No, you aren’t – it’s terrible on many levels.
They’re not classy and they’re not funny, but they’re not really reviews either. The Mean IF Reviewer is just aping MST3K, and then forgetting that that’s what he was supposed to be doing, and then just goofing off and ranting. I wouldn’t say it’s contributing anything to society, but the blog isn’t the problem with IF criticism any more than Crow T. Robot is the problem with film theory.
There are some actual IF reviewers, though, who seem more focused on wowing us with their prose and acid wit than communicating useful information to the reader, and their scores get counted in competitions. I don’t want to name any names, because this is a public forum and I don’t know who is whom and I don’t have the URL on me at the moment.
(Hey Mr. Patient. I checked out Pissy Little Sausages. It’s got too much cussing for my taste but that’s just me. I guess I thought I’d let you know that I looked at it though. Thanks.)
Enh. I don’t think there’s a problem with reviewers – there are reviewers who err on the side of cruelty, sure, but there’s no shortage of reviewers wearing rose-tinted glasses you could weld with, and there are reviewers who go above and beyond to be diplomatic and constructive, even to things that don’t really merit it. This is what spectra look like. You’re not obliged to read reviewers; I personally haven’t bothered to look at Mean IF Reviews (because what would be the point?)
I agree that there’s not much value in Mean IF Reviews and it’s kind of sad that it exists. I think Pissy Little Sausages strikes a more pro-author note even if her criticisms might sting all the more for being hilarious. I want to like her site less than I do, but Jenni’s an excellent writer which makes that position difficult.
IMO the community does a good job of writing high quality reviews of good games and there are plenty of jerks that enjoy roasting the truly terrible ones. What’s not clear to me is that there’s any point in flaming a half-finished game or its author; clearly the creator doesn’t care, so why go to the trouble?
But there’s a relatively broad swathe of mediocre games by promising and talented authors that don’t really get the kudos they deserve. I mean, it takes a fairly serious commitment just to turn out an IF title that is playable with some fun bits sprinkled among the rough patches. A good chunk of IF Comp titles fall into this category: the ones that place from 5-15 in a given year. Many of my favorite IF memories came from this group, and it’s no coincidence that my IFComp scores diverge wildly from the final results if you exclude the top three.
I figure that anyone who spends the time to make an IF game could have finished an indie platformer or roguelike in one-tenth the time and seen more players and more positive feedback for their trouble. Those genres are flourishing despite a similar lack of commercial prospects. It doesn’t feel like IF is doing quite so well. In terms of support for the programming and design aspects we are arguably up there with anyone, but it seems like that support evaporates once the game is released. You can ask as many newbie programmer questions as you like through the process, but woe betide the poor fool who releases a game with portable scenery and dares to read the reviews.
I don’t know what the answer is but maybe it involves fewer comps and more jams, where the point is just to create something cool for a community that likes to play IF.
How would jams differ from SpeedIF, exactly?
This is probably accurate and I probably haven’t read enough of the relevant material. I don’t understand “welding with rose-tinted glasses” though.
Oh now I get it!
That’s a good question. My perception is that the people who create SpeedIF are nearly all people who frequent IFMud, with the result that the events have tended to feel rather elitist and exclusive. Anyone can play them but if you weren’t on IFMud you aren’t in on the joke (whatever the joke might be).
The exception to that is the recent SpeedIF Jacket 4 event - probably because it was announced here and promoted here, and had games written by people I know from the forums. I really liked that format and I would love to see more events like it.
Would it be as successful without as many A-list IF authors participating? Hard to say. But I guess SpeedIF and IF jams are probably the same thing once you get past the social anxiety component.
That wasn’t ever the intention, really; the issue was more that we never really thought that SpeedIF was a big enough deal to be worth promoting all that hard. (And with a few exceptions, there’s not really a joke to be in on: SpeedIFs are incomprehensible to everyone. But they do lose something if you weren’t part of the event, I agree.)
Yeah, it was really nice to see games from people outside the MUD-regular crowd; any Speeds I run in future I’ll definitely cross-promote, and I’ll encourage other folks to do the same. I totally agree that SpeedIF and similar things have a valuable function when it comes to producing workable games in a low-pressure context that still get a little bit of attention; but I think the functional overlap between them and comps is fairly small, even with two- or three-week Speeds.
There’s been some talk lately about how we could really use a better mentoring and/or collaboration system than is in place at the moment, as a way of building support for promising-but-flawed authors in the aftermath of comps; it’s kind of hard to envisage a model that isn’t trivial, isn’t patronising but isn’t I-have-this-cool-idea,-do-all-the-work-for-me-please. We have a really good grasp of how betatesting works, and when people take advantage of that system it can do a huge lot of good; but betatesting has its limits.
First of all, it restores my my hope in the universe that other people don’t like Mean IF Reviews either. But dfabulich linked to it and called it good; the IFWiki 2011 page links to it by name so it looks like a real review. Why, if everyone agrees they’re not a real thing?
This is similar to my experience; when I’ve judged the TVTropes Writing Contests, we’ve gotten as many as 30 people signing up and fewer than 10 final entries, so it’s not really exaggerating to say that everyone who submits a story is a winner because they’re ahead of two-thirds of the entrants. And, as I tell the first-time writers and high schoolers, there’s implicit respect in having a contest with no categories based on age or experience and thereby saying that even beginners have the right to be treated on a level with experts.
Nevertheless, there’s extremely little incentive to complete anything that’s likely to garner nothing but scorn, and any movement that heaps criticism, solicited or unsolicited, on newbies is going to stay very small indeed.
I’ve been meaning to revise the betatesting site at some point, maybe it would be a good idea to add code review as one option alongside gametesting and proofreading?
They might not be good reviews, but I don’t think anyone argues that they aren’t actually reviews. I think IFWiki takes a neutral role of just cataloguing information just like they list even games that are obvious jokes, trolls or attack pieces.
code reviewYes, please.
I have some other suggestions.
For contests, first, anonymity. Obviously wouldn’t work for XYZZY, but all other contests ought to be anonymized. One hopes favoritism isn’t an issue, but there’s no reason to solicit it.
Second, why does every contest need to have open judging? Why not have contests judged by a small number of experts with a history of providing fair, helpful reviews?
I also had a terribly good idea about IFDB. On DeviantArt, your gallery is split into two sections, the main gallery and the scrapbook. The former is for finished artwork; the latter is for sketches, unfinished pieces, and whatever else. It doesn’t show up on your homepage or in news feeds.
How about something equivalent in IFDB? Have a section where you can post games that you want to make publicly available for whatever reason, but don’t want to be evaluated as completed, serious works.
Belatedly, Victor has described my own feeling about this. I was disgusted by the “author, kill yourself” line (and the concept of Mean IF Reviews doesn’t appeal to me much either), but I don’t feel there’s much to be gained by providing free advertising on my blog by complaining about this behavior. It’s more likely to gain readership for these people than to pressure them to stop – if anything, the traffic bump might feel like an incentive to keep going. This shouldn’t be read as tacit approval, but more as weary acknowledgement that calling out trolls on the internet rarely produces a desirable result.
So I think the best bet for cultivating a warmer community spirit is to provide more of the positive content. I’m all for looking for ways to provide more support to authors, as well as alternate ways of showcasing games. (There used to be, 10-ish years ago, more of a niche for contests/anthologies with pre-named judges: the IF Art Show ran that way, as did a few minicomps. That could happen again, if someone wanted it to.)
Just for the record, this topic is the first time I have ever heard of Mean IF Reviews. It – well, let’s just say that I don’t see any reason to ever write something that is “mean-spirited”. Even a good rant is good precisely because it is not mean-spirited.
Also for the record: we have been bashing the person who wrote “author, go kill yourself” quite heavily. That may well be deserved. But perhaps this person says “go kill yourself” to his/her friends all day, as a piece of criticism that has lost its original meaning; in which case the blogger’s fault is not thinking about different social contexts, rather than being an ass. We don’t know, and my purpose in picking that example was not to eternally condemn this particular blogger to the fiery pits.
I know that I have written reviews which I was ashamed of later; Attack of the Mutaydid Meat Monsters comes to mind. What’s there is the revised version; the original was much worse. I wrote it late at night, and felt terrible about it the next day. Luckily, Duncan is a really great guy who didn’t hold it against me.
Sounds good, though perhaps it should be in a thread not called “Screw IFComp”? [emote]:P[/emote]
One has to find a way to make a difference between authors who want constructive criticism, and authors who are just fooling around. We know from experience that there are always some people around who intentionally release bad stuff just for the fun of having other people be irritated by it; and it can sometimes be hard to distinguish serious-but-not-yet-very-good authors from these “jokers”. (One of the very first IF reviews I ever wrote was of Paul Panks’s Ninja. Had I known Panks, that review would not have been as harsh and indignant as it in fact was.) Nobody, after all, wants to be wasting time on the jokers.
I don’t think this will really solve the problem – it’s not the scores that are an issue, it’s the reviews. And you can’t (and shouldn’t) stop people from posting reviews.
This I very much like. And I think it can be applied to contests too. One nice feature of the JayIsGame IF comp was that it allowed rolling updates, so bugs weren’t baked in for the duration of the contest; if someone hit a bug the author could fix it. I think this improved the experience both for the (often very new) authors and for the players, who didn’t have to deal with the bugs. – And it’s not just the new authors; I ran across a bug in Hoosegow.
If that’s true, you can expect a platformer from me by Christmas. (Seriously. But I doubt the 1/10 bit, and more realistically expect it to take just as long.)
I think for something like Mean IF Reviews to work, the reviewer needs to be at least as sharp and clever as the material he’s attempting to skewer. He isn’t. Jenni is. She also skewers with what appears to me to be affection. I’d be honored to be reviewed by her, even if I came out looking very much the worse for wear.
Hey, we could have a SpeedPlatformer event. Write a game in 12 minutes!
Code review’s good; it’d be nice if there was a specific check-my-English option for non-fluent second-language authors; and I think it’d be good if there were options for writing help that were stronger than proofreading.