Blurbs for IFComp

Competitions
62

Hmm, you have a good point about the word count thing; it’s a thing for all the choicescript published games, because people do use lengths in their purchasing decisions (usually longer is viewed more favorably) but it doesn’t really add much over the game length field in this context.

e: I feel bad about totally leaving out the average run length though because reading speed is so drastically variable - I’ve had testers tell me that they’ve read through significantly under time, significantly over time, and that it was just right in length. So, I’m going to throw my hands up and put Two hours in the time box and hope putting an average run length would let people know…but I also know people don’t really know how fast they read.

63

Well, I might be weird about this and everyone else likes that. But IMO it’s a waste of text space that could be used advertising all the racy fun stuff you’ve got going on in the game.

64

The first blurb sets up the situation, but doesn’t give any indication of how it’s going to play out. It also looks like it’s setting up a “telling stories” kind of frame, but Gawain and the Green Knight doesn’t have the same kind of anthologizing structure as the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales or the Thousand and One Nights. It feels a little bit like a bait and switch.

It might work better if there were a bit more gesturing toward how Gawain is going to respond to Arthur’s challenge, however brief: “But you are young and untested, and you have no stories to tell. Yet.” Even that directs the reader’s attention back toward the one young protagonist and away from the “is this an anthology” suspicion, and gives a sense, however general, of how the narrative is going to progress.

For me, the second one just isn’t specific enough: it feels like it’s trying to be mysterious, or maybe coy, but it falls out on the wrong side of the “not enough details to pique my interest” line. It might work better with more specific images in the language: what is “strange”? What happens when the company arrives? (Some foreshadowing here might bring it to life.) What does the strangeness mean to the protagonist? Hinting at answers to questions like these might pay off.

To me, blurb 3 seems the most promising, and I think that just a little more evocative detail and a little more information about the situation might help it stand out. Maybe something along the lines of “You don’t WANT to die, but, well, you promised. Maybe you should have listened to what those women were saying instead of just praising their beauty.”

I really do like the cover art, and I think Gawain is a great choice for a text to adapt.

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65

I love this:

A quest to fulfill a promise to get your head chopped off? Definitely that’s worth some PR.

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66

It’s been a really long time since I read Gawain, but oh man is there a lot to dig into there. I think it could be a really productive field to plow.

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67

This time I am going to play entries of ifcomp reverse than last time.
I plan playing first parser based games and then choice novels.
Why? Well, choice games aren’t usually challenging enough. Some of them are a bit more improved but they have no interest for me.
About the lenght, the same idea. I am going to play first full lenght games.

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68

I’m a sucker for Gawain, but …

I wouldn’t include the statistics on word-count and all that. By all means make it clear how long it is going to take to play, but pride in the number of words as such seems … misplaced to me. What counts is how good the words are, not how many. An author who is especially proud of how much s/he’s written may be missing the point.

The second blurb is simply too generic. It doesn’t make me think “ominous horror” it makes me think “could be anything”. The strange company might for all we know be Auntie Elsie bringing a dry turkey sandwich. “Strange” is just too weak a word.

The problem with the third is that “goes to meet his death” suggests “is bound to die”, and who wants to give away an ending (especially if it isn’t the ending) so early. Goes to “face his death” might be better. But even so: what makes me care about “Young Sir Gawain” especially.

For me the first remains the most promising. What I don’t like about it is “and have no stories to tell”. You don’t sell me a game about a story by telling me that. It’s also got some rather weak words “displeased” (what about “fretful”, “impatient”, “furious”) Why “thereby” (weak latinate word, redundant).

I also like that it comes close to being alliterative like the poem, but doesn’t quite make it. I’d be massively tempted to go for something that actually is alliterative.

Christmas at Camelot, and King Arthur is cursing
“My knights have drawn nigh! And can no-one be found
Who will tell them a tale of terror and true knighthood,
to open our feasting as feels most fit?”

A hundred knights turn their jaded eyes to you. Young and untested, what story will you make?

I like the illustration from Cotton Nero A.X, but the composition isn’t great. Would it be better cropped?

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69

Thanks to everyone for their comments. I have to say, I’m surprised at the number of people here who’ve apparently read the poem/know about it beforehand. The number of people I know in person who have familiarity is pretty low, despite being generally highly educated, so I suppose y’all are a vastly different sample, huh?

On further reflection, I do kind of agree that setting the scene with blurb #1 would kind of be - not entirely misleading, because it’s literally what’s happening at the start of the game, but the promise it gives is a little different and, importantly, doesn’t necessarily tell you what the game is about, other than possibly that “you” are going to have a story-worthy adventure.

So I think I’m going to try and figure out an appealing version of #3, goals being a) arouse interest and b) give useful promises about the contents of the game.

As far as word counts, I’m surprised at how much comment it’s attracted. If you look at the ChoiceScript WIP forums, it’s pretty common to just…list word counts, as, like, a convention, so I didn’t think it exceptional at all. I think the convention grows out of the fact that in the start page description in all the published ChoiceScript games they have a word count line.

Looking at the blurbs of other IFComp entries from past years, it looks like they don’t do that, so I may as well kill that line.

Oh, also, re: cropping the illustration - maybe? Cutting it down to just the bottom 2/3 and squaring it off might work. It’s certainly make it more…square. I’ll play around with it a bit.

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70

As the CoG genre developed, the games kept getting larger, and the company called this out on the site. I think it was something of a selling point to say “This game is bigger than our last one!”

It was also useful for giving the player an idea of the game’s scope. Like when you pull a physical book off the shelf and say “Oh, this is short” or “This is pretty long” or “What the hell, Brandon Sanderson?!”

IFComp never had this because (a) the games already had an assumed scope of “like two hours”; (b) the first several years were all parser IF, usually puzzle-heavy, so the connection between word count and play time was just not meaningful at all.

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71

Working my way through part four of the Stormlight Archives now. The last few months were indeed full of 4000+ pages of “What the hell, Brandon Sanderson?!” (shouted out loud in the most lovingly intimidated way imaginable.)

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72

CoG also charges for games, and therefore it’s good marketing to justify that their games approach the word-count of books people would pay for.

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73

I find these CoG word counts intimidating, because beyond the first draft, the longer I spend writing a thing, the shorter it gets.

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74

I think it’s less about length and more about promising depth of interactivity. Choice of Games, as its name implies, cares a lot about selling the amount of content variation and choice reactivity to a consumer base that expects a lot of branching, content agency, and impactful game elements (like how many skills there are and how often they contribute to differentiated outcomes). So a work that has some massive 400,000 word count is valued because it implies that there’s lots of alternation, a variety of routes, and many endings. A COG player seeing a large wordcount is not expecting an epic time investment but a signal that there is a lot of content underwriting the story as a game. Thus, this conversation is a sort of subcultural misunderstanding, where IFComp’s quality over quantity expectations are misinterpreting COG’s norms around quantity as game systems signifier.

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75

Which implies lots of play-time in total, if you expect to play many run-throughs in order to see all the big story branches.

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76

Okay, so, I think I’ve settled on what I want to do! First, I’m gonna drop the wordcount, because judging by the reactions here at least half of the IFComp players are gonna see that and go “…huh?” I think kaemi describing it as a cultural difference seems most apt.

Anyways, I tried going More Poetic as an experiment, and ended up with this

One Christmas at Camelot in charged a strange fellow,

a giant man all green, great axe in hand,

and called out a challenge in the court of King Arthur:

"Bequeath me one blow, behead me clean,

and then,

in one day and a year,

pay your price in blood red!

Come to my chapel queer,

to kneel and lose your head!"

And, like a fool, you’ve accepted, in front of Arthur, Guinevere, and the entire court of Camelot. Backing down is not an option. Can you survive your reckless promise?

Based off the 14th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

which is fun, but also you can’t do italics or line breaks in the text, you can only do paragraph breaks, so it stretches the entry vertically to an annoying degree. It also centers it so heavily on the opening scene. So, I tried going very short - like, under 30 words short - and came up with:

You are Gawain, nephew of King Arthur. You’re on an unusual quest - find the Green Knight and let him behead you. Can you survive your reckless promise?

Based off the 14th century poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Well it’s not actually under 30 words, the second line bumps it up, but the second part is less part of the blurb and more…attribution.

It does kind of suffer from the fact that the game opens before Gawain has actually made the promise, but eh, it’s fine. The other issue is that if I go with this the title becomes unmoored from the description, since this blurb mentions nothing to do with Christmas. So I’m probably going to change the title to The Temptation of Sir Gawain if I’m going for a exactly what it says on the tin vibe.

e: I just played around with the text, and I realized if I delete everything under the “lose your head” line in the poetry one, and move the “Based off the 14th century poem…” to the subtitle field, then the text doesn’t stick out from the bottom too much. So maybe I will use it! It’d certainly be unique, if nothing else. I’ve gone ahead and slapped portions of the poem in the game itself, so it’d be at least consistent with that…

77

So annoying, right? Your first option is great, I think, and clocks in at 92 words. Since most of the advice I’ve seen is to stay under 100 words (which isn’t a lot), I think it’s fine, but I worry about how the paragraph breaks will stretch it. Will people have to scroll to see all of it?
Can you smush it up a little, like:

It isn’t perfect, but it does get rid of a few lines without getting rid of any text.

The second option doesn’t thrill me, and it doesn’t thrill you either, obviously.

I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why we can’t have line breaks, but it does make things difficult.

78

There’s a possible issue with this title having undesired connotations, discussing which unfortunately requires delving into a major spoiler for David Lowery’s recent film The Green Knight.

Summary

In the film, Gawain flees from the green chapel in fear at the last moment, returns home, gains a report of valor that’s wholly undeserved, and eventually becomes king. However, he lives in fear that his past will catch up to him, and indeed one day the Green Knight comes pounding at the door. Terrified and powerless, Gawain loses his head (literally) only to find himself back in the green chapel, and we realize that the whole thing has only been a vision or imagining of a possible future, and he still has a chance to redeem himself. This whole sequence is a direct homage to a very similar fake-out at the end of The Last Temptation of Christ, with the connection being so strong that anyone who’s seen The Green Knight will likely be primed to think of it when they see the proposed title. This means that the game risks involuntarily drawing comparison with the film’s take on the story (which is quite different from the original) rather than being taken on its own account.

On the other hand, I don’t know how many people have seen the film - if it’s a tiny fraction of IFComp players, this might not be worth worrying about.

Also, I feel like it should be “based on,” not “based off,” though the latter is so common now I don’t know if I can mount a vigorous defense of that opinion.

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79

I’d agree with that. I haven’t seen the film, but the allegory in Gawain is plain enough (it’s not a particularly subtle piece of writing) without having to stick it right there in the title.

Would also second that, but that’s just my British sensibilities I think.

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