Can we split IFComp into two categories?

Should I have got two prizes?

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Cool, so you admit you’re totally unqualified to have strong opinions about them

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Regarding difficulty of writing games, Adrift games are quite a lot easier to write than Inform or TADS games, but I don’t see anyone shouting that they shouldn’t be counted as IF because you don’t get to brag about how obtuse your code is.

It’s also really easy to write a bad Inform game, just as it’s really difficult to write a good Twine game. It’s almost like the amount of effort you put in is in direct correlation to the quality of the game produced.

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As someone who’s much more steeped in parser games, being exposed to choice-based games through the Comp has been a really positive experience that I don’t think I would have otherwise had. I’m definitely still more interested in parser games overall, but there are really cool, innovative things happening in the choice-based world and the way the different groups have gotten to know each other better, and take some design lessons from each other, I think just strengthens the admittedly-small community of folks who are into IF.

The Comp is big, certainly, so some filtering tools like others have suggested might be handy, but I really don’t see the need to do anything else. On the question of fairness, while there are more choice-based games, my impression is that parser games have tended to win the competition and be rated slightly higher, so if there’s a bias it might actually run the other way around. And since there aren’t specified criteria for judging, I suspect most people evaluate the games based on the quality of writing and design, rather than on the imagined impressiveness of the programming that undergird the writing and design, so even if there were some systematic difference in how hard or easy it is to code the different systems, I don’t see why that should have an impact on rating.

Basically things seem fine to me, there’s a lot of games but it’s fairly easy to just look at what one’s already interested in and the Comp is a good opportunity to widen one’s horizons, and if authors of some of the newer parser systems don’t feel welcomed by IFComp that’s bad and worth digging into but I don’t think bifurcation of the comp would help.

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I’m actually really frustrated lately with how difficult it is to write twine. I’ve been thinking of getting into writing poetry – you don’t even have to do any coding so it must be really easy.

God, I’m so lazy!

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Sorry for the reply spamming. As the author of the only non-parser-game to have ever won IFComp - and which was only able to come close to doing so by mimicking parser games as closely as possible - this has ground my goat for whatever reason.

This isn’t untrue, but it’s a quite bizarre thing to believe, since IFComp winners are overwhelmingly lightly comic puzzly parser games. Maybe if you stopped pushing this myth, more of them would enter?

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You know, there’s probably a parallel universe somewhere where Collossal Cave was a CYOA, Nelson and Short both became dentists, and IFComp players recently started whining about how any bozo can write an Adventuron game these days and it’s unfair that they’re able to compete with the real Twine games.

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are you telling me that my clear recollection of The Parser-Dentist’s Bill of Rights isn’t real, robin

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I agree with this. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a IF player say “A parser game? Ew.” but I heard people publicly and frequently make that comment about choice based games. I mean, the OP straight up admitted that he refuses to vote for any choice games. How is that not biased?

Besides, it’s not like if you remove all of the choice games, suddenly there will be twice as many parser games. They didn’t eliminate any from being entered. So you’d just have the 40 or so entries. The only difference would be that some of the crappier games would rank higher without the choice games because they’d have less competition.

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lol. I’m both a poet and a programmer (and author of The Cave in this year’s competition).

A little secret – poetry is a type of programming, we just use different words to talk about what we’re doing and what governs our choices.

In the end, a lot of poetry relies on the clever, innovative, and elegant use of language within certain constraints (space, linguistic, or formal). Great poetry is more than just a block of language that describes, it’s a deliberate artful construction of language and ideas that conjures or evokes something (usually an emotional state or memory) into existence to be experienced by the reader.

Just as you can write plenty of games that compile and execute, but aren’t particularly memorable or enjoyable, so too can you write a lot of poetry that has the aura of “completeness” (looks like a poem, kinda sounds like a poem), but doesn’t resonate or connect with the reader.The stakes and challenges are similar, especially when it comes to IF.

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Difficulty is a matter of perspective too. I pumped out my game engine fairly easily (with the exception of a few parts that kicked my butt), but when I sit down to write a simple room description, I’m like “Oh God, just kill me.”

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this is a good point, and it speaks more to our experience with this project. it wasn’t so much that we found, or chose, “easy” or “hard” systems. any system is fairly easy to work with when the test surface is a few rooms and several objects, whether or not those are notional. almost all the real difficulty comes from how we plan scope, and how we manage adding orders of magnitude more content to those systems, while also keeping them working and despaghettified, and all on a deadline.

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Just a friendly neighborhood moderator wave :wave: and a reminder that philosophically we are opposed to hard-edged definitions of “what is IF” and promote an encompassing view on this forum.

Your preferences and opinions and discussions are welcome so long as they are civil. Please refrain from exclusionary arguments in general. We enjoy IF of all kinds and understand that people have personal tastes.

Avoid personal comments, and be generous in accepting others’ points of view without assuming they intend insult.

As always, use the flag post option as necessary if anything crosses the line, or PM @moderators if you have any specific questions about site content.

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I really like the idea of players being able to “favorite” entries on the list to keep track of what they want to play. Being able to look at a list of just the ones you’re interested in would make things less overwhelming.

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Has the Comp ever had additional winning categories, like Best Choice Game, or Best Experimental? Maybe these category winners would receive honorable mentions, without changing the current prize distribution structure? Might be a fun way to call out types of games that tend to not do well due to player preferences.

i wouldn’t say this is a bad idea, but i would say it’s unlikely to help in that way. one reason for that is philosophical – how do we decide what’s a choice game or experimental game? what if it’s a point-and-click parser world model which is very experimental and multimedia driven?

there’s also the simple reality where a lot of the people who make critically acclaimed comp games year after year do so by integrating the history and practice of parser, experimental, choice, and otherwise. c.e.j. pacian writes parser games that feel like hypertext, robin johnson writes web games which feel like parser, and nobody ever says to themselves “i think i will make a parser game this year” and just stops there.

mostly it seems like the big tent approach, where we all just say “give us what you think is interactive and fiction,” does the best job of producing a lot of varied works. you might note there’s 3 TADS games and one C64 BASIC game in the comp this year, both of which are supposedly “dead” systems!

(and, historically, yes, the very first competition was split in half exactly how it’s been suggested here, based on TADS and Inform systems. there’s a very good reason they gave that up immediately, and plenty of wisdom in realizing why no one’s standing here now and suggesting we split TADS, Adventuron, Inform, and C64 into separate categories.)

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Mathbrush gave everyone an honorary prize title last year. The XYZZY categories have been updated (“Best Innovation” confused a lot of people until they split out a “Multimedia” category as games started including sound and graphics more frequently.)

IFComp has remained pretty steady as an ordered list along with “Miss Congeniality” which is author-chosen top three, and then “The Golden Banana of Discord” which is the game with the widest spread of vote scores.

And there are also hybrid games that fit both categories. Also, if you’re going to filter on category, may I suggest calling them point and click, drag and drop, and hunt and peck as the categories because really we’re talking more about interfaces than anything else…

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and now swipey swipe, too! is it even point and click if, as with ours, you can swipe it like it’s apocalyptic tinder? for our part, we also did everything we could to take influence from parser games, both design-wise and narratively, and surveyed probably 30-50 of what we’d all agree are some of the best parser games of all time. would it serve either audience to have spent part of the development time making it Clearly Choice or Clearly Parser? it’s also probably important to note that, for the author tooling, jon ingold and his associates designed ink from the get-go to encode a lot of what worked best about parser! he is a classic parser author, after all. i just can’t imagine how audiences or authors would benefit from lowering the amount of potential interest in any of these games, parser, choice, and mongrel.

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Or, as I like to call it, “tinder”.

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