I’d ballpark that as a cheat on statistical par with, say, a simple blackjack card-counting scheme (where the payoff would require a few hundred IF comps to be noticeable) [emote]:)[/emote]
Okay, I can’t dismiss that one at all. [emote]:([/emote] Well-spotted and slightly spooky.
That’s the sort of thing that bothers me about it. If your game is reviewed early enough, and you’re provided with transcripts to read through, there’s a very good chance you can update your game to remove whatever it was about it that people disliked*. If that isn’t cheating, I don’t know what is. As said in other posts, not everyone plays the games the week the comp begins. Allow people to update their games and a game played in week 4 might be a wholly different game than one played in week 1.
But fixing problems (implementing more nouns, improving responsiveness, repairing bugs, tidying up the game-logic, etc) and retro-fitting “to better fit with the zeitgeist of this year’s judges,” are two different things, really.
That strikes me as an entirely honest and positive application of the rule.
(Bear in mind, though, that I’m neither a judge nor a competitor and absolutely never will be, so my priorities may differ dramatically from those who are)
I think it’s time for something from the authors, in this thread.
Cheating is like stealing. Cheating is breaking the rules, doing something that they forbid.
What we did (myself included), by releasing an updated version of the game, did’t break any rule. We actually did something we felt COMPELLED to do, as a new rule would do to everybody.
I’m not saying I’m glad this new rule is in, as I stated a few posts back, still I’m not thinking I’m stealing to anyone in this particular case. It just was there and I used the opportunity.
The fact that the rule was out after the deadline (though I’m not sure about it— I’m quite sure I’ve read it days before the Comp started) should just put an end to the discussion.
The second point is that now this long thread is actually becoming punitive for those who followed a rule you yourself built up. The updated versions of the games were, up to a day ago, just updated versions of the games. Now, they are like a giant, red finger pointing at our work with a neon sign on it reading “look, this is a cheater, his/her game was a total ball of poo before the author uploaded a new version.”
I had an early transcript. I actually DID put some tweaking ingame to smooth the player experience (as tho pointlessly, as stated here http://emshort.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/if-comp-2011-andromeda-awakening/) but, as long as I feel it being awkward, due to rules one USUALLY would find in competitions, I can’t feel like cheating. I will NEVER feel like I was cheating.
Too bad, a lot of readers of this forum will think differently, now.
What I’m saying is:
Because, now, just following a rule THAT WAS THERE – we didn’t CHEAT – we gave a hard bonk on the head of our games and hardly they will regain their consciousness.
Sorry for the rant. But, uhm, well: try and look it from our perspective also.
You talk rather often about ways to keep the players interested. How to bring new ones into IF. It’s about fair (if not mandatory) to think about ways to keep authors interested also. [emote]:)[/emote]
Uhm, one last word.
Can experienced players/testers/writers or even iconic figures like EmShort or Zarf really be fooled by a rule like this? You mean a troll-post and a game with some mistake (although fatal, as in my case) could look the same? [emote]:D[/emote]
I’d have loved to have been given the opportunity for that but the first time I heard about the rule was after the comp had begun.
And for what it’s worth, I am an author and I still think it’s cheating.
Yes, I too was quite surprised.
It can’t possibly be cheating if you act in accordance with the rules, can it? The question is not whether there is a moral problem with an author who updates his or her game (e.g., whether that is “fair” or “cheating”), the question is whether this rule change has an overall positive effect on the competition. My gut instinct is that is doesn’t, but I can see the arguments on the other side. So count me undecided.
Look: no.
I live in a Country where avoiding paying the taxes is widely considered the right thing to do. Out Prime Minister is a tard* who did that and does that for hundreds of millions and has inspired a whole Country to think it’s fair to fuck the others in order to get a new 100 yard yacht.
BUT: the law in Italy goes AGAINST that. It frankly states one gets to JAIL if he’s caught stealing money from the state.
THAT’S cheating.
If the codex said “it’s ok to stop paying taxes” that would be a moral problem (the kind of we have here, now). At the moment its against the law. This IFComp says “it’s ok to stop paying the taxes”. And so I did. I feel this morally doubtful, at best. But I am NO F**ING CHEATING. [emote]:)[/emote]
Folks, seriously. Let’s look at what could possibly happen due to this rule (ignoring attempts at deliberate cheating for a moment, which I think at least in this year, we can rule out unless anyone wants to include Stephen into any sort of conspiracy):
Authors change their games based on every review they get, trying to ‘resolve’ all issues raised by making big changes. Their games will end up as an inconsistent mess, because they were not strong enough to stick to their own original vision. Since they only ever try to please the judge/reviewer who has already made up his/her mind (which is not necessarily the same view of the next judge), ratings will still not be great.
Authors use early transcripts and reviews to add synonyms for nouns and actions, maybe fix actual, small bugs and do other small fixes like dropping a small hint about a puzzle solution here and there. All for the better, I’d say. Out of the eight games I’ve played so far, this kind of change would only possibly change my overall impression of the respective game in maybe one case. That being because the game was virtually unplayable; from my short e-mail exchange, it didn’t even sound like this author had the skill to quickly fix things up (remember: the scope we’re talking about here is counted in few weeks) – after all, there must have been a reason for the initial problems. All the other games, while they would all benefit from improvements like this, I would not rate differently after such changes.
I also exchanged a few mails with Jamespking (if I’m reading this correctly that he is the author of Andromeda Awakening) and one thing I told him was not to try to make too basic changes in the course of the competition. The risk of breaking something as opposed to fixing a perceived issue is too big anyway. I think any sensible author will see that. If not… case #1 [emote];)[/emote]
FWIW, though I still think this rule is a great idea for the reasons I and others said before, I sympathize with David’s surprise at the rule having been announced when it was.
Still, if the rule is allowing people to implement more commands and synonyms in later versions, yay. I’ve got a couple for you when I get my review up, David. [UPDATE: That may have come across as more hostile than I wanted – I just meant that, as often happens in any game, I found a typo and some unimplemented phrasing, and if you were to patch them I think it might help the experience for later players.] And I don’t see someone retroactively tweaking their game to fit with the zeitgeist as a serious problem – wouldn’t it have been a lot of work to insert zombies into A Quiet Evening at Home?
Another anecdote in support of the rule: In the JayIsGames IFComp, which was set up to encourage constant feedback, I encountered a pretty nasty bug in Hoosegow where falling off a supporter effectively put you half on it and half off it, and also blew up the hint system. The authors fixed it, and the game won the competition – though it might have anyway, since many players might not have encountered the bug (it took a particular kind of failure to trigger it). I don’t think would it have improved anyone’s experience to force players to continue to deal with a potential game-breaking bug, except maybe for the authors whose games came in second place… and one of those is Sargent (another is zarf), so I’m guessing that he wasn’t too upset.
This thread is neither vehement enough nor unanimous enough to convince anybody that any author has done anything wrong. This is a good thing. Discussing the situation isn’t punitive, it helps people clarify what they want to do.
My first thought on this is if I had entered this comp, I would be on a total obsessive compulsive binge during the whole judging phase of the competition doing updates and fixes. While I wish I had one more chance in Spring Thing 2010 to fix some of the dumb mistakes I had made on low sleep right before release (a big gap after a quote in some text due to an out of place [paragraph break], etc)… there was a sense of contentment for me to say “There, it’s done. No going back now!” and then not really worrying about it for a month.
In other words, I have mixed feelings about it and that’s just my opinion.
Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction to it from a potential-author standpoint. And from a potential-judge standpoint, my reaction was similar to what others have voiced in this thread: “oh no there were already so many games to play, and now we’re looking at different versions?” But both of these are problems that are easily solved with some self-control on my part, and I think there’s potential in the new rule to help authors who would otherwise either spend the Comp in despair over a silly bug or who would submit the game and never look back after the Comp to tidy it up.
An author who submits a game with a game-ending bug in the first room could be mendacious, as in Zarf’s scenario, but it seems to me that any possible advantage of an extra week’s development time would be more than offset by the judges who assume the author is an idiot for having a game-ending bug in the first room.
Yeah, absolutely.
My answer is “yes”. [emote]:)[/emote] I do care about the deadline, but I also want the competition to result in good games. As the IFComp has gotten wider notice and more people outside the traditional IF community have begun playing the games, IFComp has in effect become not only a competition but also an outreach tool. The rule change and my approach to implementing it is my attempt to promote better games in the competition while not completely stomping on the competition aspect.
I can’t wait for the second round of game updates—and its very own six-page forum thread!
Exactly?
I’m fairly surprised there’s anything controversial about this, although I can appreciate that there are cash prizes and people are naturally eager to “win.” But from the point of view of a non-competitor, the games getting better seems like the best possible scenario, and I’d prefer that to happen sooner (when more people will be actually playing them and authors have a motivation to do so, i.e. during the comp) than later (in a “post-comp release” that may never actually happen because you get distracted by real-life and have no more incentive to improve your game).
As an outside data point, most indie game festivals in the outside world (I know this was/is true for at least Slamdance, IndieCade, and IGF) allow you to continue updating your game throughout the judging and exhibition process. If a judge or attendee plays an earlier, suckier version of your game, that’s your own problem for not getting the better version ready sooner.
As a player, I’m all in favor of getting bugs fixed quickly. As an author, it would be nice to be able to make some forward progress on the game during the Comp, and not have an enforced six-week stasis period where you lose momentum. As a reviewer, I simply downloaded the lot at the beginning of the Comp and played what I got, as my only “fairness” concern was that I didn’t want to play Game A early on, ding it for a bunch of bugs, and then later play Game B, which was just as buggy but had been thoroughly fixed by that point. I decided I was going to play and review the first release only, which dovetailed nicely with my laziness.
I think the risk of trying to make major changes in a game mid-Comp somewhat balances out the “unfairness” of being able to put a new version in front of (some) players. An example from this year that Emily pointed out as well: I’m not at all sure that Adam’s changes to The Elfen Maiden / A Comedy of Error Messages actually improved the game, despite his well-intentioned effort at maximizing political correctness.