IFComp Review Threads By Game?

Competitions IFComp
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In 2017 and 2018, most IFComp reviews were still on people’s blogs and personal sites, but for the opinions that were expressed on the forum (2017, 2018), there was a move toward having forum threads by game rather than by reviewer and I really liked that.

It felt more like a discussion, even if I think most people were still posting their thoughts first and then going back to read the thread. And to be fair, more of this was hint requests rather than reviews, but for instance the 2017 thread for Arthur Di Bianca’s The Wand has a bunch of review-like posts.

And then in 2019 (or 2020?) we started having many more reviews on the forum itself, and people just moved back to per-reviewer threads without (I feel like) much discussion or thought. So I’d like to open up this discussion again.

I do NOT think this has a single “correct” answer. It feels a lot like the shelf-order debates you see in librarians’ discussion spaces: obviously you want to be able to easily browse all the reviews of a single game and to be able to easily browse all the reviews by a single person. But the books can only physically be in a single place (and the software puts a similar limitation on posts) so you have to choose which is more important (for each library, in each situation).

So the question is, which order (per-game or per-reviewer) do we use the forum threads for directly, and which do we relegate to secondary things like the review spreadsheet, or table-of-contents posts or whatever?

If the main purpose of the forum is discussion, then I think we should try (at least some) per-game threads, but other people may feel differently… let’s talk about it.

Possible Advantages of Per-Game Threads

  • Feels more like a discussion
  • Lower-pressure space for small reviews
  • Nice to browse a bunch of opinions on one game
  • …without risking seeing opinions of games you haven’t played yet
  • Less awkward to comment on an older review (the thread is still about the same game, rather than having moved on to reviews of three other games in the meantime).

Possible disadvantages of Per-Game threads

  • It’s nice to browse a single reviewer’s opinions too
  • Might not want to interrupt conversation with another review
  • Might feel awkward posting a small review after a big/thoughtful one
  • Might not want to post another review if everything has already been said
  • More threads (because there are more games than there usually are reviewers)
  • Shorter/no thread for a game might feel like a more pointed lack?

I do think a bunch of the negatives could be worked around with conventions or building community attitudes around it being OK to do those things, but YMMV…

Further reading: I think part of why this happened in 2017 and 2018 was that Ruber Eaglenest proposed it in 2016, and quoted but not linked are several interesting comments from an earlier 2016 thread.

Proposal

So what if: when you wrote a (smaller?) review, you started a review thread for the game? If someone who writes bigger reviews (or more of them) wants to keep theirs separate, they could do that, but they (or someone else) could post in the game’s thread linking to each post to join it up to the conversation?

I feel like the spreadsheet is so spread out horizontally that it’s difficult to use for clicking through to find all the reviews of a single game. It feels a little easier to look down a column and find all reviews by a person. Though… you have to control-click or something to actually follow the link instead of editing it? So it’s still not ideal.

So I also wonder if some people who review a lot of games would want to put their reviews in the per-game threads and just have a table-of-contents post that links to all of them. I think anyone who’s a “Regular” can make their posts “community wiki” to let other people help edit it and keep it up to date (after posting, go to the bottom of your post, click the three dots, then the wrench, then Make Wiki). Edit: and interestingly, it looks like you can “Remove Wiki” the same way at any time. As it is, a bunch of people help keep the spreadsheet up to date and that works pretty well…

Anyway. Something to think about, see if you might want to try something different this year or keep structuring review threads the way you have in the past.

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the solution can be in something akin to symbolic link like the *nix filesystem ?
(and, seems, on IF-archive symbolic links are used (e.g. MS-DOS AGT IF are in both games/pc and games/AGT directories via linking)

That is, a review can be linked in both story’s and reviewer’s thread ?

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Hmmm, but how would you link them both? Unless you have double the amount of threads to normal…

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I think it would be nice if each game had an IFDB page (with or without dowload link/play-online option) and each reviewer posted their reviews both here and on IFDB. Reviews on IFDB is more long-lived and don’t drown when new topics are created.

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I would be down for discussions separated by work rather than by reviewer. I recall people doing this in 2018 when Erstwhile was submitted. I took a break afterward so I didn’t notice the switch back.

I also agree that we should ensure forum reviews are ported over to IFDB!

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I’m pretty torn on this, because I love the idea of more game-specific conversation, and it definitely just sputters along for a bit before being overtaken by the next thing in reviewer threads. On the other hand, given the way I review games bumping or starting threads for 70+ games seems exhausting, not to mention that I typically don’t read other reviews before writing my own so I’d worry I’d be throwing up giant blocks of text and possibly derailing conversation that had been going on.

I think it’s worth experimenting with, though, especially if the idea is to lean more towards doing threads for games where there is a fair amount to talk about (a thread for a buggy, slapdash game that’s just about bagging on it seems sad). I might still keep my own reviews in their own thread, and link or participate more informally in the game-specific threads.

(As for IFDB, yeah I strongly agree it’s a good idea to get forum reviews made more permanent there, though personally I like to wait until after the Comp is over to avoid potentially biasing folks who are just browsing or looking to play a game, rather than actively seek out reviews)

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For these reasons I’d be much more likely to post my thoughts here if there were threads per game. There must be other sometime lurkers like me who might want to share something but wouldn’t want to start a whole thread about it.

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Exactly. I sometimes want to post my thoughts, but I don’t feel like I write enough reviews or good enough reviews that my thoughts merit their own thread. I encourage Mike and others to continue having their own threads, and to perhaps link to their reviews from the per-game threads. But I imagine there are many people like me who would like to post briefer reviews.

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Yeah, I also worry about this. I tend to be a wordy reviewer and dumping a wall of text into a thread that has an ongoing conversation that I didn’t even read feels weird. I’d prefer to keep my ramblings confined to a thread where anyone who clicks on it has essentially signed up to hear them and can’t complain. :stuck_out_tongue:

I would love to have a discussion thread (in which no one posts formal reviews) for each game, though.

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I’m a big proponent of making threads for each game. The Wand is the game that really convinced me of this. During the year it was released, the authors’ forum had discussion threads for each game, and the thread for The Wand was an explosion of discussion and discovery. The public forum, in contrast, was practically dead; nobody really compared notes, which meant that the entire second half of The Wand, and all of its best puzzles, went largely undiscovered.

And yeah, if people want to write bigger reviews on their own blogs or in separate threads, they could still link to those reviews in the discussion threads. But sometimes it feels like there’s pressure for people to write “buttoned-up, professional” reviews. Encouraging people to talk more casually/informally about the games would be great.

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Under this proposal, would there be separate public and author-forum threads for each game, or would there be per-game threads in the public forum and per-reviewer threads in the author forum?

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Nice to browse a bunch of opinions on one game

It’s nice to browse a single reviewer’s opinions too

These are the main things for me. Sometimes I look in reviewers’ threads because they’re prolific reviewer, and sometimes I go looking for a particular game I played (or one I made).

Edit: I wrote a bunch of stuff that seems unnecessary. I just realized you can tag individual posts within threads.

If someone were to maintain authority over game title tags for consistency, and authors tagged each review with the game title, that would allow for very easy cross referencing while maintaining the current system.

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Another potential way to go: Post your review in the game thread with other reviews or wherever you want it for discussion. Then create your “All Reviews by…” index post linking to all of your reviews and place a link to each other message where you review a game with any additional commentary in between.

In the post where you reviewed the game, click the link icon and copy the URL and paste it on its own line in your review index thread - which should one-box the link to provide a preview (unless the post you’re linking is from a private category like the author forum - in that case you’d want to quote/copy the entire thing if you want it visible.) Pretend these links are to my reviews:

That way people who want to just read Mathbrush’s reviews have them organized and can read a preview and link to wherever they are on the forum, but the review can live somewhere else where discussion about the game is taking place.

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I suspect you’re over-estimating how much discussion there might be, and under-estimating this community’s ability to keep talking past long opinionated digressions :stuck_out_tongue:

But yeah, that’s fine: I’d be happy if we get any per-game threads at all so people have something concrete to see how they feel about rather than just empty speculation.

:person_shrugging: I hadn’t thought about that because I’ve never entered IFComp: I have no idea what the authors get up to back there :grin:

Honestly this whole thing was just “I liked that there were per-game discussion threads a bunch of years back, could we do some of that again?” and then I went and did some forum diving to make sure I wasn’t imagining things…

I had been thinking that a couple of people (IIRC?) did table-of-contents posts at the top of their review threads last year but I was too lazy to go dig one up for an example. But yeah, for some reason I’d forgotten about the boxed previews. And quotes. Being able to drop a nice-sized intro/quote from one thread into another really does make thread cross-referencing work fairly well, huh?

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There’s a general norm (though not a rule any more I don’t think?) that authors shouldn’t review each other’s entries in public during the comp, because it skates too close to telling potential judges “here are all the problems with my competitor’s entry so you can see how mine is better and you should give me ten stars and them one”.

But authors generally also want as many reviews as possible, so there tend to be separate threads in the authors-only forum for that.

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And Discourse is very good at not revealing content in a post or a category you’re not supposed to have access to.

For example, this link to a topic in the private Staff category won’t one-box. If you click it will tell you you don’t have access.

https://intfiction.org/t/testing-shared-drafting/62202?u=hanono

Screenshot 2024-08-14 at 3.16.55 PM

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In my experience, most game discussion happens in reviews, and the games that get singular “game discussion/hint” threads are the ones that are extremely puzzly and take longer to play or have multiple endings; usually a linear choice-narrative doesn’t need a hint thread unless it broaches deep subjects or structures that warrant discussion external to a review.

Arthur DiBianca games tend to get their own thread specifically because people need to puzzle through them and require hints.

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But that didn’t happen for The Wand! It had its own public thread, but people still didn’t discuss it very much. I’m not sure, to this day, if the full scope of the game is even common knowledge. So much of my own knowledge comes from the authors’ forum.

I’m not sure how you’d address this, really. It seems like the way people discuss games during IFComp is sort of culturally ingrained. Maybe dating back to the days when the judging period was more private?

Years later, the communal playthrough of The Wand in the authors’ forum is still one of my IF highlights. It was so much fun! I wish stuff like that could happen more often in the public forum.

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Oh, huh. I had to go back and look, because I thought the hidden second half did get talked about a fair bit, but it looks like people mostly only mentioned it obliquely.

David Welbourn’s walkthrough covers the whole thing AFAIK, so I assume most people who get stuck and check a walkthrough find out about it…

But… hmm. It does sometimes happen that people talk things through in public: I feel like 2019 was a good example of that, with threads for both Sugarlawn and Hard Puzzle 4. Both of those are highlights of my forum participation. But I guess those were both started by individuals making a strong push for a thread for that particular game: Dannii for the one and you for the other…

So maybe what we really need is more people to step up and start game discussions even if they have to talk to themselves about it for a while until other people jump in? :thinking:

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Sorry, yeah, I can see all the forums by default so sometimes it escapes me if they’re in the private forum.

That’s kind of a normal thing - the IFComp participants tend to be more thoroughly invested in all-things IFComp in general. For a while it was because the entry-rate exploded and we were getting 50 active regulars here who were in the Comp, so they’re going to aggregate attention where the most discussion is naturally.

That was sass going around “If everyone active in IF is in the comp, who’s left to judge?”

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