The IF Comp used to require authors to provide a walkthrough that would allow the organizer to quickly verify that all submissions were winnable prior to the public release of the games. Other bugs might make it through, but there would at least be a working path from beginning to end. In the event of a typo such as in your example, I expect that the author would be notified and allowed to resubmit if he could fix the bug before the actual deadline. If not, the game would be disqualified, and players wouldn’t have to deal with it.
It’s certainly better than allowing free updates throughout the competition, but I prefer that the games remain unchanged from the time that they’re first seen by the public until after voting is completed.
I agree with this. If they don’t already, comp sites should link to this thread on accessibility.
I meant this more as a general striving for greatness and not pointing at a specific person and saying “I want to defeat that guy.” Although I do think there’s an element of wanting to be as good as or to surpass people whom one perceives as notable and especially skilled. This is akin to wanting to beat Kasparov at a game of chess. I don’t see this as antagonistic or motivated by jealously, but rather that the person has become a benchmark for a certain level of skill to which one aspires.
I’d emphasize the “at that time, under those circumstances” element of my previous statement and liken it to a skilled boxer getting knocked out. I think that, with Taghairm, he completely misjudged how much his audience would be alienated by animal cruelty, especially a minute or two into a Twine game that up until that point had offered virtually no interactivity. The player is asked to skewer and burn a cat before having invested anything into the game, and, unsurprisingly, many people noped right out of there. It’s a failure that reflects an inability or unwillingness to engage an audience before challenging them. It doesn’t matter how profound your words are if no one is listening. (Consider the preceding in reference to your point 2.) If we average his two scores, I’d say that we arrive at a good overall assessment of his skills as applied last fall.
“His skills” requires some discussion of point 1. I would say “there are multiple skills that we could be measuring”. For simplicity’s sake, we project them all onto a single axis and call them IF skill, but I think that a simple comparison of a hypothetical Twine comp with a hypothetical parser comp demonstrates that not all comps that we’d construct in the realm of IF would test the same set of skills. These two comps would weight the individual skills that we map to “IF skill” very differently. The Twine comp would likely emphasize visual design, prose writing and interactivity design in the large (in terms of branching story), while the parser comp would emphasize programming ability, cleverness of puzzle design, and interactivity design at a smaller scale (exploration of an environment and object manipulation). So we have to interpret “better skills” with respect to what’s being tested by a particular competition, and we need to design competitions to test those skills that we’re most interested in promoting.
I largely agree with this. Bingo or Chute and Ladders would fall into the category of valueless competitions that I mentioned earlier, because they test an attribute (luck) that can’t be improved. I’d resolve the seeming contradiction with “outside assistance” by saying that, in those cases, it’s a team that’s competing, and it’s the team’s collective skill that’s being tested. But overall, yes, the rules are the important thing, and I thought that we were arguing about which rules (1) would be fair and (2) would test the things that we want to test. The problem is that this formulation assumes a unified “we” with a single will.
Yes, but if testing it prevents us from testing other skills that we value more highly, then it’s better that we don’t. (I’d also be interested in data about the rankings of revised games.)
The organizer is running a competition (see my earlier post about the Main Festival vs. the Back Garden), an event in which people compete for recognition and prizes. I conclude that, since a competition is being run, it should be a fair one, and so I argue against rules that I perceive as violating the spirit of fair competition. Although we can argue about what’s fair and what’s not, yes, I see the desire for fairness in an organized competition as self-explanatory. However, I’ll explain it (again) anyway. A competition is organized to test a set of attributes. If it’s not fair, then it doesn’t effectively test those attributes. That makes it not fit for its purpose and a waste of time.