IF Comp Predictions Thread

Incidentally, this is also the message upon winning the game…

Also, for a state of completeness, the author will release a modified version that will also allow you to play as Independent, Confederate, Tories, or Pirate Party.

Its title will be The Game Formerly Known as Secret Muslim Mode.

Don’t you mean 21st December 2012? The 21st May already came, saw and left without conquering.

Oh no! Are they saying 12/21 might be a problem too? Well, I’ll amend the prediction–reference to May -or- December 21st, upping the expected number of games referring to them from 1 to a whopping 1.5.

  • Three game titles will have punctuation. One of these will end with an exclamation point!
  • one pseudonym will be all lower case, recalling e e cummings, or perhaps princess charlotte
  • One game title will be a comma-delimited list.
  • One game title will be in all caps. 90%+ of the posted reviews of this game will justify, in a single paragraph, the reviewer’s score of 1.
  • One game title will be an oblique reference to a 19th century poem. Most players will know what it alludes to, but one particularly pompous reviewer will point it out under the assumption that the rest of us are too uncultured to have read Tennyson.
  • One game title will be very similar to, but not identical to, the title of an older IF game. Everyone will wonder aloud at the author’s lack of originality. At least two reviewers will be snarky, suggesting that the author is so ignorant that he couldn’t be bothered to check IFDB to see if a similar name existed before naming his own game. Another reviewer (possibly the author, pseudonymously) will leap to the author’s defense that this is hardly a trademark infringement, and trademarks are overrated anyway. One person will continue to post on a variety of fora, quoting intellectual property law and Creative Commons attributions, long after everyone else has moved on to gossiping about the next game.
  • The frustratingly elusive, but cool-once-you’ve-figured-it-out, puzzle of the year will be based on the French Republican calendar. Hope everyone knows a botanist.

Accountability for pundits! Nate Silver is very ashamed of all of you.

Pretty Good

  • Healy: About 30 games will be entered into the Comp. Of those, at least half will be Glulx/Z-code, and a good amount of the rest will be classified “Other web-playable”.
    [/*:m]
  • Healy: Someone will enter a barely coherent tract on, not politics, but something very personal to the author. It is sure to be very moving, if anyone could ever understand it.
    [/*:m]
  • Joey: At least one game will involve a tedious simulation of something that is easy in real life (like making a cup of coffee or a sandwich). One game is based entirely around it.
    [/*:m]
  • VictorGijsbers: The golden banana winning game will not reach enough voters to turn the tide in the US election. howling dogs received 88 votes. Assuming absolutely optimal voter targeting in the swingiest states, Mitt Romney would have required an additional 289,770 votes - or 144,885 Democrats switching sides. (Mitt Romney is likely to blame Porpentine for his loss anyway.)
    [/*:m]
  • maga: The Golden Banana winner will place eleventh.
    [/*:m]
  • Joey: The Golden Banana will be won by a non-parser game.

Half Right

  • Healy: There will be at least 4 pseudonymous authors in the Comp. One will take their name from a dead person. Seven pseudonyms, not counting established handles.
    [/*:m]
  • Joey: At least 7 games revolving around exploring abandoned places. I count six, but this is pretty subjective.
    [/*:m]
  • Joey: Less than half of the games will give a response to xyzzy. True, but only if you count parserless games. (Parser games are close: 12 with, 10 without.)
    [/*:m]
  • Joey: Over 60% of the parser-based games will involve a charming response for ‘sing’. 68% have responses, but only 23% match my highly scientific standards for ‘charming.’ Least charming response: ‘With this gag on, you can only make muffled groaning noises.’
    [/*:m]
  • aschultz: one game will contain completely random scoring for each ending, with scores ranging from -20000 to 30000. Partial credit for Living Will.
    [/*:m]
  • Kate McKee: One game title will be very similar to, but not identical to, the title of an older IF game. Everyone will wonder aloud at the author’s lack of originality. At least two reviewers will be snarky, suggesting that the author is so ignorant that he couldn’t be bothered to check IFDB to see if a similar name existed before naming his own game. Another reviewer (possibly the author, pseudonymously) will leap to the author’s defense that this is hardly a trademark infringement, and trademarks are overrated anyway. One person will continue to post on a variety of fora, quoting intellectual property law and Creative Commons attributions, long after everyone else has moved on to gossiping about the next game. We’ve had a Castle Adventure before, but nobody cares.
    [/*:m]
  • Kate McKee: Three game titles will have punctuation. One of these will end with an exclamation point! I count one Fantasy Apostrophe; others point out one genitive apostrophe and one ampersand.
    [/*:m]
  • VictorGijsbers: There will be no Stiffy Makane games, and in fact no dick jokes at all in the entire competition. No Makane, but dick joke identified in Last Minute.
    [/:m][/list:u][/:m][/list:u]

Kinda But Mostly Not

  • Healy: A newcomer, or relative newcomer, will win the Comp.
  • Healy: Someone will enter a port of an old game they made in BASIC, and it will be shockingly charming. Castle Adventure, maybe, but I don’t think anyone was charmed.
  • Healy: Last, but not least, an author will come from absolutely nowhere and blow people away. It might even be the same newcomer who wins the Comp.
  • Joey: The prevailing theme will be Sea Monsters. I count one outright sea monster, one cheating selkie, and one missed opportunity to feature Jormungand.
  • maga: There will be at least three games with major female characters depicted by male authors in a kinda-creepy way. I could make an argument for a maximum of three, maybe, but it’d be a bit of a stretch.
  • Kate McKee: One game title will be in all caps. 90%+ of the posted reviews of this game will justify, in a single paragraph, the reviewer’s score of 1. One word in one title in all caps; one all-lowercase title.
  • Kate McKee: One game title will be an oblique reference to a 19th century poem. Most players will know what it alludes to, but one particularly pompous reviewer will point it out under the assumption that the rest of us are too uncultured to have read Tennyson. Eurydice quotes Tennyson’s In Memoriam; howling dogs is named for a poem by Oe Kenzaburo, born 1935. Swing and a miss!
  • Nathan: One entry will be in some obsolete format, like Scott Adams, Level 9, or Apple Integer BASIC. ALAN’s not quite at that level.

Not As Far As I Know

  • Healy: There will be another meta-puzzle entered into the Comp. It will be worse in some respects than the Hat Mystery, but people will be able to pick up on it before the Comp ends.
  • Joey: Despite his protestations to the contrary, ‘Comazombie’ will come back (but probably with a different name)
  • Joey: An IF heavy-weight will enter the comp under a pseudonym, but they won’t come first Eurydice might be a long shot
  • VictorGijsbers: The golden banana of discord will be won by a game that attempts to make a case for electing Mitt Romney. I am 95% certain that this was not a subtext of howling dogs.
  • maga: Three different games will employ the word “brony”. Two will use “neckbeard”.
  • aschultz: one game will have a critical puzzle message embedded in a map the player needs to draw out
  • aschultz: one game will make a joke about how May 21, 2012 was not the end of the world.
  • aschultz: three games will reference Occupy Wall Street. Two will reference global warming.
  • Joey: Three authors will list their own mothers in the credits

Definitely Not

  • Healy: expect to see a common “theme” between completely unrelated games. Possible themes include the economy, Breaking and Entering, dark family secrets, and Australia. I count one-and-a-half with breaking-and-entering, one-and-a-half with dark family secrets.
  • Healy: An under-used IF genre will see, not just a lot of games, but a lot of really good games entered in the Comp. Possible genres include Superheroes, Romance, and Porno Parody. Nothing that could remotely be described as any of these.
  • Joey: The average placing of multiple-choice games will be higher than last year. Highest-placed game ranked 11th; mean placing, 21/28. Last year’s highest game placed 3rd, mean placing 20/38.
  • Joey: Only 30% of the games will be by first time authors. At least 39%.
  • Joey: Rage over in-comp updates will reach hitherto undreamed of heights when one of the games changes genre three times during the six week voting period
  • Joey: The average placing of multiple-choice games will be higher than last year. Highest-placed game ranked 11th; mean placing, 21/28. Last year’s highest game placed 3rd, mean placing 20/38.
  • Joey: There’ll be at least one puzzle involving spaghetti, and two involving a duck (but not necessarily the same duck)
  • Joey: One of the game’s titles will be far creepier than intended
  • Joey: 8 of the games will be written by 3 of the authors
  • Joey: Over 60% of comp veterans will place higher this year than they have in previous comps. Five up, four down.
  • VictorGijsbers: At least two games will feature RPG style combat. One will be quite good.
  • VictorGijsbers: Of the games which feature significant conversations between humans, more than half will pass the Bechdel test. Hard to judge that counts as ‘significant’, but this is not even close. I count six games with clearly-female human protagonists (fifteen with clearly-male) and only two of those (Valkyrie and howling dogs) pass the Bechdel.
  • VictorGijsbers: One game will suggest that the player listen to Immortal’s At the Heart of Winter as a soundtrack.
  • VictorGijsbers: There will be no game about crime. Guilded Youth is about trespass, theft and arson.
  • VictorGijsbers: The good RPG game, the Romney game and the Immortal game are all the same game, but this is not one of the games that pass the Bechdel test.
  • maga: There will be exactly one Varytale game, one in Undum, and three homebrew CYOA parser-replacement things.
  • maga: The winner will have an average score of 8.1, +/- 0.05.
  • maga: There will be exactly six games with a reasonable play-time of over one hour. I estimate eight.
  • maga: Someone will replace their entire game with another during the update period just to make a point; this will be widely condemned as a dick move. They will then claim that the big pile of 1-votes they received proves their point.
  • maga: There will be exactly two games written for children.
  • maga: At least one game will do an idea that I’ve been meaning to do for years, and they will do it totally wrong.
  • JamesPKing: There will be just 5 entrants.
  • JamesPKing: Michael Gentry, Adam Cadre, Andrew Plotkin and Emily Short will all compete this year with 4 different masterpieces which will simply destroy the standards raised by their former games. They will end up (in random order) 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th.
  • JamesPKing: The aforementioned author will hang him/herself on a lamp post.
  • JamesPKing: The pic of the lamppost-hanging will be used as a cover in the next Cover Competition by Sam K. Ashwell.
  • aschultz: one (fake-?) troll game will have the parser say only “WRONG!” for various errors. It will have plenty of stupid deaths, with messages like “You tried, I guess.” When the player wins, it will say “YOU MUST HAVE CHEATED!” It will also grade the player unfairly on efficiency–if the game can be done in 40 moves, but the player takes 70, the player will get 57%, or an F. A last lousy point will require including profanity in a command. This game will not out-average more earnest efforts, but it will get a higher percentage of 10’s.
  • aschultz: one game will allow the player to play Yahtzee, Parcheesi or Chutes and Ladders. Or, if the programmer is the outdoorsy type, Horseshoes.
  • aschultz: two games will feature a blogger or freeware-game programmer or combination of both who lives in his mother’s basement. One as protagonist, one as antagonist.
  • aschultz: The Romney game will have unlockable Obama mode if you do spectacularly well or poorly. It will feature Joe Biden cleverly and subtly trolling the player-character in either case.
  • Kate McKee: one pseudonym will be all lower case, recalling e e cummings, or perhaps princess charlotte
  • Kate McKee: One game title will be a comma-delimited list.
  • Kate McKee: The frustratingly elusive, but cool-once-you’ve-figured-it-out, puzzle of the year will be based on the French Republican calendar. Hope everyone knows a botanist.

It’s Cheating If It’s Your Game

  • JamesPKing: An author that has already entered the Comp with an average-to-bad result will improve his writing and coding skills 300%, thus producing a game 300% better than the one he did last time. Okay, maybe not 300%.
  • JamesPKing: But at least one will give 3 different responses [to XYZZY], depending from the plot.
  • Joey: At least three non-human protagonists. Three non-humanoids, two of which are from Summerland; six whose human status is questionable.

Hey! C’mon! The three non human characters are all by Joey! He cheated too!
(And, actually, I couldn’t say for myself that my game is better than last year’s)

I think you’re just jealous that the meta-analysis proves me to be most psychic, and you to be least…

Analyzing the meta-analysis. Why? Because I love a good nitpick:

Standards for “heavyweight” are subjective, of course, but Christopher Huang’s name appears twelve times on the list of XYZZY awards and nominations; surely that counts. (Joey has something of a claim too.)

There’s also one ordinary genitive apostrophe (Murphy’s Law) and one ampersand (Irvine Quik & the Fish of Traglea), so I grade this Half Right.

There’s one in Last Minute:

…alright, I just replayed the section of my game (The Test is Now READY) with the Violinist problem, and I can see why you didn’t list it. It would be a VERY weak pass, as the nurse who info-dumps the violinist information to you is a) optional and b) only present for one turn, and you never respond to her at all.

Of course, to pass the Bechdel, you would also have to assume that the PC at that point is female. Which, in the game code, she is, as the PC of that section is named Judith (in the code), after Judith Jarvis Thomson, the originator of the Violinist thought experiment.

Also, the Violinist thought experiment is another way of looking at abortion, so it makes sense that the PC at that point is female.

HOWEVER, the game never surfaces the fact that the PC is female during that segment, even with “x me”. Combine that with the optional, minimal nature of the nurse “conversation”, and I understand not being listed here.

Various amendments made.

Chris is more of a cruiserweight, to my mind. (I had to go and look this up). I suspect he would fight in knickerbockers, under the name The Dandy Vicar.

Ah, but a major point of the Violonist is to get people who are at no risk of ever getting pregnant – i.e. men – to consider an analogous situation as something that could happen to them, rather than to Someone Else. So my prima-facie assumption (which is about as shaky as the above) would be that if you need to assign a gender, the character’s probably male. But really it’s more of a straight-up AFGNCAAP. (Even if it counts, we’re still not at 50% Bechdel.)

Best Failure To Pass The Bechdel goes to J’dal / Racist Waitress, where men tell you what to say and then take over the conversation for you as soon as conflict arises. Also, the subject of the conversation is sausages.

I had thought of making a joke about sorting him into one of the interminable boxing weight classifications, but I couldn’t think of one.

Don’t the characters have to have names to pass the Bechdel test? Or does the PC get a free pass?

Amanda mentioned that if you talk to your sister at all, Body Bargain passes the test. I got the feeling conversation with her was going to be improved in future updates.

I couldn’t figure out which ones these were. Oh wait, Joey’s is Murphy’s Law, right?

Eurydice is the first, I suppose.

Right, Murphy’s Law. For the first I thought howling dogs, which elicited reactions roughly split between ‘this was really moving’, ‘whuh?’ and ‘this was really moving, but… whuh?’

Ow, right.

Named characters is a non-standard variant, I think. If you want to adopt it, though, the concern it’s meant to address – that a movie might technically pass the Bechdel by briefly showing two female extras chatting – seems pretty well satisfied by a game with a female protagonist.

As for Body Bargain… hm. The only conversation I had with my sister was really conversation about Overclock; but I had some trouble with getting her to be responsive in general. And it’s possible to avoid talking to her entirely. So it seems plausible that some playthroughs would satisfy Bechdel.

I’ve got a bunch of XYZZY nominations from back in 2007, but have yet to reach those giddy heights since re-entering the scene late last year, so I’d say super-welterweight tops.

You can talk to your sister in Body Bargain about her upcoming surgery, so there’s that at least. Is the Bechdel only for protagonists? If not, I think Paula addresses a woman in the dining room.

Yeah, in context I’d consider ‘heavyweight’ to mean ‘an author who, were they to enter the comp without a pseudonym, would make everybody assume that they would probably win.’

Hm. Let me take another look at that scene… unless it can go different ways, I think the whole conversation is between Paula and Erik. I don’t see another woman speaking.

Actually, sod it, let’s show my working.

No Significant Conversation

  • Escape from Summerland
  • Fish Bowl
  • Murphy’s Law
  • The Island
  • Shuffling Around
  • Signos (I think)
  • Transit
  • Living Will
  • The Lift

Significant Conversation, Fail the Bechdel

  • J’dal: alternate title, Sausage Party
  • Castle Adventure: so put me down, punk
  • Changes: there are conversations in flashbacks, but I’m not sure any of them involve clearly-female characters
  • Eurydice: male protagonist
  • Lunar Base 1: no female characters
  • Sunday Afternoon: one female character
  • Andromeda Apocalypse: no female characters
  • Kicker: cheerleaders, not chatty
  • A Killer Headache
  • Irvine Quik and the Search for the Fish of Traglea
  • The Sealed Room all NPCs male one female NPC, player AFGNCAAP
  • Guilded Youth
  • Last Minute (at least, all the plot threads I found had a male protagonist)

Significant Conversation, Might Pass the Bechdel

  • Body Bargain: conversation with sister; might be about Overclock, or not
  • The Test is Now READY: Violinist subject is female, but only in the code; conversation with nurse optional

Pass the Bechdel

  • howling dogs: Empress / ambassador. The conversation is about dreams.
  • Valkyrie: Bryndis / protagonist. The conversation is about wicked awesome armour that shows off your wings. (The next thing she tells you is about how you should show appropriate deference to the Allfather, but we’ll assume that’s a new conversation.)
  • Spiral: conversations with Helen and Alana; Helen’s memories of being a bully
  • In a Manor of Speaking: aha, I missed this one. Hooyoo and Yoohoo are female, and arguing about nothing whatsoever when you show up. Nothing whatsoever is not a man, so TECHNICAL VICTORY!

(To be fair, a 50% Bechdel pass rate would be really high for IF, even if we didn’t have a protagonist gender skew; the average work of IF features far fewer characters and conversations than the average movie or novel.)