Maybe another IFComp at a different time of year?
I don’t think two IFComp’s would solve the problem, unless you mean to have one be parser and one be choice. In that case, we might as well just abolish IFComp and rename it to ParserComp.
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Just chipping in to say how much I am enjoying switching to and fro between parser and web-based games/IF this time as a judge / reviewer / voter. As usual for me. It’s a variety that I enjoy, and makes judging much more fun for me.
However that said I would very much be in favour of more sophisticated filtering options being available on the IFComp ballot page, to help judges narrow down which games they want to play next. So anyone who does just want to play parser could more easily do that, and vice versa. With us now having over 100 games in there, being able to filter a bit more finely might be a welcome move, for some players anyway. If folks don’t want to use this facility they wouldn’t have to.
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When I first entered IFComp (2010) there were a few non-parser games. There are more parser games in this IFComp than there were in my original IFComp in total.
I have hundreds of public reviews on the board showing I have openly tried every kind of game, parser, choice and any other. But, to buck the sentiment recently expressed by Viv, this long-term experience has informed me that I remain fundamentally greatly interested in parser games, and fundamentally not in choice games delivered by computer/electronic device, in spite of a youth of CYOA books and Fighting Fantasy. Based on a ten year arc, this is me. That doesn’t mean I won’t review any non-parser games this year; there are other factors like time that might even cause me to review more of them than parser games.
I’m sort of interested (in a curious way) in this desire for filtering options. Even if I prefer parser games, to me, one of the most exciting parts of IFComp is going through that initial list of blurbs, formats, pictures, etc, having ideas, saying ‘Oh this looks good’, speculating. My understanding of Netflix’s behaviour is that it’s so algorithmically obsessed, people have launched material on Netflix that nobody saw because Netflix’s code decided it didn’t match anyone’s taste, so it wasn’t placed before them. It’d be a long, ridiculous bow to draw to say IFComp is anyway near that! But filter design is probably a matter of global urgency due to the explosion of material in the world. I reckon both itch.io’s and Steam’s search features are pretty bad at finding anything I want to find, even if I know it’s there, just as an exercise. I, knowing me, usually have to get in there and find it. And that’s what I like about the big start menu of IFComp. Getting in there and looking at everything.
-Wade
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I certainly thing it’s a very bad idea to pigeonhole the category of a game based on the technology use to develop it. They might fit into “general” broad categories, but that’s the problem with generalizations. They are just that. There are “choice based” games like Detectiveland, that have way more puzzle complexity than many parser games, impactful games like Bogeyman which just blow your mind, and wildly creative games like Limerick* that are experimenting with the medium.
That being said, with a huge catalog of game to choose, it does feel a little overwhelming to try to make sense of the entire field. And different kinds of games are going for different kinds of effects, so it’s very hard to judge all of them on a level playing field. I wonder if it would make sense to allow authors themselves to self-categorize their works on something less arbitrary than the technology they used, but more based on their style and focus, and perhaps have different winners for these different categories (as well as an overall winner of course). People with much more experience than I can think of what those categories are but I’m thinking of something like puzzle based, rpg style, experimental, narrative, etc.
Or maybe its just too hard to categorize things in general, in which case, disregard all that. 
Perhaps Warrigal is to be thanked for kicking off this year’s traditional debate that looks to be almost as long standing as the competition itself and always runs to pretty much the same conclusion, viz. things are fine as they are (unless you really hate choice-based games!).
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Even if it was true in a narrow technical sense, a large part of the difficulty of writing is well, writing. No difference between platforms there. It’s an interactive fiction competiton, not one of technical prowess.
Not an unreasonable point, you could always start another competition with a strong technical requirement of say “it should run on a C64” or a small size requirement akin to demo competitions. I don’t think it’s what IFComp should do though.
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That’s very true, and it’s what I look for first and foremost in a game. No degree of programming mastery will compensate for poor writing, in my opinion.
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concur and agree on point-and-click adventure, and I remain convinced that the Legend interface (spellcasting *01, gateway) is still the best mouse/graphic IF interface, and that adding to it clickable, dynamic, graphics will be the perfect text/graphic/P&C IF)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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You, guys, definitively need to organise yourselves and make parsers great again! XDDDD
Jokes apart. You need to organise the parsercomp again.
As someone that makes games that tend to fall somewhere between choice and parser games, I get really nervous whenever people start talking about the distinction between the two as a salient category, especially since “miscategorizing” a game could lead to some high-drama fights. Were I to classify a game as a CYOA, and were that game to do well, other people in the CYOA contest who would have “done better” if not for my game would be upset. They’d be saying things like “Why the hell is this game in the CYOA category? you type directions, it’s a parser!” but of course if I go to the other category people are gonna be like “why the hell is this game in the parser category? it has menu-based choices for every part of the game except you type directions”
Also, as someone that makes both parsers and CYOAs (and games that combine both) let me just say that CYOAs are just as hard…I find myself putting the CYOA portions of my games off because I have a hard time visualizing story trees…making sure every choice is accounted for and there are no dead-ends, stuff like that. Especially with Adrift, my native system, parsers are so standardized that they don’t require that much work compared to programming out a CYOA.
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visualizing (a)cyclic story graphs is one of the hardest problems in non-world-modeled game design. even in an algorithmic sense, producing human-readable graphs with balanced trees is very difficult at the scale we talk about in IF, where a full accounting may well involve >1000 nodes. in practice, there’s a very narrow range in which graphs provide better information density than, say, a spreadsheet.
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this is a nice way of putting into mathematical terms what I can only apprehend through personal experience. Building the CYOA portions of my games “makes my brain hurt”, building the parser parts does not.
EDIT: Also, I definitely use a spreadsheet
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i think we can probably speak for both sides, the automated and the authored, to say that there simply aren’t a lot of really great ways to put 1,000 content atoms in a visual representation. you can follow one of these algorithms – they’re effectively still the optimal strategies for this http://cs.brown.edu/people/rtamassi/gdhandbook/chapters/trees.pdf – or you can make a twine. but either, at a large enough scale, results in a lot of small moments of your game dev spent looking for your own content. that may or may not be better than a spreadsheet for some people, but it’s certainly not easy work. in fact, as far as i know, this is a type of thinking which people struggle deeply with. that’s one of the big problems in interactive TV, is the people who sign checks don’t really know how to understand a spec script that’s also a mathematical graph.
How would such a split even work, considering how many hybrid games there are?
Was Skybreak! a parser game or a CYOA?
I’m not even sure how a filter would work in that case, although I wouldn’t object to the idea if it’s author defined. But then I’m also not sure how the OP has gotten so many replies when he admitted from the beginning he was talking out of his ass. How can someone who never plays a CYOA know how much work went into the individual games? I’ve read plenty with a word count of over half a million, and use of variables and state tracking are common. Not sure what about that makes it ‘easy’ or not count as fiction that is interactive.
It’s of course already been pointed out that parser games, and a specific kind, always win. And the OP and anyone who cares have complete freedom to ignore any game for any reason they like. This is a complete non issue.
There are certain types of games I prefer not to play too, but I don’t make threads demanding changes to a long running comp based on my personal preference.
edit: lol, I see a wild The0didactus appeared while I was typing and brought up Skybreak already. That came has really become my favorite one to confound people who see a significant difference in parser and CYOA though.
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Skybreak! definitely blurs the line between parser and CYOA, and I’m working on a game now that will utterly shatter it.
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In all seriousness, I favor a filter for interface, but maybe the categories should be mouse, keyboard, and touch. That’s actually useful information and avoids the politics of choice vs. parser.
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to me, speaking from the user experience perspective, the generic option here is probably best. rather than “judges should be able to filter games by X,” perhaps the answer is “judges should be able to filter or organize their ballot according to their druthers.”
and i think this is probably a better answer for why this is the most commented-on thread so far – clearly, regardless of reasoning, there is significant desire for the ability to tend one’s own garden here.
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Is it an aesthetic distinction? What do you see as the source of the inbetween-ness?
I see a parser game as usually consisting of a world model and a parser. Whatever the screen looks like, or whether I can click things too, or there are pictures, etc., that’s still a parser game to me.
The world model is tied pretty significantly. It’s not that a CYOA can’t have one, but there’s a reason they lean simple if they’re there, and aren’t typical. The combinatorial explosion. All elements have to be presented as discrete things, in lists or links, to be chosen. That’s why it’s best if there aren’t a lot. A human is great at pulling any one element out with a word. In the parser approach, the word no longer has to be on the screen, it only has to have been encountered, or remembered, or potentially logical (or potentially illogical) and be typed. To say, ‘Okay, the English language (or some other language) is your basic command/item list’ eliminates the visually crippling graphs/lists that form a challenge for both choice-based design in general, and presentation if seeking to use a highly combinatorial world model. The parser game leverages the mind’s traffic with language itself.
Most discussions I’ve had with myself in reviews about parser-ish’games have been at cosmetic levels, I think, when underneath I was usually dealing with what I’d unambiguously call a parser game. I don’t know that I’ve seen much of the reverse because it’s usually apparent if a game is using a world model with many basic planes or not.
-Wade
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I spent a happy hour or so the other day going through all the entry listings, making notes of which ones I wanted to try soon. It’s one of my favourite things of IFComp too. That left me with 20 games for starters. When I’ve exhausted those it will be a case of going back through the list at length soon. Not everyone enjoys doing this process.
I’m in favour of more filtering options because the number of entries is so extremely high that as a judge I find it overwhelming to pick through. I know many are in favour of judging in a purely random order, but that doesn’t suit me personally. I prefer to pick things that appeal to me, especially if I am then going to be spending an hour or two on a game.
However I am hugely sensitive to the problems of filtering. I do like the idea of author defined terms though. But again with over 100 entries this year I do think some filtering would be a nice option. Again I stress an option. People who don’t want to use it wouldn’t have to.
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