I’m not entering this year but I have before, and I remember the first year was pretty stressful.
I wanted to say a few things that can help it be less stressful:
There’s usually a burst of quick reviews at the beginning before it slows down later on. About 3 or 4 weeks in the number of reviews can slow down a ton and it feels like everyone’s forgotten about the comp and your games. Right before the end sometimes it picks back up again.
The most-reviewed game almost never wins. Usually the game that gets reviewed the most is something like a short choice-based game with nice cover art and a quirky name and blurb that uses multimedia and lasts less than 15 minutes (or a short troll game). I remember Wizard Sniffer got almost no reviews for a really long time before it won.
It can sometimes take a week or two before anyone gets to your game. That’s not a bad sign! It may just mean your game looks long or difficult so people want to take their time on it.
Placing high isn’t the same as having a lasting effect. Some games that placed really low in the competition have gone on to have more of a legacy than winners, and bad games can be a springboard into making better games.
Releasing anything is an accomplishment, so congrats to everyone who entered this year! I’ve enjoyed the games I tested and look forward to all the new ones!
Thanks for posting this Brian, lots of good points! I’d just add that last year, the least-reviewed games had 9 reviews, and I wouldn’t expect this year to be much different. So even if one or two people bounce off your game, which inevitably happens even to stuff that in retrospect people feel like was widely-acclaimed, there’ll likely be a range of other folks looking at your game and possibly vibing with it more.
Engage thoughtfully with criticism. If you get a review that disappoints you, don’t respond right away, and DON’T respond with defensiveness or anger or passive-aggressiveness. It is a stone fact that bitching or whining about reviews will make people less likely to review your game. It isn’t likely that everyone will like your game, and that’s OK! And if you’re open to it, the criticism you receive will help you improve as an author, which should be your goal. Regardless of what reviewers say, they took the time to play your game and write something about it, and that is fantastic. Don’t make others wary of doing it.
Also, if your game isn’t in very good shape, you’ll get dinged for it. Every year there are new authors who submit very rough games that haven’t been tested thoroughly and that were rushed into the Comp. If you did this, don’t be surprised to get that exact feedback, and learn from it.
Finally, relax and have fun. Play the other games and talk up what you love.
Tripling down on this! We’ve got a really great community here, and this is the fastest way to turn one’s experience from a nail-biting competition into a fun time. Embrace the community aspect and you’ll have a much better time!
Also for those who have parser games which auto-transcript through the IFComp site (if they are still doing that…) You’ll get a bunch of transcripts with 0 moves or just a few moves before quitting.
Don’t freak out about those. That is usually someone who is clicking “Play Now” just to see the first screen of text. Think of it as customers browsing in a bookstore and skimming the first page to see if they are interested.
Just because they don’t continue play doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t like it or there was a problem and they may come back later. I myself tend to quick-sample all the entries when released - I call it “hummingbird” behavior, checking all the flowers to find the nice ones - to see the writing style and make a list of games I want to come back to. There’s no need to be anxious when this happens!
I have a very thin skin when it comes to criticism and I want to strongly agree with this point. I even have thin skin when I get playtesters’ comments, and I asked for those! It would be catastrophic if I responded immediately–“How could you criticize that which I so artfully constructed and have made abundantly moving and clear in myriad ways, you ignorant reader, you?” Then I walk away from it and set it aside and come back to things a day or a week later and realize the reviewer / commenter was correct about 75% of the time, if not much more.
I’ve gone through creative writing courses and now teach creative writing and I’m still not much more gracious out of the gate than I used to be. (The nice thing is I scare my students with how thin-skinned I am and how much critiques can suck, and then they’re pleasantly surprised when it isn’t as bad as I made it out to be.) But I’ve learned to just shut the hell up, return to criticism with clear eyes, and then I get genuinely excited about all the things I can fix to make whatever I’ve written even better. (I love getting parser transcripts for this reason.)
Perhaps the other to note is that it’s okay to listen more to reviewers you trust. Many of the people commenting here I trust completely and have served as playtesters for my games. Other reviewers might just be starting out reviewing or haven’t done it much, and they can struggle, too. It takes me forever to write a review, and I worry I often don’t do the game justice. But every author will find kinship with different reviewers, so I think it can be good to attune yourself to whichever reviewers resonate with you.
My approach is that I usually don’t respond to reviews at all anymore. Not even positive ones. Not even just to say “Thank you.” Sometimes it feels like authors are hovering behind the reviewers, ready to pounce, and it can create a weird vibe.
Also, reviews are not synonymous with feedback. Feedback is for the author; reviews are for the public. Reviews might function as feedback for the author on certain levels, but I’ve seen authors take them personally when most reviews are impersonal. I think it’s important to remember that.
Yeah, I think generally new reviewers may be worried they may have to make a splash, or it’s most engaging to be like (gah) youtuber reaction videos. And we don’t need to be. But certainly the internet makes us feel like we do, and even if we try not to be, a voice says “but you have to be a little exciting, don’t you?”
Certainly I’ve seen cases where I thought reviewers were being unfair to other entries and they wound up being unfair to me too. Or they seemed unfair to me, then they were unfair to others.
I don’t have a problem waiting 24 hours before responding, unless it’s “ouch, that’s an acute bug, fixed and updated.” There will be enough time. In fact I like to do so, so if someone writes a review of my game, so they won’t be worried I gave someone else an immediate response and not them.
Even though we know obsessing over likes and response time isn’t healthy, we do it anyway.
Also, if a reviewer or review you dislike makes a really good point nobody else made, don’t feel guilt fixing things and moving on and ignoring them, or ignoring the rest. That’s your right.
I generally have a narrow focus of what I respond to – I’ll say “thanks for noticing that” or “that bug can be fixed, sorry about that” or “that can go in a later release.”
I only give an explanation if I want to … in this case “reviewing is not for you but the public” becomes “the technical explanation isn’t for the reviewer, but for the public curious how the bug happened.”
I feel less need to respond to reviews than I used to. But I also don’t want to give people who’ve put time and thought into their reviews the cold shoulder. It’s tough to balance.
Oh yeah, when I’m on the author side, I’m on high alert too. But when I’m on the reviewer side, sometimes it’s like How did you get into my apartment?? Not literally, of course. But it’s the “ready to pounce” component that I try to be mindful about.
I’ve never received a review that I thought was harsh. A few people have given me harsher feedback in private messages. (Sometimes they’re beta testers, so it’s expected).
I think that people who really dislike something are more likely to give low ratings.
Personally, I don’t write negative reviews. I try and explain what the game is about, what I think the author was trying to do, what gave me trouble, and what I found worked well. Sometimes, I lead with a one-liner that I think is funny; hopefully other people think it’s funny, because it’s not meant to dismiss anything the author has done.
So if I reviewed your game, I found it interesting enough to leave an impression. That means I liked it in some way. However, I only give scale ratings to about half of the games I review. I don’t vote in IF Comp.
Since I’m selective, I don’t write a ton of reviews, but I’m going to try to write some more this year because I have time on my hands.
Just the act of reading transcripts can be very stressful. I always wonder what I did wrong that made this player take 25 turns to solve this puzzle that should be easy. Then I feel guilty that they’re not having a good time.
Even worse is watching a player guessing the verb or phrasing over and over again. One particularly bad command from 2022 was “oh ffs” after the player had the parser rebuke them innumerable times. No fun.
The “who are reviews for?” convo is interesting to me because I found it very jarring when I entered this space that authors regularly engaged with reviews. “Reviews are for readers, not the author” is a big thing in static publishing spaces, with not-infrequent minor scandals around authors complaining about negative reviews or putting reviewers they disagree with on blast. But here the vibe is very different; authors are encouraged to read their reviews, and there’s no stigma about replying to them. At this point, my understanding is that IF reviews are for both players and the author; reviewers often seem to write with the intention of providing feedback on the game as well as letting prospective players know what to expect. I was just reading this recent interview with Jacqueline Lott, where she discusses her reviewing approach as centered on giving the author feedback (direct link to the relevant section).
(As a reviewer, I also typically like when a game’s author replies to my review—anything along the lines of “well, you’re wrong” is obviously off-putting, but “I’m glad you got what I was doing”-type replies are always gratifying!)
I’d wager, because the community is relatively small, many authors are actually both authors and players. So, the line is kinda blurred? (idk if that makes sense)
Historically, IFComp used to be complete radio silence from start to finish. Reviews wouldn’t be posted, no discussion was allowed, authors didn’t talk about it. Then once it was over, reviews were posted all at once.
Restrictions have been relaxed bit by bit over the years, and the last rule to go was ‘authors can’t talk about the games during the comp’, so for IFComp specifically, responding to a review was a big no-no.
I think the change has been overall positive, with most authors responding well to comments. Having been both an author and a reviewer, I’d have to say that responding defensively about your game never looks good, and will probably give you or your game a (mildly) worse image than anything the reviewer would say.
