Did you type that on an Apple device? It always changes love to live for me. I use the former much more often too. Crazy…
Indeed. And the in The and so many other awkward things. I.e. Awkward turns to wake are.
And now that I think of it: love turned to live is a nice, in topic, change, right?
Emily, this is an excellent idea. Like all communities, the IF community will eventually die of genetic defects due to inbreeding without new blood. You are absolutly correct. Authoring IF works is hard work, and lots of it. Publishing an IF work takes courage on many levels, and lots of it. Consequently, it is imperative that the IF community be perceived by new authors as inclusive, not exclusive. My personal experience with the IF community as a new author is that it is inclusive, but it could do more, as you are suggesting.
To offer a platitude: Some but not all plants improve and thrive with prunning, even sever prunning (i.e., pointing out faults). However, almost all plants will thrive if you apply plant food (i.e., pointing out merits), especially new plants.
Please sign me up for input into your experiment. I will offer I can, though I am not the expert that the bulk of your contributers seem to be.
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That’s fine! “I liked this because…” is encouraging regardless of where it’s coming from.
PM or email (emshort@mindspring.com) your preferred email address, and I’ll send you an invitation.
rdeford: Let’s be serious for a moment. No, of course not everyone is as shallow as I alluded in my sarcastic comments. However, I did not mean the opposite of what I said at all – there is a grain of truth in each of the points I listed. If Joey claims this is all palpably untrue, fine. When he says, though, that people will vote for the “most solidly implemented, enjoyable games”, this is not a contradiction to my points, is it? It just leaves the question open of what people consider “enjoyable”, and that is what I’ve been trying to address (in an admittedly poignant way.
Everybody can make up their own minds, looking at past results (no, not just the #1 spots) and reading past and present reviews. Of course (and that is what I did not address in my previous comments), the group of people writing reviews is not identical with the group of people voting in the IF Comp overall. My comments were much more addressed at the former than the latter, probably straying a bit from the original question, but let’s face it: The expectations of the non-reviewing community are even less transparent.
The Player Will Get It Wrong. Some of these things are I think inherent to the nature of art and art-reception.
I don’t mean to be flippant, and I really do think it is important to do what we can to help people have a good experience with the comp if possible; and I think that there are specific things that can be done to address some of the concerns you raised, particularly the “player got stuck on a puzzle and didn’t have fun ever afterward” problem. That one can (in many cases, for many players) be handled by better walkthrough and hint-writing strategies.
Then, too: yes, some players have a rating scale with specific rules that say things like “problem X means you lose Y points”. I think that’s actually driven in many cases by a desire to be fair and objective: “hey, look, I have the same rules for everyone! They’re very clear!” But my sense from reading reviews this year is that the majority of publishing reviewers are not doing a rigid point-scale thing, that that was more popular a few years back than it is now. I dunno. In my view the more variety we have among entries, the more the point-scale business will break down of its own accord.
Re big words and depressing symbolism: eh, I don’t know that this is a universal. I’ve frequently heard both of the following statements:
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Judges are more interested in a polished, middle of the road toy than in literature or human truth. All the comp winners tend to be blandly mediocre, while the spikier, more humanly powerful entries come in lower on the scale.
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Judges are more interested in a game being profound or pseudo-profound or experimental than in whether it is a good game solidly designed – even if the thing it’s saying is weird or takes a lot of parsing.
Both have been said every year for at least the dozen years I’ve been paying close attention.
I’m happy to raise my hand and say that, yes, all else about a game being equal, I typically prefer the one with characters in it. (“All else being equal” qualifies this statement so much as to render it meaningless, of course: a game with significant NPCs is likely to be a very different beast from one without for design and technical reasons.)
And while I am having a hard time thinking of that many successful comp games that traded on heavy crucifixion metaphors, I suppose I recognize a part of your critique about content. If a game seems to be trying to say something to me beyond “your score has gone up by 3 points”, then I generally am going to try to figure out what that something is, and that process is likely to be a major topic of my review. Often this is more or less orthogonal to whether I thought it was a good piece or whether I enjoyed it; I just want to enter into the conversation that the author has started, and say, “okay, here’s what I heard you saying, and here’s why it resonated with me, or failed to resonate.” It’s not at all the case, though, that only depressing or dramatically serious games have had this effect for me: I had a similar response to Apocolocyntosis, which was lewd and hilarious and anything but a mopefest.
This is the kind of reviewing I like best. It’s the point where the judge/reviewer relationship stops being about cheerleading (this was cool, I’m glad you did it, I hope you stick around and make more things) or correction (hi, you’re new to this, IMO you made the following mistakes) or craft feedback between equals (here’s what I experienced as issues with your work, when I’ve had similar problems here’s what I did) or production/consumption (I have consumed the commodity that is your game; here is how much I would be willing to consume another such commodity / would like to reward you for having produced that one) or curation (leaving the author out of the equation, I am going to stand next to a work and explain to third parties why I think they should take an interest in it, and what information might help them understand its context and meaning).
Instead it becomes about human communication, about people speaking to one another and, one hopes, gaining something from that process. But I don’t always find something like that to respond to in every game. Might be as much about me as about the author.
It would be impossible to give advice to anyone about how to achieve a game in which I would find meaning. All I can say here is really vague: write something you yourself believe in. If someone sees and responds to what you’re trying to say, win! You’ve connected honestly with that person, and that is one of the best things that can happen in life. If not, maybe the thing hasn’t found the right audience yet, but at least it still means what it means to you.
All the same, it occurs to me that there is a way, an almost walkthrough-y way, of encouraging people to talk about the aspect of your game that you think is the important part: the author’s note. One wants to feel that one’s work will stand alone and convey itself clearly to the most confused onlooker, but that’s not always the case; and in games I can recall that did have an author’s note, after-playing blurb or similar feature, that bit of armature did appear to provoke reviewers to comment on the author’s declared intentions and how well they succeeded. Whether it raised the score is another question.
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The worry about “Players getting it wrong” was what led me to release the commentary mode with my game Tenth Plague last year. I personally love author’s commentary, and I thought that having this additional source of information would help explain or fill in potential gaps in a way that >ABOUT would have fallen short. Which of course itself ended up being a feature that was received with different levels of enthusiasm, so I’m not sure how much I’d recommend it (but it was fun to experiment with).
Of course, the final interpretation is always in the hands of the players. “To whom does art belong - the artist or the viewer” has a much more weighted answer when the art is a game that offers choices and the feeling of agency. The balance then is more definitely “viewer”, and writers just need to realize and accept that and work with it. If I could do anything differently for past entries, it would be to schedule in a period of “no touch” where I don’t even think about the game so I start to forget it, and then play it as though approaching it as a new player. I think this offers a good chance at giving yourself a fresh view of your own game.
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All that said (and I’m glad that this discussion has now been moving into a slightly more profound direction than simply stating the basics like “post a walkthrough” or “have your game tested”), it strikes me as quite a problem that so many expectations which many reviewers and judges apply when evaluating games are completely unstated. At best, it is possible to try and read the implication from the sum of their reviewing work, but then, most reviewers are not quite one-dimensional, so it’s hard to draw conclusions. Of course, the opposite extreme would be this pseudo-objective reviewing style of counting negatives which is even less desirable.
Of course, everybody expects as few bugs as possible, a smooth gameplay experience etc. This goes without saying, making it completely uninteresting to even repeat this point. It’s what comes on top of this where things actually only become interesting! If we’re talking about themes, “what nerds like” is maybe a start, but not more than that. For example, it is my impression that really pure “nerdy” subjects have not been doing too well in the last years. Hard science fiction or high fantasy only places well if there is either another layer of meaning or an interesting gameplay gimmick.
When I said earlier that what I wrote will not help you make a good game, I was serious. I perfectly agree that people should make the games they want to make. In a way, the initial question of this thread strikes me as quite silly, because why should winning the competition (in the sense of placing first) be someone’s goal above everything else? I’m sure everybody wants to place as well as possible, but hardly at all costs.
The good thing that in spite of snarky and shallow reviews which every author has to stand when entering a game, the IF Comp is still the most liberal event this community has – by far. I’d hate to see it become as elitist as, for example the XYZZY Awards (try explaining this back and forth with that CYOA game last time to anyone outside this forum; it’s impossible). All these smaller competitions and awards should really be a warning to everyone. This goes double to those who are happy with the way they are going. The IF Comp still has a not-so-vocal, but nevertheless existing heterogenous set of judges which will lead to at least some surprises and appreciation being given even to non-streamlined games. Often, a bad review does not really mean a game is bad; it might mean just that the game is not what the reviewer is looking for.
That distinction is hard to make out in most reviews, though. Non-contactable or non-responsive reviewers don’t make things any easier. After my own experiences with this, I started sending my own reviews (a link to them, that is) to the authors actively in order to make it easier for them to reply, explain or simply ask for further explanations. Some use this opportunity, some don’t. Exactly this point of player expectations and compatibility with the author’s vision has come up many times. I will certainly try to write down my own plus and minus factors at the end of this competition and use them again next year. And no, it won’t be “-1 point per ten non-understood parser inputs”. It will most likely not change the way I feel about the games and if I don’t like something, I will still say it. However, maybe it will help authors of such games to understand why I didn’t like something and whether it was something they really didn’t do well or plain incompatible tastes.
As has been pointed out twice already, the purpose of this is not to provide a design blueprint for maximising your Comp score at all costs, and “winning” is intended pretty broadly, as “getting the most out of the experience.” (But the title was intended as kind of provocative; if I offer a bait-and-switch, I shouldn’t be too surprised when people latch onto the bait and worry at it.)
There are, obviously, plenty of reasons for entering the Comp other than placing highly. One is the pure volume of attention, in-community name-recognition and such. Another is the depth of feedback that it elicits. Another, if we want to get all high-falutin’ about it, is “I have this story in me and I have a need to tell it to people.” But a lot of the techniques used to serve these goals are convergent, or at least non-contradictory; that’s the kind of advice we should be going for.
a) all else aside, the Comp is still a comp, and I don’t think it’s going too far to assume that most authors would like to do well in it, and I don’t think it’s problematic to say that there are lots of straightforward ways that they can improve their standing without substantially changing the game that they want to make. (“Make the game you really want to make” was meant to be part of the original message. If talking about genre muddies that water, then we need to throw that out or re-word it for a different emphasis.)
b) most people who write a game have an ideal conception of what their game is about, what should be cool about the experience, what the story says and so on. They would, presumably, prefer that the experience of players be focused on that, rather than frustrated by unanticipated annoyances of design.
c) if all you’re interested in is the wider attention, good or bad, (that is, you don’t actually care whether voters or reviewers enjoy your game) you are not really in a position to complain if they say nasty things about it.
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I’d say that’s pretty low-falutin’, because a parallel thought is ‘oh my goodness, programming language X makes certain parts semi-trivial.’ That, along with “I liked these things many years ago, and I want to write a game now,” or “I have this story, and I would love to make it end different ways, or allow people to make it as detailed or streamlined as they want” or “the deadline will actually help me get around to it, finally” is a powerful motivator.
For any of these people, I think there’s something we can clearly point them to, a list of stuff they don’t need to do or stuff judges won’t like e.g. deliberately allowing unwinnable states because Hitchhiker’s Guide was a fun fun game even with them.
Lots of this is probably covered in Graham Nelson’s list of player’s rights. But the only way a rule list like this comes alive and is more than “thou shalt not” is for someone to play many more games or maybe see some examples.
I don’t think I’m the only person who said “Ooh, fun, text adventures are still around” and then realized that, yes, with a few simple rules authors can take care of, they could be even more fun & the player has a right to this. Question is, how do we capture this without making it a chore for the writer to follow these rules.
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I’m mostly calling it high-falutin’ because, for me, it immediately conjures up Schiller and Tolstoy and high-minded, ludicrously-universalised theories of the moral purpose of aesthetics. So, uh, he who smelt it dealt it, belike.
Part of what I was trying to get at is that it’s very difficult – perhaps impossible – to formulate this information in detail. The obvious formal stuff (we aren’t that big on mazes any more, please don’t submit troll games, check your grammar) is easy to express. But when you get into questions of theme and gameplay mechanic, well, it’s a lot harder to give guidelines.
A couple of things that affect my thinking, from least important to most:
High production values. This can be misleading, of course, but as a player I tend to be predisposed towards a work that has cover art, perhaps feelies, a nicely constructed walkthrough, an attractive website, and similar features. It’s not that I can’t like a game that doesn’t have those things, but when I see them, I think “hey, the author put a lot of work into making this experience enjoyable for me, and I bet that level of effort is going to show in the game itself as well”; and, again, I go into the play experience feeling more optimistic.
Setting/genre that I like. (Or at least don’t dislike. Though I’ve given some very high marks to games in some of my least favorite genres, it’s rarer for me to enjoy horror, or lazy-medieval, or that type of SF where everything about the universe is exactly like now except it takes place in featureless spaceship corridors.)
Focus on social interactions.
Strong use of interactivity as part of the way the narrative makes its point. The way Photopia says something about grief by frustrating the player’s expectation to be able to “win,” e.g.
The aforementioned Having Something To Say, especially something that resonates with me.
Those aren’t really markable checkboxes, though – and it’s not possible to deliver a list of themes or mechanics that will work. It’s hard to predict even if you have AAA game company resources at your disposal and can do focus groups and marketing surveys. For one thing, people, when asked hypothetically about whether they would like a type of gameplay they haven’t seen before, are rarely any good at answering the question accurately. (I’ve heard a rumor, perhaps apocryphal, that the gameplay concept of the Sims did terribly in focus testing where people were asked whether they would like to play a game with features X Y and Z, and then of course went on to sell approximately a bazillion copies.)
I can talk about a couple of things that I tend to associate with the more successful endeavors:
Clear author vision. Can you give an elevator pitch on why your game is awesome? What is the player experience supposed to be and what’s cool about it? Some of the worse game debacles I’ve seen, worked on, or heard war stories about, in IF or elsewhere, have resulted from the lack of such a vision. This gets way more difficult with large teams, so it’s an area where single-author IF has a natural advantage. (Bonus: if you know why your game is awesome, that is likely to help you write a catchy blurb; writing a catchy blurb means that the judge is excited to try your game; excited judge is likely to have a happier time than bored or wary judge, thanks to expectations being what they are.)
Ability to pretend your game isn’t your game when you’re testing it yourself. Are you honest with yourself when you sit down to play about whether those experiences are in fact being delivered? Obviously you can’t play the game as though you were a player, but the closer you can get to simulating a player’s mentality, the better. One commercial project I worked on for a while, there was a designer who’d sit down and play combat sequences every morning and then come back and say “hey, this needs to be tuned to be a tenth of a second faster” or whatever – because he was able to put himself in a very analytical headspace that wasn’t about why it was currently designed the way it was designed, but rather about what he wanted that experience to be like and how far his present experience was from that. (Dan Shiovitz has an article about some specific things to look out for when thinking like a player in an IF context, but it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, I don’t think.)
Long test cycle with people who aren’t you. The companies that are most successful often become most successful by giving themselves time for a whole load of play-testing using a game that is potentially close to feature-complete. Valve is famous for this. They’ll make a version of the game, show it to players, watch them play, tear out whole concepts that aren’t working, retune the levels, rework the endings; so that by the time you get Portal 2 into your hands, a nontrivial portion of the awesomeness it displays is down to all that user testing and feedback that occurred before it was shipped, and the fact that they took the time to address what they learned. In IF terms, this means a) have alpha testers who are giving you feedback throughout development and b) give yourself lots of time for beta.
Those are largely process suggestions, though.
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@ Maga – This has proven to be a very good topic for me. Thanks to you and all who took the time to post. Is there any chance that you will create some kind of synopsis?
Well, my synopsis is that IF Comp isn’t about winning, it’s about taking part.
And as stated before, this thread is more about how to successfully take part in the competition without annoying or disappointing everyone involved.
It feels like people take issue with the subject line that anything else, but I think it may even be valuable as presented - that’s what would get newcomers to read it.
I don’t have much input on how to succeed since I am another outsider here, but I can provide my own understanding of these guidelines.
I’m not sure if I have more patience or tenacity than most, but very little of the thread’s contents surprises me. I’ve watched IF from the sidelines for years, playing a game or two every couple years, trying unsuccessfully to get started on something in various iterations of TADS and Inform. During this time I’ve read articles and blogs, gone through the newsgroups a bit, read this forum, read reviews of IF, tried good ones and bad ones. I have to say the advice given here seems very self-explanatory with even a passing familiarity of IF. I know that I’ll need testers, I know not to put in a maze, and I know to expect tough criticism. I would hope that prospective authors would at least know this much, but apparently it’s still a struggle.
I appreciate learning from the OP that generally games aren’t docked for being too long. I doubt I would run into that problem, but it’s something I hadn’t considered before.
On the subject of what sort of tropes and themes are better to use than others for the sake of originality: that seems tough. I’d sooner just tell the story I want to tell than consciously decide to avoid certain settings. However, if I were trying to do something I considered clever, I’d have to ask whether or not it’s been done before. IF has such a broad selection and so many individual twist stories that it feels like trying to do something unique is a minefield of ideas to unintentionally copy.
It’s odd to me that content outside the scope of the game (feelies) would be considered important. I’m actually a bit annoyed when I need to pick up extra context or clues from outside the game. I suppose as an author, it’s a way to show you put a bit more effort into the whole presentation, but to me it feels like a holdover from the '80s. I consider it an extra text dump at the start of the game, something that I need to invest time in before I know whether the game is worth my time.
Currently what I am most interested in is learning more about how to design a game more efficiently, or how to design NPCs that the community would accept as being well-developed. Information has been tough to find. There are plenty of programming guides, but not much in the way of modern design guides. That’s probably outside the scope of the thread, but to me it’s the next step after learning basics like these and the programming. Maybe we could have a “how to create a prize-winning NPC” thread as well? [emote]:P[/emote]
Places to look for design advice:
Craft pages on ifwiki
Threads, indexed by topic, from about ten years of rec.arts.int-fiction – some of the advice here is aging, but there’s still a lot of interesting stuff
The IF Theory reader
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I love this collection of comments from comp reviews organized by topic: mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/ … IFGems.zip. They’re from 1995-2005 (so it would be great if someone had the energy to add later reviews…)
Thanks. I found the free version of the IF Theory Reader and started reading it, and the first article mentioned a puzzle in the Seventh Guest which is a game I had always been curious about, so I spent most of the day watching someone play through it and its sequel. Yikes!