The possibility of a “best tiny game” award for IFComp was raised elsewhere and I think that’s a really neat idea. The Titanium Lychee of Succinctness, perhaps?
The actual criteria for the award might be tricky. A parser game can have a huge amount of detail even if it’s possible to get from start to finish very quickly. Similarly, there’s room for a choice-based game to have a vast number of branches even if none of them are very long.
It would probably be a faff to try and compare actual word counts anyway, which makes me wonder if the highest-rated game with a 15-minute playtime would make for a good candidate. Is this something that might actually be worth doing next year, or can anybody think of some reason why it would be likely to fall apart?
Regarding a prize for the highest-placing game with a 15 minute playtime: at the moment, the playtimes are only a convenience for players who want to know what they’re letting themselves in for, and so I think everyone understands that they are best guesses. If you tie eligibility for an actual prize to it, you’re incentivising authors to see if they can get away with arguing that their game is a 15-minute game even if they might really have thought it was a bit longer. And then if the prize automatically goes to the highest ranked 15 minute game, you have judges wondering “I like this but I don’t think it’s 15 minutes, so do I rate it lower in the comp overall to decrease the chance that it wins the [kumquat or whatever]?”
I have a hard time judging the IFCOMP entries because it’s like a writing contest that has one overall category for Poetry, Short Stories, and full-length novels. I don’t know of a writing contest anywhere that would lump together everything in one category. How does one compare a 8+ hour world-building parser game with a short 15-minute or less twine short? They’re just so different.
I know it’s not going to change because the IFCOMP would rather stay old-school and stick to the same historical judging formula. But I would agree with the sentiment here. Have three categories for Short-Medium-Long works of interactive fiction, Give a gold, silver, or bronze award for each category and 3-5 honorable mention ribbons.
There is a degree of difficultly attempting a huge parser game that is years in the making versus a CYOA game which may only take a few weeks. Why shouldn’t that be acknowledge that with proper categories?
I just feel that would be a little easier on the judging. And little more satifying for the authors to compete against similiar works of IF.
Yeah, I think there’s a challenge to making something like this an official IF Comp reward. The IFDB Awards do have a “best short game” category, though, which feels like a good way to go about things since it depends on a critical mass of voters deciding a game is short, rather than relying on authors or the Comp organizers to draw hard and fast lines.
To be fair, in the early years of this comp, there was more homogeneity between the types of entries, or to the degree that there can be homogeneity between entries in any writing contest.
Yeah, when IFComp was first formed, “under two hours” was a short game—the point was to incentivize people writing short IF rather than sprawling epics like Curses. That’s why it’s got the “must judge after two hours” rule.
Then circa 2014 Twine exploded onto the scene, and had a big effect on the overall design of IF, both parser and choice. We still have things like Prince Quisborne and the Choice of Games corpus, but now being under two hours is the rule rather than the exception.
Which means the one way I could imagine this working is if someone set up a separate voting website, where you had to rate games after fifteen minutes of play instead of two hours. In that vote, things like Miss Gosling’s Last Case and The Den would do terribly, because you’ve barely gotten through the setup of the world and interface, and haven’t reached the actually interesting stuff. But something like Deliquescence, the impression you get after fifteen minutes is about the same as the impression you get after two hours.
You’d also get a lot less votes, but since a relatively small fraction of the comp would do well on these metrics, I think it could work.
This is the main issue I could identify going in. I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere that inaccurate playtime estimates are a source of low ratings in themselves (and think I may have run into this with an entry that I underestimated significantly) so possibly people would still err on the side of caution, but I can see how this might prompt more people to round a 20-minute-ish game down to 15 minutes rather than claim it as a half-hour offering.
The one other thing I think might make a difference would be making the actual “prize” attached completely trivial. I think it would be nice to have some easy way of recognising the top-placing short game, but there probably isn’t a need to reward it any other way.
The issue I see with this or with its hypothetical opposite (best epic game award) is the subjectivity of the category.
All of the other side-awards are awarded on objective criteria.
One might disagree with the subjective voting that chose Miss Congeniality, but there can be no disagreement as to which game qualified for the award once the voting is over.
The same is true for the GBoD and the RS awards.
But that wouldn’t be true here. There very easily could be sincere disagreement over which games do and do not qualify as “tiny.”
And that’s a problem.
I would suggest that a better idea would be to discuss this kind of thing non- officially in threads on intfiction.org. A “What was your favorite of the tiny games?” thread would likely engender less serious disagreement than an “official” award would.
Wouldn’t anything under 30 mins be considered a short game anyway? (<15mins is very short?) There’s a much bigger jump between a 30min game an a 60min one probably making it harder to accidentally or deliberately mischaracterise. (Especially as playthrough times in some games can be very open to interpretation between individuals depending on reading speed, how much they agonise over choices, how difficult they find puzzles etc.)
Word counts as a metric can be tricky. We have this issue in CSGs where the “playthrough” count often seems to matter more to a lot of players than the “total count” especially when judging a game on a single playthrough (which in a comp setting is quite possible). But that does underestimate the replayability and work put into some games where there is a much larger word count (or even just coding to react to events differently) under the surface. The total number of hours you could potentially get out of a game could be much higher. But since the IFComp runs on more of a “playthrough” length for categories I wonder if average number of words on a playthrough much be a better metric than a total count? (I’m not sure how easy this number is to get for some systems though?)
Otherwise if it was a “friendly” rather than a high stakes prize I’m sure it’d be fine to let people characterise their own games (similar to ectocomp where it’s just on an honour system that people are not putting a game with far more work on it into the petite morte category.)
(Just as an aside, I’d love to see a short game shoutout award of some type in IFComp. I’ve seen some excellent ones entered over the years but they generally can’t compete with the longer ones for top 10 rankings.)
The Short Games Showcase does seem like it has a lot of these goals covered, is there a particular additional element that would be better served by tying it to IFcomp specifically?
Most judges will give a well-done 10-minute game a lower score in their final ranking than a well-done 2-hour game. Usually, a longer game just has more impact on you; and I suppose some reviewers also want to reward (perceived) effort. So it’s fairly hard for a 30-minute-or-shorter game to get into the top 10. In fact, here are the highest ranking 30-minute-or-shorter games from the past few Comps:
2024: Imprimatura, 13th place
2023: Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates, 12th place
2022: Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s, 16th place
2021: Funicular Simulator 2021, 14th place
2020: Doppeljobs, tied 11th/12th place
Fairly consistent, actually! The years before that show a different pattern:
2019: Night Guard / Morning Star, 7th place
2018: Animalia, 3rd place
I don’t think there’s much one can really do about it. I was a bit disappointed when my well-reviewed 2023 game didn’t make the top 10. But perhaps the other games were just better (the competition was fierce); and anyway I don’t think that the disappointment would have been any less if I had received a special award for the best short game!
Mostly just that I think it would be nice to recognise specifically short games that have done well within the comp. It feels like the big event of the year, and while there are others I find that having to enter separately is a bit of a barrier. I meant to enter something in the Short Games Showcase myself last year but just plain forgot!
I think eligibility for this award would have to be arbitrated by the competition committee prior to the start of judging. If you list your game as sub-15-minute, the committee will play it and evaluate whether that’s an accurate classification. If not, it’ll be removed from contention for the award but the metadata can be left as-is if the author insists on it.
That’s… kinda hard to judge imo. Different people will take different amount of time to play a game (different reading speed, puzzle complexity, etc…). One game that takes 15min for someone might end up taking another player 30+min.
Or, for this hypothetical award, all of the games are eligible, and it’s up to the voters to determine what games are a. short and b. worthy of the award. Different people would have different opinions, but the ultimate winner would be short and good by consensus. Maybe with a ranked-choice vote for top 5?
Sure, there’s a ton of subjectivity here, especially for puzzly game that some people might blow through in a minute while others get stuck. I’m expecting that submitters will exercise some discretion and that the committee’s role is to filter out obvious abuses. Where Nothing Is Ever Named obviously qualifies for the category (and is what I would have liked to win this year’s award had it existed), Curses obviously doesn’t, and Shade is the first thing that comes to mind as the kind of game I’d definitely avoid submitting for the category but would be a judgement call whether to disqualify it.
Are you suggesting adding a parallel vote to the competition? So judges rank each game and then separately have to indicate someone how much they think it deserves this additional award? That sounds like adding a lot of complexity to the competition for something which isn’t intended to be the main focus.
Anyone who wants to try this can submit a prize for next year’s competition themselves (“Donors can declare that a prize should not go into the pool, but will instead automatically go to the author of a game that, once the competition is over, meets certain conditions”). I would have thought the best line of enquiry, if anyone is keen to do something along these lines, would be to check what sort of “certain conditions” the organisers are comfortable with.
For example, I don’t know if “highest scoring game with playtime listed as 15 minutes, but I reserve the right to discount a game if it’s clearly not 15 minutes” is acceptable. Same for “the winner of this separate side poll of small games, which I will carry out in the following manner …”
I initially rejected this idea as too complicated but maybe there’s an instantiation that could work. Games classified by their authors as sub-15-minute get a simple checkbox added to the voting form asking if it should be eligible for the category. Scores for the category get multiplied by a penalty factor computed as the proportion of people who vote that the game belongs there, raised to some arbitrary power. I’d try a power of 0.5 for the first year and tweak it from there. The penalty factor only affects your placement for the Tiny Game award and not your rank in the overall competition.
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