Most years when I play the Golden Banana game, I have a pretty clear sense of why the game won the Golden Banana. Not so for this year.
Does anyone have thoughts on why " A Day in a Hell Corp" got the banana?
It seems to have the highest SD (standard deviation I presume) in the voting statistics.
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Well, that’s the definition of the Golden Banana: the game with the highest standard deviation.
But why did this game have such a high standard deviation?
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This is just a guess, as I didn’t play the actual game, but this was the one entry that used AI art in its cover and didn’t disclose it – probably because the author didn’t generate the art themselves but rather made a montage out of AI clip art, which I think they may have been unaware of. So maybe there’s a split between people who noticed and thought to dock it points over it and people who didn’t think it mattered or didn’t notice?
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I also think this game came down to a split between people who thought it was AI generated and those who thought it wasn’t.
On one hand, the cover art does look pretty clearly ai generated. The writing uses a really over-the-top tome and lots of emojis, the same the other ai games used tons of emojis. The different areas didn’t feel really tied together and felt a little illogical to me.
On the other hand, the art could technically be thought of as 3d art that happened to be in the style copied by AI. And a lot of the oddities in text could be put down to translation, which has less of a negative viewpoint than pure text generation. The author gave an explanation for the upbeat tone, disconnectedness, and illogicality: Mathbrush reviews IFComp 2025 (Latest: Monkeys and Car Keys, done for now) - #60 by hex
If this were entered four or five years ago, I think it would have placed higher as voters tend to be forgiving of small oddities in games as long as they’re typo free and have a lot of non-repetitive content. But with the advent of AI the perceived worth of silly but polished content has gone down with some voters.
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I didn’t have a chance to play “Hell Corp” during the competition window. I expected “Hobbiton Recall” to be a contender, due to its use of AI art, a bug in the original release which made fully 2/3 of the content unreachable, and an unlikable protagonist. Yet if you play past that point, it is actually an engaging game of epic length.
Ultimately Hobbiton Recall ended with Standard Deviation of 2.25, which is high, but not even second banana.
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