Maybe that is the future, but the present is: IFCOMP is two months ahead. There is no time to change that kind of rule.
Well, as long as it’s being renamed, I think I’ll call it “Square”, which is equally descriptive and pejorative.
Or maybe “Hamster Style UI”, because I’m not gonna use it.
FWIW, I don’t think webability will be any guarantee of archivability either; besides the point that the webpages have to stay around, I’m not sure how much we can expect new browsers to support old plugins.
Old plugins no. Open web standards yes.
One of the great regrets of my life is that I didn’t snag a Corley Motors bandana when they were offering them. [emote]:([/emote]
For a moment of nostalgia: youtube.com/watch?v=Dih7toPsows
In your dystopia, creators would just naturally gravitate toward web-playable games. So, even if that dark future comes to pass (and I’m not at all predicting it won’t), there’d still be no point to mucking with the comp over a non-comp issue.
Could anyone not? Seriously?
Seconded. Well, I’ll still have my archive, so I’ll still be playing them, but you get the point.
Take this with all the appropriate grains of salt, because I don’t know anything about what’s going on under the hood here. But:
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Doesn’t that mean that it’s not current playability on the web that assures future archivability, but conformity to open web standards? Do open web standards guarantee the continuing usability of the version of Javascript that Parchment is built in? If not, then it seems to me that games that are currently web-playable through Parchment could become unplayable. Which is unlikely to happen because you’ll be maintaining Parchment, but then I expect people to be maintaining native z-code and Glulx interpreters as long as it’s possible to write native applications (and people care about the form).
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I don’t really trust the same agents who are trying to make it impossible to run an application that you didn’t get through their store to conform to open web standards.
Well Parchment should be mostly using open standards technology. There is a little IE only code, but that’s because IE doesn’t support the technologies it should. Future versions will and that non-standard code will be ignored. So I’m fairly confident Parchment will run much as it does now in 1, 10 or 100 years.
Our OSes are concerned about security, and because browsers are already sandboxed then I expect them to keep supporting web technologies. Especially as many of the modern standards are all about security…
What is it about the presentation that you don’t like?
Also, the Linux Mono distribution should actually work on Mac Mono, it’s just that I don’t have the hardware to be able to test it out.
IFComp only had 1 game written in ADRIFT 5 last year.
You know, guys, this discussion is really painfully frustrating. Predictably, it went off into the less interesting direction of the two possible ones.
(emphasis mine)
Last year, there were already some games which were not downloadable, but only hosted on some lame website. One of them actually got into the top three, if I remember correctly. This is a nightmare for future preservation. Sites do go down! The guys of ifwizz have got a “Just Lost” category on their site (scroll all the way down) listing games hosted on sites which have gone offline. Some of the listed games could be saved and hosted elsewhere, at least one of them now seems to be lost forever. Why, between all the hype of “web playability”, does the preservation aspect take the back seat? I’m calling for a rule that all games have to be hosted on the IF Archive (at least), even if they primarily run on some website.
Wow. So I’m not the only one.
The 2011 web games are on the Archive.
There is already a rule that authors must permit their games to be hosted on the Archive.
Setting that up during the competition (as opposed to afterward) doesn’t seem to add much – it just complicates the release process.
That’s great, but then, my question is why this is not visible on the competition website? The voting page looks something like this: http://ifcomp.org/comp11/info.php (see “The Binary”). For all games, there are links to the Archive, but not for those “Web-based” ones. Why is that? I don’t see why one format should be treated differently than another one with respects to when it’s added to the archive or why it should be more complicated for some to be published there than for the rest.
I must leave that question to be answered by the comp site maintainers. 
Is that new for 2011? The ChoiceScript entry in 2010 is nothing but a text file in the archive: ifarchive.org/indexes/if-arc … herry.html
I guess you mean this rule? “All entries must be freely playable by judges, no strings attached. While you retain the copyright to any games you enter, by entering you are granting the competition and the Interactive Fiction Archive the non-exclusive right to distribute your game for free, and granting judges the right to play your game for free. No shareware, donorware, commercial products, etc. may be entered.”
That rule was in place in 2010, but the IF Archive doesn’t/can’t distribute Sons of the Cherry, because the author never sent any files to IFComp.
I’d be pretty happy with an explicit rule that to be eligible for the competition, you must distribute your entire game to IFComp and the IF Archive.
But (scrolling up) it looks like the general sentiment is against changing the rules to promote archivability, so I suppose we’ll just have to plan to vote against games that don’t distribute files to IFComp.
Well, given the general hype, we will probably have 100 “web based” games this year. Let’s see how this good rule is enforced in practice [emote]:)[/emote]
Edit: Oh, I see the games have already been published. The “web based” ones are not on the archive, though. An oversight of Stephen’s or a breach of the rules?
Web-based games: THREAT OR MENACE?
I’m working with the authors of web-based games to archive them.