So, are you saying we could just call them all competitions (for the purposes of event type, anyway)?
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I don’t know whether I have a fully formed opinion on how to proceed with IFWiki.
Some thoughts:
Having fine-grained categories is generally nice because it’s hard to know conclusively beforehand what people (writers, players, IF historians) might use them for.
And removing fine-grained categories feels a bit as if one is unnecessarily removing information. (As if one were in a library and took the record cards from several different boxes and threw them together into a bigger box.)
On the other hand, in cases where a specific category doesn’t serve much of a purpose, and just leads to miscategorizations, or to people/potential contributors agonizing over whether something falls into category A, B, or C, then one might as well leave it out from now on, and/or discourage people from using it in the future.
As a player:
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I’d want to know which events are coming up for reviewing and judging/voting, regardless of whether it’s a comp/jam/minicomp.
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I might want to look for long and very polished games from current or past events. This might ceteris paribus point me more to the competitions than to the jams and minicomps. (But of course, that could only serve as a heuristic. High-ranking jam games will usually be more polished than low-ranking comp games.)
As a writer:
- I’d want to know in which events I might participate in the near future. It might be useful to see at a glance whether I can enter something I’ve already worked on (-> competition) or not (-> jam, usually). But I also don’t want to have to look in a lot of different places if I just want to know what’s coming up.
As a critic and historian:
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I’d want to know what terms are used (and were used) to describe events.
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I might want to gather knowledge about games which were made under specific comparable conditions, or something.
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I might want to find an event, which I only vaguely remember, by its category.
As an event organizer or IFWiki contributor:
- I’d want to know quickly how I should describe/enter an event in the wiki.
Maybe more people will chime in with possible use cases, so we can get a picture of what the categories can help to accomplish.
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Maybe? Winter 2023 TADS Jam / Comp ?
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There does seem to be a distinction between competitions and jams that doesn’t exist between competitions and mini-comps. So likely I’d keep the new Jam category to see what people put there, for now at least, but get rid of the Minicomp category.
It would complicate matters to let an event be called a jam and a competition though.
I think a “jam” is what the IF community calls “speed-IF” where the challenge is to create a specific type of work in a timeframe. These may be judged at the end, so it’s somewhat of a competition?
One issue is itch.io runs “jams” but doesn’t put any kind of mechanical parameters on entries (sort of by necessity) so site creators are free to enter any game on the site to any jam no matter when it was created or how long it’s existed. If you want to run any type of competition on itch, it’s called a “jam”. Technically what itch considers a “jam” is closer to a “showcase” of games potentially around a theme and more of a promotional tool, although many jam-runners do tend to run “make x game in x amount of time on this theme” and creators usually are like “I already have an existing x game on this theme” and enter it for visibility. I guess itch assumes runners will police their own entries.
You could group jam/minicomp/speed-IF together potentially with the definition “timed creation competitions”. “Jam” is a more pleasing term.
As opposed to “competition/showcase festival” (IFComp is a comp, Spring Thing is more of a showcase festival where judging is less the focus, EctoComp has a jam component) and pure “awards”.
So:
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48-hour Film Festival is actually a jam for amateur filmmakers to make a short movie with very specific parameters in 48 hours which are then screened in movie theaters during a festival - and then there are “best___” awards, but the focus is more the creation process and showing the work.
(Like Ectocomp’s “petit-mort” jam games) -
Cannes is a film festival which solicits entries from creators that have been made in the past 12 months, can have been shown theatrically but not online or DVD, and equally focuses on showcasing the entered works and awarding promotional clout to the judged winning entries for wider release, so more of a “comp/competition”.
(Like IFComp/Spring Thing) -
The Oscars and Olivier awards are pure award ceremonies - although without direct creator submissions - (Oscar noms are determined by an academy) considering everything already released during the year as a potential entry, and with no formal screening period, just awarding “Best____” of the year prizes with a lot of promotional clout.
(Like XYZZY awards which are nominated and voted by the community instead of entered by the creators)
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I’m guessing that no matter which definition we use, there might be some gray areas. To give one example: ParserComp 2015 had a limited creation time, and was described by the organizer as a jam, AND has “Comp” in its name. I’m not sure that more recent ParserComps had a limited creation time, though. So I’m not sure which category ParserComp (as a whole) belongs in.
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ParserComp has no time limit for game development. I just may not have been released previously.
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Is there any real need for the categories to be separate? Can’ t it just be “Competitions & Jams”?
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I think a competition is competitive (hence the name). It has rules, rating by the general public (or judging by a panel), allocation of winners and losers, and potentially prizes.
I think a jam is non-competitive. It may still have rules, but there is no rating/judging, hence no winners and losers and no prizes. Jams tend to be cooperative, rather than competitive and games may be unfinished or unpolished.
I can’t recall any IF competitions that ever called themselves jams, apart from the Text Adventure Literacy Jams, but they were clearly competitions. The fact that competitions may use itch’s jam hosting platform is irrelevant.
As others have said, is there any point trying to make a distinction at all? Just lump them all in together as competitions.and game jams.
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Yeah, this seems like the best approach to me - rather than try to impose a taxonomy on unruly reality and hope users figure it out and there aren’t too many edge cases, for most people interested in these kind of events a more useful system would be to provide a comprehensive list, and then document the individual rules and approaches on each event’s respective page.
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As I think @fos1 was alluding to, the Winter TADS Jam 2021/2022 was an IF competition calling itself a jam. And as @bg says, ParserComp used to be a jam calling itself a competition. Other than that, you’re probably right – IFWiki has nearly 500 competition pages, but the word “jam” only appears a handful of times.
Based on past use it would hardly merit its own category, but it seems to be used more now. We came up with Jam as an alternative to Competition to try to include events that produce games rather than winners (like IF Arcade, IF Progressive and IF Whispers), but maybe they’re not all jams either and we should have an “Other” category after all… 
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Both PunyJams were competitive.
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The event type also determines what the infobox says, on the actual wiki page for the event. Right now, for example, the infobox for The Annual IF Competition page labels it as “Competition (series of events).” Do we want the infobox to say “Competition or Jam” instead? Or are we talking about having a “Competition” category and an “Other” category, in which case the infobox would still say “Competition”?
(I see the text on this page could use some updating…)
Wikipedia defines a game jam as…
A game jam is an event where participants try to make a video game from scratch. Depending on the format, participants might work independently, or in teams. The event duration usually ranges from 24 to 72 hours. Participants are generally programmers, game designers, artists, writers, and others in game development-related fields. While many game jams are run purely as a game-making exercise, some game jams are contests that offer prizes.
Wikipedia is a stone. 
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You’re right, of course. I should have remembered that, because I won the first one.
Just checking back, I see that all the Adventuron game jams were called that, even though they were competitive. There was also the brilliant Cryptex Jam 2021, IF Speed Jam #1, Infocom Tribute Jam, Winter 2021/2022 TADS Jam and probably others.
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Each entrant could choose whether they wanted to have their submission rated by judges or not, and everyone chose to (except me, since we stated in the rules that organizers could not have their submissions judged).
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How would you describe the XYZZY Awards? I’d be happy lumping them in with Competitions, but are they really something else? Currently IFWiki calls it a “popular-choice award” but has XYZZY Awards as a sub-category of Competitions.
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Qui Bono?
I’ve entered a handful of Game Jams on Itch.io. Infrequently, because I can’t imagine achieving anything worthwhile in under four weeks (I have a day job). Jams are most often only a week in duration, or less.
I think the concept of Jams is there to develop the tooling and engine ecosystem around Game Development. It reinforces the offer of Game Development courses, that a new student can produce a work in a short space of time thanks to the maturity of authoring systems.
I can’t be about fostering complex storytelling, or nurturing longlived narratives, or there wouldn’t be such an emphasis on newness.
The archetypal superstar Game Jam entry is a creatively naive offering which maximally embraces the presentational opportunities of the sponsored platform. I don’t see how it could be anything else, given the short timeframe.
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The following 2024 topic is relevant to what we discussed above: Comp/jam/minicomp categorization.
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