Looking ahead to a 2025 play event (your input wanted -- yes, *you*!)

[otistdog]

Many people enjoyed the Free IF Playoffs earlier this year, and 80% of those participating in the relevant mid-game polls said that one of the things that they liked about it was that the contest added motivation to play games that had been lingering on their wishlists.

The whole point in hosting the event was to promote the play and discussion of games, and I’m considering trying something similar this year. It’s much too soon to do another Free IF Playoffs (though about a sixth of the contestants would be new), so I’m looking at other options.

Some ideas that seem promising:

• The People’s Champion Tournament – This came up as an idea during this year’s tournament. It would basically be the same format as the Free IF Playoffs, but there would be a preliminary process for players to select the 64 contestants. (For ease of setup, I think maybe each player could privately send a small group of up to 3 or maybe 5 nominees, and those games with the most votes would be placed in the pool, using a lottery among tied games toward the end of the list if needed. A lottery, in which each independent nomination of a game yields one “ticket” for the drawing, would be used to select the 64 games from among the total pool of submissions.) [EDIT: Modified version of Rovarsson’s suggestion below adopted.] To ensure freshness, games that competed in the Free IF Playoffs would not be eligible.

• The Great Play Marathon – This would be a “competition” between players instead of games; a selection of perhaps 20 or 30 games (called the “field”) from which each player would play a “course” of 6 to 12 that they choose. This would be a longer event (maybe 3 or 4 months), with people posting their thoughts/impressions/reviews as they go, and various awards for players such as fastest course completed, toughest course completed, most useful reviews, etc. Games on the “field” would be selected randomly from among the top 3% rated games on IFDB, which should offer plenty of options for new choices to any one player (mathbrush excepted). Free IF Playoff games might appear on the list, but that shouldn’t matter for this event.

• The IF Olympics – The idea here would be that players would form geography-based teams, including one or more “at large” teams for those who claim no geography teams based on imaginary geography that draws on fictional polities found in IF, and each team would be tasked with selecting games to represent their zone. [EDIT: See discussion below.] (There would be a preliminary thread to organize the “drafting” of games, to ensure that no game is taken by more than one team.) Games would then compete in matchups across larger and larger regions to determine a world champion. [EDIT: See Piergiorgio_d_errico’s better suggestion below.] The structure of competition would be based on assorted “sports” corresponding to various sub-elements of a work, e.g. most evocative prose, best supporting mechanic, most surprising plot twist, etc. This option would rule out Free IF Playoff games, too.

Do any of those sound like fun to you?

Yes! I would be interested in participating as a player in…

• The People’s Champion Tournament
• The Great Play Marathon
• The IF Olympics

Note that I’m just gauging interest at this point. Timing of the event hasn’t been decided and would probably vary depending on the format chosen. (And no matter which idea wins out this year, feel free to discuss any below; they could be themes in following years.)

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

I suggest that instead of being based on geography (with all attached evils…), an “IF olympics” ought to be based on “sports”. That is, by language/engine/narrative/theme.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio

[otistdog]

Oh, I like that idea! In fact, I’m officially adopting it.

I’ll have to ponder ways to set up “events” to simulate a competition in a way that uses player votes. (Suggestions welcome!)

[@Hidnook and @SomeOne2, please update your votes for “IF Olympics” cast before the change, if you don’t like the new version.]

[rovarsson]

I voted for the People’s Champion, but I have additional thoughts.

@otistdog

I think maybe each player could privately send a small group of up to 3 or maybe 5 nominees, and those games with the most votes would be placed in the pool, using a lottery among tied games toward the end of the list if needed.

I became very enthusiastic when reading the first part of this. A number of games jumped up and down in my head vying for attention.
(“Pick me! Pick me!”)
Then I read the second part about votes, and my enthusiasm deflated considerably.

Why not pull the lottery part of that selection process to the forefront? Each participant sends in 3 games. All the suggestions are thrown into the hat, and 64 are picked at random.

Perhaps some would object that mean-spirited people could troll the entries with bad games. To which my answer would be: “Yes. Yes they could.”

And that would be great.

I personally wouldn’t sink so low as to purposely enter bad games, but in the context of such an event, I wouldn’t mind much either. I’ve played plenty of bad games that I got at least some sort of entertainment out of.
I also wouldn’t suggest any of my top 10 games. I’d go sniffing around for decent-to-good but obscure titles that nobody but @mathbrush and me (and perhaps two or three others) have rated on IFDB. Titles that most probably wouldn’t survive a votes-based selection, but which I wish other people could discover.

[otistdog]

Just to make sure that we’re on the same page: When I said “votes” in that sentence I meant that I would treat each submission as a vote for it. For example, if 7 people submitted game X as part of their nominations, that would count as 7 “votes” for the purpose of creating the initial pool of contestants, which would be subsequently assigned randomly to a multi-division ladder.

The idea was to ensure that each “contestant” game would have a fair number of proponents and fans in the audience, to promote player participation. Ranking in nomination “votes” would not be disclosed (at least, not at the start), and I’m pretty confident that the structure of the randomized ladder would add something unpredictable to the outcome of the tournament as a whole.

How about a compromise: Random lottery to select candidates but each candidate gets a number of lottery tickets equivalent to the number of nominations?

[rovarsson]

So that even a game which was only nominated once would have a (slim) chance to get in the eventual list. Not just the candidates that get nominated 4 or 5 or 10 times.

Yeah, that sounds cool. I was looking for a way to get some real outliers in the list.

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

because the “olympic sports” idea is mine, I’m obliged to elaborate more on it:

actually there’s a precedent, the very first IFComp, whose was divided in two “sports”, Inform (6) and TADS (2) with two distinct result lists, and this is the broad model I suggest; Today we have a much extended gamut of “sports”, on top of two broad category (parser and choice) and in the last spring thing was accepted two entries in borderline categories (political simulation and the good ol’ trek game) so I think time are mature for an “olympic” approach to this gamut.

But how to form the divisions (sorry for the EU football term) ? let’s start from the obvious top: parser and choice.

Under the first, the divisions should be, I hope, obvious: Inform 6, TADS Inform 7/10 and “others”; we can also have a rule that with a minimum but significant enough number of entries, a language get its own category (e.g. if there’s at least three, four, or five entries in Dialog, the dialog category is formed, else remain in the “other” category)
Personally I don’t think that we need sub-leagues (that is, for example, having Inform6/standard lib and inform6/punyinform or TADS/adv3 and TADS/a3Lite or even TADS/TADS2), because the coding challenges between them are very similiar, so are “the same sport”

I’m still a bit at loss on the other broad top division: obviously, there’s Twine, but I’m unsure of what else can be alongside twine as “choice language division”, and personally I feel that there’s enough library differences in Twine to seriously consider Twine/Harlowe, Twine/Chapbook and Twine/Sugarcube as sub-league of their own (that is, “different enough sport”, but I admit that I’m still exploring the choice side of IF.

on scoring, personally (and I stress, PERSONALLY) I think that the olympic spirit (“what matters is partecipating”) must be encouraged, and (over)competitive approach discouraged, so, my personal suggestion is limiting the scoreboard to the first three ones (“gold”, “silver” and “bronze”) and publishing only these three’s scores; but I think that “jury’s prizes” analogue to Spring Thing’s ribbons can be given to entries in “the group” (in the cycling sense: it. “gruppone”), meaning all other partecipants).

EDIT: I’m unsure on my opinion on sub-elements of a work as leagues: I admit that I have a very negative bias against certain specific elements, based on, to put it mildly, the divide between native and learned speakers of the most used human language in IF, but on plot, there’s definite precedents, e.g. ectacomp, and this can be an occasion for encouraging exploring uncommon plots, mechanisms and twists; so “thematic leagues” (e.g. time travel, exploring an eccentric mansion (I 'fess up, Hollywood Hijinx remains my favourite Infocom story…) and so on, IS an excellent idea.

this is, roughy speaking, my broad vision of an “IF olympics”.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@Piergiorgio_d_errico

Under the first, the divisions should be, I hope, obvious: Inform 6, TADS Inform 7/10 and “others”; we can also have a rule that with a minimum but significant enough number of entries, a language get its own category (e.g. if there’s at least three, four, or five entries in Dialog, the dialog category is formed, else remain in the “other” category)

Don’t the IFDB awards currently do this?

[otistdog]

@Rovarsson: OK, I agree that Lady Luck should have her due.

@Piergiorgio_d_errico: I admit that I was thinking of something a little different: A (tongue-in-cheekish) mapping of various Olympic sports to features of interactive fiction as experienced by the player. For example, under “gymnastics” there could be “Twistiest Plot” (like rings), “Best Tension” (like balance beam) or the like. Under “track” there could be “Fastest Ending” (100m dash), “Best NPC interaction” (relay race), etc. (I’m spitballing here.)

I wouldn’t necessarily want to map anything to the platform or the technology, just focus on the elements of the player’s experience. It would be hard to make any programming comparisons without seeing the source code, and I’ve seen many authors attest that even inelegantly-written games can still deliver solid interaction. (Though maybe that could be an event for games that provide their source?)

I think the nature of the event requires everyone to be able to see the results of player voting as we go, but I agree that gold/silver/bronze would be the outcome of any event. The various countries would accumulate a score based on the medals awarded.

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

Your vision is definitively interesting ! I concur and agree on this tongue-in-cheek categorisation of themes & polts !

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio

[AmandaB]

I like @rovarsson 's idea of an actual lottery drawn from suggestions. Everyone’s got some favorites that aren’t in the IFDB top 64. Have everyone submit a few of those and then do a lottery drawing.

[otistdog]

I just updated the top post with the compromise version of his suggestion, which I think will work well. Don’t forget to cast a vote for that theme! (and one or both others, if you like)

[otistdog]

Momentum seems to be gathering behind the People’s Champion option, so I’m starting to think ahead along those lines.

This would be a qualitatively different situation than the Free IF Playoffs, because there wouldn’t be nearly as high of a chance that each player would have played at least one of the two games in any early pairing. I think that to make this work, the schedule would need to be something like:

• January: Early fan registration and nominations. Each registered fan by a certain deadline can submit 5 games. (Not five votes; each fan can create only one ticket for a given game.)

• early February: Lottery held and contestants selected. Non-selected games (and the number of their independent votes) would also be announced, to give at least some recognition to those passed over by the hand of fate. Note that per the new formulation there is a good chance that several of the most commonly-nominated games would not be chosen!

• February through ???: “Quiet” playing period and open player registration. Maybe weekly featurettes to “meet the contestants” in groups of 3 to 6 depending on the length of the period. (Authored by @mathbrush, if he’s willing? Or maybe by committee of those who nominated them?) These would serve both as a reminder and to build interest. Division assignments would be announced either all at once at the start of this period or in stages as we went along.

• ??? through ???: Actual tournament held, using the same basic pattern as the Free IF Playoffs, but probably a base period of two weeks per round to allow more time for play of new games.

The overall pace would be slower, and not try to mimic the March Madness style of this year’s tournament.

We could recycle the mock-ESPN theme or change it up to something else, such as elections or debate club or [your suggestion here].

[AmandaB]

64 games is a lot. I didn’t have time to play many of the longer ones. Is there any reason why it has to be that many games?

[otistdog]

The fewer tournament slots available for games in the contestant pool, the more submissions are guaranteed to be skipped over by the lottery. See the proposed schedule’s “quiet play” period to help alleviate the problem.

As with the Free IF Playoffs, the expectation would not be that every player casts a vote in every pairing.

[otistdog]

I’ve been thinking over some possibilities for the IF Olympics theme. As Draconis points out, it probably wouldn’t be desirable to have events that gauge aspects too similar to categories of other events (such as the upcoming IFDB Awards). Something closer to the style of Spring Thing’s audience-voted ribbons seems like a better fit, only in this case there would be a standardized list decided beforehand.

The real trick is to find meaningful aspects of interacting with the work that somehow map to an iconic Olympic sport. Here are some initial thoughts for possibilities:

• Plot
  ** most inventive (long jump?)
  ** best reversal(s) (fencing?)
  ** best twists (rings?)

• Mood
  ** most skillfully-maintained tension (pommel horse?)
  ** most uplifting (high jump?)
  ** most impactful moment (shotput?)

• Style
  ** most gritty (boxing?)
  ** most pointed (javelin?)
  ** hardest to pin down (wrestling?)

• Theme
  ** most unified (synchronized swimming?)
  ** deepest concepts (diving?)
  ** most thought-provoking (archery?)

• Characters
  ** most multi-faceted PC (figure skating?)
  ** best dialog (couples skating?)
  ** best NPC integration (relay race?)

• Subjective Play Experience
  ** shortest meaningful experience (100m dash?)
  ** best pacing (marathon?)
  ** least friction (speed skating?)
  ** most thrilling (ski jump?)
  ** most chaotic (pankration)
  ** best guidance (equestrian?)
  ** most interesting journey (cross-country skiing?)

• Design
  ** best synergy (triathlon?)

• Other
  ** cleanest source code (weightlifting?)

My initial intuition is to have about 25 total events, with any individual game probably competing across more than one event. Does anybody have suggestions for additions or improvements for the event list?

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

I admit that I have jumped back and forth between the en. and it. wikipedia for figuring some sport names I don’t recognise (and I was surprised of the revival of the pankration, albeit is not (for now…) an olympic sport), but I agree on the list, aside that perhaps relay race is more akin to “best multiple PC” (which IS an challenge in coding) (disclaimer: I’m definitively partial, nay, partisan supporter, to The Den (my lone 10 vote…) but on “best NPC integration” the obvious alternatives are an actual can of worms, the US-EU divide is also about what team sport has merit, up to diverging in what is football, so I’m definitively at loss here. But if we find a team sport whose US an EU agree is a major sport, all will be fine, I hope.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

This all sounds pretty interesting and I’d be happy to write descriptions for the games involved.

Here are some thoughts about ‘People’s Champion’:

As for time, it might be worth having two different events (in different years), with really long games having a competition with fewer number of entries and shorter games having the previously-described 64-entry competition.

For instance, games like Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina, Lydia’s Heart and Inside Woman are all great games, but I’d expect a ‘normal’ IF player to spend a few weeks or a month to play each one and to either give up at some point or use walkthroughs/online hints.

[AmandaB]

I agree wholeheartedly with Brian’s suggestion. It’s very likely that looong hard games will be up against 1-hour games, and my feeling is that most people just won’t play the long ones under time constraint and those matches will get low numbers of votes.

Although this is a little problematic to decide. Aisle, for instance, is likely to be nominated by someone. Aisle can be a 10-minute game or a marathon game depending on players’ involvement.

[Hidnook]

My ideas for a list (didn’t look at Otis’s so we’d have more variety):

• Rhythmic Gymnastics: most surreal
• Artistic Swimming: best choreography
• Diving: deepest (emotional) dive
• Swimming: best genre switch
• Sailing: smoothest ride
• Water Polo: best teamwork
• Alpine Skiing: best downhill thrill
• Cross-Country Skiing: best long journey
• Ski Jumping: best leap of faith (creative, risky)
• Snowboarding: coolest style
• Figure Skating: most graceful execution
• Ice Hockey: best stick work (mechanics)
• Skeleton: scariest ride
• Speed Skating: best finish
• Athletics: best synergy
• Sport Climbing: best cliffhanger
• Triathlon: most well-rounded/cross-genre
• Boxing: best knockout (impactful moment)
• Fencing: sharpest wit
• Baseball: best curveball (twist)
• Basketball: best characters
• Volleyball: best setter-hitter combo (set up and payoff)
• Table Tennis: best back-and-forth
• Cycling Mountain Bike: most adventurous
• Cycling Road: most scenic
• Equestrian: best rider’s perspective (POV)
• Archery: best minimalism

Looks like we went in opposite directions: Otis started with awards, I started with sports. I didn’t go by popularity. I just took the entire list and did what I could think of awards for.