You will see this as a completely superfluous contribution, but please allow me to mention that I don’t want to bother you with yet another redundant and unrealistic concept - I just had an idea, want to write it down, and that’s it.
Authors apply for a yet another competition. A “jury”, a committee, some guys construct random tasks from a list: A setting, a goal, maybe a character description. Example:
Setting:
— Mayan village, 500 B.C.
— fictitious, stereotype small town in the Bible Belt
— ruins of NYC, 2100 A.D.
— a planet where gravitation is so heavy that people and buldings are small and sturdy, 3rd dimension doesn’t play a role
— a medieval castle with a ghost
Goal:
To
— find and defeat
— escape from
— make love to
— re-establish
the
— mayor
— secret sorority
— manic antagonist
— entire neighbourhood
The player is
— old and ill
— having a sidekick with Tourette syndrom
— sitting in a laboratory and controlling a robot
— ugly as hell
Individual tasks provided by a computer program, re-drawing possible in special cases (although “You’re sitting in a laboratory and control a robot which is in a Mayan village and needs to make love to the entire neighbourhood.” still sounds feasible… somehow). Authors have one week/two weeks/… time to come up with a (small) game that matches their individual task. Votes provided by the jury/registered voters/the plebs, in kind prizes handed over, yet another competition over and soon forgotten.
If there weren’t already gazillions of competitions (one per existing author I tend to think), I could think of this as a funny, yet half-baked idea.
I wouldn’t mind a short competition with some structure. Sometimes it would be nice to take a couple weeks off the ole WIP and do something different.
I wonder if the community could support a frequent-ish comp. I wonder if such a set-up might be more conducive to ADRIFT authors and games.
For mini-minicomp/speedIF things, I tend to prefer premises that can make for wacky games, but don’t oblige you to do so. The premise as stated here would, unless you got lucky, tend to make non-wackiness difficult. (That said, I’ve been doing speedIF for… wow, ten years yesterday. So while I may feel that mandatory-wackiness is played out, others might not be so jaded.)
A lot of the value of speedIF-like wackiness is that there isn’t any voting or judging; there’s no expectation of producing anything good, but it’s nice if you manage to do so. Adding votes automatically makes things a quality contest – which is fine if you’ve had time to do your best on a project, but not very fair for something you’ve knocked off in a hurry.
I might like to participate in something like this. It would give something specific to work on, and I could probably reach into my bag of stashed-away ideas and fit them into the framework of the “tasks” that I would be given. I think it would be fun, but I can’t do it right now. For one thing, I still have an ever-narrowing possibility of finishing my current WIP for this year’s Comp.
But I very much agree with this. I would be hesitant to participate in a contest that mandates (either directly or indirectly) that all the entries must be wacky at some level. I normally end up embarrassing myself badly whenever I try to be funny.
Also, I really don’t care at all whether the games would be voted on or not. It wouldn’t affect my decision to participate, or not to.