I am pleased to announce the parameters of Event One of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction.
The challenge of Event One of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction is to create a game in Inform 7 with beautiful source code text.
What does it mean for code to be beautiful? Beauty is famously difficult to define. It is an entirely subjective quality, and therefore a very appropriate metric for success in the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction.
Code can be lauded for its elegance, and also for its cleverness. But is clever code beautiful? Specifically, is clever code beautiful because it is clever? Maybe. Sometimes. Is elegant code beautiful because it is elegant? That sounds more likely. Possibly elegance is a subset of beauty. Hmm.
Event One is limited to works composed in Inform 7 because Inform 7 code has a unique potential to be beautiful by way of resembling beautiful English sentences (as well as many other vectors of beauty), and also because the Judge possesses basically no qualifications to judge the beauty of code written in other languages.
If you choose to enter this Event, you must first sign up by following the instructions in this Google Form. Then, you must submit your Entry by emailing it to rcveeder@me.com from your Exposition-specific email address. You must submit your Entry before I wake up on the morning of Monday, February 3rd. As a gesture of benevolence, I will charitably interpret “wake up” as meaning “wake up enough to feel like processing a bunch of Exposition Entries,” which probably will not happen until 9:00 AM CST.
You may submit your Entry in the form of a .txt file consisting only of your source code text. If you do this, I will compile your source code text myself and format everything so that it looks very classy and professional when I make it publicly available on the Exposition web site.
If you decide to do something weird, or you compose Inform 7 source code text that will not compile properly in Inform 7 build 6M62, you may find it necessary to submit additional files in order for me to view your Entry in the manner you intend. I will make some small allowances for such aberrancies, but you should temper your experimental sensibilities with the knowledge that I am the sole judge of this Exposition, and I resent being inconvenienced.
The source code text of your Entry must compile into a playable game. (It is not necessary that the game is winnable or loseable or at all completable.) The Judge may choose to interpret this standard of playability very liberally—as of this writing, the Judge is thinking, if a game accepts input, and it doesn’t crash, the Judge supposes that qualifies as playable.
There are no constraints on the content or features of the compiled game. However, you can expect the Judge to play and inspect the compiled game while he is considering scores. However, the focus of Event One is the creation of beautiful source code text, so to a certain extent the Judge must disregard the quality of the compiled game when he is considering scores. However, if the Judge really likes the game itself, he may be fooled into giving the Entry a higher score on that basis. However, now that the Judge has raised that possibility, it seems like it will be more difficult to fool him.
I guess there are no constraints on any of the content or features at all. It would be understandable if this open-endedness left you wondering where to start. If you require a jumping-off point, I encourage you to take inspiration from any of these videos, all of which I consider very beautiful:
Sweet Dreams - Cardan Lifting - Witch Mountain Bridge - Wizard People, Chapter 4 - Wet Dream
Entries in Event One will be scored on a ten-point scale. There will be no ties.
Que l’exposition commence!