IF Derby, by Hella Deadline
I’ve been playing, reviewing, and rating the Comp for more years now than I care to contemplate, and while some thing have become second nature, I still do struggle with that last element when it comes to judging the incredible range of games on offer according to a single ten-point scale, especially where length is the primary axis of difference. Is there a principled reason to rate two games of comparable quality differently when one lasts five minutes and the other goes well beyond the two-hour judging window? Does it even make sense to talk about “comparable quality” when the difference in what a super-short game can do and be good at, and what a longer game can do and be good at, often yawns so large that it becomes a difference of kind, not degree? I dunno, man, it’s tough. But what I do know is that when it comes to these amuse-bouche style experiences, I’m more than content if I get a single moment of intense engagement, which could be an “aha!” at a clever gameplay trick, or a laugh at a committing-to-the-bit joke, or just deep appreciation at one or two haunting, poetic lines of writing. Even if I’m not sure how to score such things later, I’m clear that that’s more than enough for success in my book.
IF Derby confounded my well-honed framework, though, by offering two distinct experiences of intense pleasure. But before getting to those, I have to describe what’s admittedly a pretty baroque setup for a piece of micro-IF. See, this is a meta game that transposes the action of the Comp into a literal horse-race: upon opening up the game, you’re presented with an octet of game titles – some of which are recognizable riffs on real games or genres, some of which are pure, entertaining nonsense – each of which is assigned to a different, lightly-animated horse (the game runs in Decker, and makes good use of the system’s pleasing Game Boy aesthetic). You start with $500, and are prompted to lay some or all of your stake on the horse of your choice. To help make your choice more informed, you’re given a smattering of data, including the number of reviews the game has received, both overall and on IFDB, as well as the IFDB average rating, and the all-important length of the game. And then you see the race, and if your horse comes in first, you pocket the winnings and get to try again.
This is a pretty basic set of interactions, elevated by the way the names create a rooting interest (I was personally very invested in Manly Napoleonic High Seas Adventure’s success, and vacillated on whether it was worth taking a flyer on dark horse Flying to Sydney in Real Time) but still clearly the purest trifle. Except that somehow this trifle managed to make me smile broadly to myself two different times, for two entirely different reasons.
The first is because as soon as I saw the oddmakers’ sheet of data, I thought to myself “hang on, is this implementing Autumn’s ranking-prediction algorithm?” XXLINK. But I didn’t content myself with a laugh, I went and tracked down the original spreadsheet, extracted the formulas, and created my own Excel doc that I could plug IF Derby’s entrants into in order to see whether this helped my luck (which I confess had been quite poor until I took this step). I won’t spoil the outcome of this little bit of extracurricular activity, but I will say that it’s always a good thing when a game makes me create a spreadsheet, so it wins plenty of plaudits from me on this score.
The second is perhaps more in line with the game’s intended effect. I won’t spoil this one either – though for those who just played a round or two and bounced off, it’s worth going back and looking for something that appears slightly different in the post-race screen after you’ve been around the track a couple of times – but suffice to say that there’s a bit of writing that constitutes the game’s real ending, and while it’s as short, funny, and allegorical as the rest of IF Derby, I still felt like it had something real and worthwhile to say about the Comp, authorship, reviewing, and why we all keep going around doing this crazy thing year after year after year. If anything, that means I’ll have an even harder time than usual coming up with a rating – but believe me, I feel very, very happy to be faced with this particular dilemma.