IFComp 2024 Post-Competition [general feedback and survey discussion]

Competitions IFComp
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Long games (like ‘23 Prince Quisborne) tend to get fewer reviews because people often don’t feel comfortable reviewing a game they haven’t completed. Prince Q was an exceptional game, by the way, and its final vote distributions reflected that.

I’m a little more concerned that short, objectively “bad” games will garner so much attention, especially if they are suspected to be campaigning for last place or Golden Banana.

Even short, flawed, but sincere games get more reviews than you’d expect from a random distribution. I think there is growing competition among reviewers to maximize the total number of reviews. Short, sincere games offer a quick path to boost those numbers.

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82

Yeah, in the end I’m okay with this because 1) what do you even do about that? and 2) short games take a big penalty in terms of final ranking. I haven’t done any kind of exhaustive research but it’s unusual for short games to make it into the top 20 at all, despite the number of ratings. This year’s results heavily favor games 2 hours or longer, with only 3 of the top 20 clocking in at under an hour. (As an aside, You Can’t Save Her placing 15th despite being 15 minutes long is a fantastic achievement given this! Good job Sarah Mak!)

So I think this is an acceptable tradeoff, especially since again: how do you even realistically change this?

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83

I think this is only a big concern if it gets more common. One Uninteractive Fiction per year is funny and harmless. A dozen of them would be really irritating. I don’t think the committee needs to change anything proactively here, other than maybe reserving the right to DQ all the troll entries if there are too many of them submitted.

Campaigning for the Golden Banana, on the other hand, shouldn’t be discouraged at all. You can’t win that unless at least some people really love your game, which means it has to have something to offer. It can be a troll, but it can’t be just a troll.

I also wouldn’t want to see any change that would tend to discourage entering short, sincere games. “Best tiny game” would make a good side award since they don’t tend to place highly in general.

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84

I totally agree with this. The only thing I’d add is that I personally would rather see a year with a bunch of these entries before any attempt to eliminate that annoyance, rather than a move to stop it ever happening in the first place. There’s a limit, obviously - if it would genuinely swamp the more sincere entries then that’s something that should be addressed - but someone producing something of this sort after a year where it’s been a bit of an issue would know they were taking a gamble. Someone who happens to be part of a hypothetical sudden wave of these entries wouldn’t.

A big concern of mine when submitting DICK MCBUTTS last year was that the organisers would see the bad version and immediately disqualify it as lazy trash, when actually it had taken months of effort and I was very invested in it indeed.

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85

I agree, and I would go further to say: right now the IFComp is in a really good place. The number of entries per year is stable at around 70 games per year after the pandemic outlier in 2020, the quality of games is as high as ever, as is the diversity of game formats and genres. That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad idea to try some tweaks to continue to improve the contest or to keep it fresh, but I also don’t see any urgent problems that demand a rules revamp.

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86

I would rephrase this as “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE don’t” &etc

I adhere to this idea in general, but suspect my application of it might differ in practice. I kind of think, like democracy, that a variety of opinions is a feature not a bug. Most especially including negative opinions. I try to interrogate those negative feelings and have something to say about them (so others can decide if my opinion holds water for them or not). In the end, I count on voting numbers to smooth out and integrate positive and negative opinions.

That said, if after interrogating things it seems my reasons are fully and uniquely unfair in some way, I will refrain. I did that once this year.

What kind of jerk would do that?!?!?!?!

This particular line of thinking resonates for me, FWIW.

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87

Survey completed!

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88

Okay, here’s a question which I expect to be controversial but I believe ought to be considered regardless:

Would it be better to have a smaller number of entries that everyone plays in their entirety?

89

The fact you pluralized entries means you are not sufficiently radical and will not survive the revolution. Every year we shall anoint an Author, who must channel their entire life essence into an Immaculate Work of Selfmaker, after which they will be slaughtered so they can’t bother us anymore. We will all live in ONE HOUSE THREE ROOMS and spend every available hour not wasted on survival thoroughly debating each aspect of this work, SocratesMax pleasuring in a perfectly pearly ovaline epistemic bubble of critical culture. After a year of debate, the work shall be so sufficiently planished as to achieve its Ideal Idea, which we can all think together. Then because we will still not be happy we shall anoint another Author.

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90

I mean, no matter how small the number of entrants, it’s definitely never going to be the case that everyone will play them all in their entirety. So the question might be better stated as “would it be better to have a smaller number of entries so that judges are able to play a higher percentage of them, and get further along in them, than they currently do?”

And as to that, I’d say not really? Like, I’ll defer to longer-timers, but my sense is that conversation around the smaller Comps tended to be less robust than what we’ve got now; certainly the number of reviews has trended up as fast if not faster than the number of games. And since we’ve had ranges of 40ish to 100+ Comp games over the last decade, it feels like we would have noticed if there was some major qualitative difference here.

(The follow-up question would then presumably be “if it would be better, how would the organizers go about making that happen?”, and I can’t think of any good answers to that even if I did have a stronger positive intuition about the first question!)

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91

There are many smaller events year-round that would welcome the support of raters and reviewers

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92

But consider a hypothetical situation in which there was even more interest in the event (which is arguably good) but a thousand entries to the competition.

Who among us would have the time and energy to play more than a tiny fraction of the submissions in those circumstances? We could have a hundred times more people interested in judging than we do now, and with a thousand entries I don’t think any one of them would have a better idea of what the best games submitted were. I don’t think we’d have any particular reason to think the votes any individual project receives would necessarily represent its quality, either.

93

Yes, in that hypothetical scenario, 1000 entries might be too many, since of course who among us would.

So far, thankfully, entries peaked in 2020 at 103 and has declined to 67 last year. So it might be more productive to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which we encourage more entrants to share their creativity with us and broaden our community.

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94

Authors are reviewers and raters, so an increase in authors comes with some (not 100%) increase in reviewers.

And with open reviews you do get a sense of reviewers swarming around the “best” entries. That said, more differing views are welcome.

It would be nice to encourage more ratings and reviews and I’m not sure how to accomplish that. I feel like encouraging people to just write something for the few games they play is good. We’re not all Mike Russo review machines, but we should not be worried about that at all.

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95

tbh I don’t know how feasible this would be. Participation in the comp is voluntary, for both authors and players. There are only a handful of rules people need to follow (e.g. deadlines, max entries, min votes, etc…). And we still bicker about them every year.

Restricting even further how to enter the comp will probably be detrimental to the event in the long term. I mean, if we have a numerus fixus on entries, would it be a first-come-first-serve type of deal? or the organisers* have to pre-choose the games (on what grounds/merits)? what about the entries not chosen/couldn’t be submitted even though they were completed? why would people bother submitting when they can’t be sure their project will be accepted in the first place? why would they bother participating at all?
* another thing to remember, these events are community run, voluntarily and freely. People give their free time to ensure they run smoothly, and they are most time/energy-intensive around the end of the submission/voting period (checking all entries to ensure they follow the current rules + votes against cheating).

I mean, you can look at other IF competitions and compare the votes. Even in smaller events, entries don’t get the same amount of votes (it might be close but there are always discrepancies). This is not an IFComp problem.

And honestly, I don’t think it’s an actual problem either. There are a bunch of reasons to why people don’t play all entries of an event:

  • they just don’t have the free time to play (IRL is always unpredictable)
  • they run out of steam at some point (it can take a lot out of you, especially if you leave comments/reviews for the author)
  • there are genres/themes they don’t enjoy/want to interact with (I’m not really fond of horror and steer clear from some violent themes personally)
  • they don’t like/can’t play a certain type of game (you don’t play a parser like a choice-based game or vice-versa, they both have codes and way of playing it)
  • they don’t like a certain type of engine (similar to the previous point, but also you might like all parsers but hate Inform for some reason)
  • or just because. You don’t need a reason not to play a game.

IMO, I think the IFComp has a good way of handling it: people can play whatever they want, as long as they vote for 5 games at minimum (and vote in good faith!). There’s always a nice range of games every edition, so people can pick and choose what pick their interest. And 5 votes is always better than just one or even zero!
Also lol, 5 min votes, 5 weeks of voting, 1 game/week. It seems like a doable thing, even for people with busy lives!

I mean… all talk about what is the best is imo all subjective. What I think is the best game, you might think it’s the worst. Even if we restrict the amount of entries and/or force people to play all games, this won’t change. People have their favourite and the stuff they don’t like.

Honestly, word of mouth helps a ton. Probably the most.
Sharing the comp in your circles. Talking about entries you enjoyed (outside of the Forum). Play the games with people/in a group. Etc…

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