IFComp '25 results

Competitions IFComp
1

I noted the lack of a debate on the results, and feeling that this lack of debate stems from a major ruckus I caused last year, I think that is appropriate that I open myself the debate on the results of this year’s comp.

The real surprise for me that a story manages to actually beat the customary “story designed for “winning” the last place”, but considering that seems to me (sadly I have judged roughly only 1/4 of the entries) the most ai-driven story, I guess that speaks volumes about the issue (which I think should NOT discussed in this debate on the results and scoreboard)

overall, the results are interesting: the “human condition” stories overall gets good placement, from 2/3 of the scoreboard up, and the italian-made stories actually got the placement which I expected for my entries (that is, half-scoreboard)

Having only played a fraction of the stories, I can’t say on what other surprises are around in the 3/4 of stories I haven’t judged because of major RL matters, so I pass the ball, the debate on the overall results & the scoreboard is open !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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2

I found it really interesting that the top eight games were all choice-based or hybrid this year! Usually I expect the top few spots to include at least one pure-parser game, but we had a really strong showing of choice-based entries this time.

It was a really strong year overall; there were some games I loved that ended up very low in the rankings, just because there were so many other excellent games they were competing with. You have to get all the way down to 66th place(!) before any game has an average rating below 5, and even the last-place entry (which became unplayable due to technical issues after the first week of the comp) had someone rate it a 9 in that first week.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen two fanfic games end up in the top 20 before, but that’s certainly not a complaint! I’m glad IFComp allows it now.

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3

Also, I believe we had five hybrid (not purely parser or choice) entries this time? The IFComp site makes it hard to search for hybrid games, but that’s a significant number!

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4

Below 6, or below 5? Clickbait at 47th place seems to have a score of 5.97.

Still, a very strong year

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5

Oops, typo. Yes, that should be below 5.

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6

The games I was most surprised by were Errand Run, A Smörgåsbord of Pain, and 3XXX: Naked Human Bombs, all of which I thought would score at least ten places above where they finally landed. (And while this isn’t strictly a matter of rankings I’m also pouring one out for Violent Delights, the banana winner of my heart.)

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7

Seconded, though I actually thought Smorgasbord would have been in like the 30s! But it was a strong year and there’s not much in the 30s that I don’t think belongs there, either.

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8

Josh and Daniel, thanks, this is a hidden but potentially serious issue.

I’ll explain: in Italian middle and high school the grading is in an 1-10 scale, and the passing grade is 6 (hence, I don’t noted the typo…) so, with hindsight is a cultural-based bias which can potentially affect up to 1/10 of the votes (there’s at least 3+1 Italian authors (and judges) which instictively consider 6 and not 5 the “passing” threshold, and 4 votes from people which instinctively use 6 instead of 5 as the central, break-even, value in judging, and I feel that this can be a substantial distorting bias for stories with up to ~20-25 votes (I’m not an expert on statistics) and there’s 8 out of 85 entries with number of rating between 11 (I’m not 100% sure if some of these are in the ~1/4 of entries I rated, is possible accessing to my voting sheet post-comp ?)

I’m not sure if I have explained well the issue, but I fear is something to take into account, literally…

Thank to both of you in pointing a really stealth potential issue, and

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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9

I think people use wildly different scales and scoring criteria even within a given country, so I doubt that’s a substantial bias. And given that it’s rare for any entry to have a standard deviation below 1 I’m sure it gets lost in the noise.

Also I feel like in broader video game journalism there’s a long-standing tradition of 6/10 being the “damning with faint praise” rating, so I’m not sure it’s even true that people see 5 as the break-even passing value. I certainly don’t.

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10

It must have been a very strong field this year. There are a bunch of games that I would have expected to place 10 to even 15 places above where they ended up.
Apparently there were a whole lot of good or great games that I didn’t get to. I only played 8 from the top 20, and, except one that I don’t understand ( * see below), I feel that all of those do belong there. (Yes, despite the harshness of my review, Saltwrack by @Antemaion too.)

Two games that I thought were sure of a top 20 or even top 10 ranking placed below that, like Anne of Green Cables by @BrettW , and 3XXX: Naked Human Bombs by @Kastel. For different reasons, I thought these were exceptional, and I will remember them both long after this year’s Comp.

* Many people must have had a much better time with The Tempest of Baraqiel by @nathanleigh than I did. As is plain from my review, I bounced off it rather hard. But I’m glad so many people enjoyed it so much and gave it high numbers. It makes me wonder if I wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time I played it. Or, as things go, this was just a game that didn’t jive with me and vice versa.

There are some works in the top 20 that I expected to get high ratings even without playing them. @radiosity 's games have been of very high quality in the past, and I look forward to playing his Comp-winning entry Detritus. I was too late to play The Promises of Mars by George Larkwright (no handle?), but from looking at it for about 10 minutes, I think I’m going to love it.

My favourite was HaWaSa The Wise-Woman’s Dog by @Draconis . Truly magnificent game. I’m so glad it took the Congeniality Prize! It put me in a similar vibe as According to Cain by @jnelson , the Miss Congeniality winner and overall 6th ranked game in 2023. A rich and living world, an intricate and rewarding spell system, and a whole lot of well-balanced (and sometimes delightfully devious) puzzles.

The underdog that I was rooting for didn’t place as high as I hoped. I found Pure by @playpurpur an enthralling and gripping experience. With flaws, granted, but also with a depth of vision and a darkness of atmosphere that dragged me along.

If anything, it’s clear that I have a lot of great games to look forward to. Thanks again to all the authors, and a round of applause for the organisers!

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11

I still need to study the results fully - I think this is definitely a year where you need to look at the full scoring, to understand the distribution of scores, and how good things were. The competition field was so vast, that even with a strong field (generally the 1-10 averaged score per game is extremely good) many that we would normally expect to place, say, in the 20s or 30s or 40s will rank further down the results listing.

I’m not surprised by the game that placed last, because it became totally unplayable so quickly after the competition opened. As a judge I tend not to play unplayable games, hoping they will be fixed! But it’s fair to expect that a competition game doesn’t have a fatal bug, and judges can score accordingly.

One thing that does pleasantly surprise me is how well some of the very long games have done. Again as a judge I’m limited in time, and can’t generally tackle games that are two hours playtime or more. The player-reported averaged playtimes on IFDB were a huge help to me this time around! To be fair IFComp uses a 1-10 scoring system, that means that games get scored by those folks who play them, even if it’s a smaller number overall. Which can be a bit vulnerable at times, but overall I think it works. And I’m pleased that other people found the long games and appreciated them.

As a UK person I’m sad that I haven’t played so many of the top ranking games, including two by fellow Brits in the top 10. Of those one was barred to me (without paying for a VPN) throughout the whole competition. Both are barred now, along with all of the other IFComp 2025 games, now that the games have moved to distribution from the IFArchive, whose games directories are still totally geoblocked to UK users. Hopefully a solution for that will be available soon, that doesn’t require all relevant UK players to buy VPN access. But that’s really a discussion for another place …

But I suppose I can draw up a list of those I really want to try out, once non-VPN access is available to me in the UK. I’ll certainly be scribbling down game names frantically, as I pore slowly over the competition results in the coming days :heart_eyes:

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12

You can use a free proxy such as CroxyProxy. I wouldn’t trust it for anything you actually have to log into or that otherwise involves you submitting information of any kind, but if you just want to try out the games then it seems a perfectly solid option.

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13

I also like Proton’s VPN service, which has a free tier that works for most purposes (just not torrenting). Since I’m not affiliated with IFComp or the Archive, I’m free to recommend these things!

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14

Opera also has a free VPN that doesn’t have very fine-grained settings or anything but is good enough if you just need to get around a geoblock on a specific country to access something via a browser. (I use it near-exclusively to watch Eurovision on YouTube.)

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