The way the voting works…isn’t it better to have 8 of 10 people like your game than 500 of 1000 people like your game?
As a certain percentage of all intents to enter make it into the competition anyway, what’s the big deal about seeing the intents beforehand, then seeing that a big number didn’t enter anyway? Then, the day of release is more of a “letdown” than something to be excited about?
First teaser for my game:
[url]https://intfiction.org/t/brain-guzzlers-from-beyond/8713/1]
Really excited to see if other game announcements start popping up soon! I can’t wait to see what everyone else is working on!
I felt resistance too. But now I’m more accepting. Knowledge is power. I can rate games more accurately if I know more about them. It’s easier to make constructive feedback.
Publicity e.g. on social media can bring more voters. It may be a little harder for an outsider to win ifcomp but quality will tell.
Agreed on the “Christmas morning” feel as a competitor or judge. For IFComp, Spring Thing, ParserComp, Shufflecomp, etc.
I don’t think this is strictly necessary. People have the ability to discuss their game. And I imagine there are authors like Hanon who want to have a placemaker in case an idea takes off, and people can maybe rip off your idea you want to delete later. Of course, the author should have the option to hide their game preview, but that’s one more thing to worry about.
Speaking as someone who kicked forward an entry from last year, I was glad to have it. But the administration both for the organizer and the competitors seems to add up to the possibility of a leak someone doesn’t like/want. I mean, if someone writes 2 games, and one is not likely to make it, each needs a checkbox for privacy–and that’s a lot of switches to flip.
So I think letting people make general posts is a big help. I’ve enjoyed doing so, whether or not my game makes it in. I’ve been able to share details in a private group.
It will be interesting to see what authors have to say after the comp, about being able to publicize beforehand. So it seems worthwhile for the organizer to have these questions in a postmortem for authors or possibly judges willing to answer a survey. As a potential author it would be worth my time.