I formally require the deletion of those words:
Awards
66th Place - 30th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2024)
and these words:
Awards
70th Place - 29th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2023)
from Creative Cooking - Details
TIA and
Best regards From Italy,
N.H. dottor Piergiorgio Maria d’ Errico
Hopefully some of the IFDB personnel will assist you, but from what I understand, those are automatic notes that show up in the games’ listings when they are also in the list of games that participated in IFComp for their respective years and they are sorted by ranking. The placement designations happen automatically, and I believe they would have to de-list your games from participating in IFComp to make that note not appear in the IFDB listing.
@mathbrush hopefully will chime in.
Right now it could be possible to unlist this game from the competitions.
There are two or three things to think about:
For those reasons, I personally won’t remove the links until another week has passed. However, editing ifdb is free to anyone (you can edit the competition page); but that swings both ways. If one person removed it, another can add it back. I personally will remove the links if you message me in a week, but I can’t guarantee they will stay unlinked.
The week wait isn’t just for you to cooldown but for me as well, I get very heated and upset about deleting history, more than I should, so I need to take the time to calm down and relax. But any other mod can help you first or you can edit yourself (no guarantee it will stay edited).
Consider - the more times and cross-references your game gets on IFDB, the more places someone might notice and check it out. There are so many historical games that didn’t rank highly in IFComp at the time but went on to win XYZZY awards. In any contest, especially with so many entries, some interesting and perfectly good entries are going to have to be down the list.
There’s a specific type of game - length, content, “flavor of the moment” appeal - that tend to do well in IFComp, and lots of IF regarded as classics wouldn’t place highly in the Comp because of that. Plus it’s an overwhelming judging period with so many games to get through in a limited amount of time.
In Olympic gymnastics, some person is going to come in last, but that doesn’t by any means imply they’re bad at gymnastics. Quite the opposite - many professional Cirque du Soleil performers have been plucked from the lower ranks of competitors. By nature anything worthy of being in a competition is going to be a significant cut above the norm.
It’s kind of a dirty secret that most IF goes unnoticed if released cold, but even being in a competition gives you a step up in discoverability. We’ve had entries in past years disqualified because they were stealth commercial games that sought to gain recognition just by being entered the competition.
There’s a running joke about that, especially on X. “I’d wish regular people to participate in the Olympics, to really see the difference between them an the athletes”.
It would indeed be spectacular.
The same applies to (most) IFComp games: even the worst-graded are thousands lightyears from what a “regular person” would be able to do.
I’ve been working around football (soccer, for you people) for years when I was 20-30. I have seen lesser, non-champion players touch the ball or hit it with a “regular” kick. If I were hit by those kicks, I would probably be dead or severely incapacitated. The hit itself, at close range, boomed like THUNDER.
Keep this in mind. And if someone points to your final result… simply ask: “and where did YOUR work end?”
Why would you like these competition results removed?
a clarification and a note:
I haven’t asked to delete nor to delist the entire entry, but only the placement, if my wording has given the wrong impression, I apologise.
I’m really surprised that both Hanon and Brian nail a major cultural trait of Italians, namely the heating and cooldown when really upset.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
ps. for Marco: once was measured the speed of a ball kicked by Careca, and the resulting speed was 170 or 180 km/h (that is, at least 610 m/s) and a ball weight 1 pound. That is, indeed the same energy impressed by a falcon (1pdr. blackpowder cannon)… so indeed a kick from a pro, and even a semi-pro player IS deadly…
While I don’t support the idea, it strikes me that the only clean resolution would be for the games to be officially removed from the IFComp results (effectively withdrawing the games from the competition retrospectively). Trying to change or remove references to the result (on IFDB, etc.) without changing the result itself would seem a rather difficult and ultimately fruitless exercise.
Having said that, I can think of lots of very good reasons why the IFComp organisers, judges and participants would not want to allow a game to be excluded from the results after the fact, including the impact it could have on the integrity of the comp.
So spoke on the integrity of the 'Comp the one whose integrity is shown by the mockery of deleting only the last letter of a name…
Nobilis Homo dottor Piergiorgio Maria d’ Errico, figlio di Rosanna Falanga figlia di Giorgina Funaro figlia di Clotilde Di Segni.
I understand that you’ve asked to remove the placements. Why do you want the placements removed?
I didn’t understand your request. In some ways, I still don’t - although I do understand how someone might want a level of control over how their work is represented on a public forum.
Other people here have given very good reasons to consider keeping the IFComp references for your games on IFDB, and elsewhere.
I’ll now butt out of this conversation.
thank you for closing this nonsensical conversation.
@Piergiorgio_d_errico You started this conversation. You made a request, people asked you for more information to figure out your intentions, and now you’re upset that people want more information to fulfill your request. This isn’t quite at the level of “personal attacks” but we’d appreciate less atteggiamento maleducato when interacting with other people.
You wrote a game.
You entered it in IFComp, the biggest IF event of the year. Going by other authors’ impressions, also the harshest Comp to release your game to the scrutiny of the community.
Players engaged with your game. 33 people rated it, and according to the 2024 spreadsheet, 9 people wrote a review. That’s a lot of people playing your game and giving you some kind of feedback.
You’ve been around this place long enough to know what entering a game in IFComp entails.
And now, after willingly and knowingly entering your game in IFComp, you ask for its result data to be removed?
I don’t think that truthful information about competition history should ever be taken down simply at the request of an author, or for any other reason other than extremely compelling one (such as copyright issues or other legal problems).
When you put your work out to the public, having it publicly criticized is a fact of life. I’ve had my IETF work covered in tech press and even some major mainstream publications. What they write isn’t always flattering; once it was a pure hatchet job. But unless it’s outright libelous (and that’s never been the case), I don’t think I have any right to demand it be changed or taken down; that’s life. This stuff isn’t nearly as big a deal as it feels like at first, even when it was my professional life’s work being criticized. Nobody is ever going to suffer professional or significant social consequences over having their IFComp entry criticized. Nobody here can hurt you unless you let them, and a low competition ranking isn’t an insult unless you make it one.
I’m closing this topic for a week based on Mathbrush’s cooldown request.