This is also why we vet games instead of just leaving it up to the author - you’re always going to read something you’ve written faster than something that’s entirely new to you! The most reliable way to get accurate playtimes is to have a number of other people play it which is not always easy for authors prior to submitting. (And clearly leaving it up to two obsessive bookworms also has flaws!)
It’s becoming pretty clear that the wordcount guidelines + volunteer checking assistance is likely the way we’ll go, but we’ll leave the poll open for now to continue to collect ideas. Thanks everyone for your feedback so far, and if you have thoughts to share on any of the other stuff EJ mentioned in her post (like ways to advertise) we’d love to hear them.
As a side note, this is a great time to remind everyone to put their playtimes into IFBD for IFComp 2025! This was a relatively new feature at the time the SGS ran last year but was still extremely helpful for us, and I’m optimistic that a year of regular use will make it even better! That said, the more playtimes are recorded the more accurate the final estimate will be - so even if you’re not interested in volunteering, adding your times to IFBD can still really help us out as well as improve everyone’s experience with the site in the future.
Yes, that’s still the plan! I just didn’t feel a lot of pressure to get the Itch page up in advance since the submission period’s so long. It’ll probably be up tomorrow.
I don’t mind the wordlimit just to try and make a clear cut rule, but I think the style of the game can sometimes really affect the playthrough times though (so just one run through the game, not including replays for extra content/paths). Like Grove of bones has players pretty consistently reporting playthrough times on ifdb of ~20 mins and is coming out averaging about 9.9-10.1 k words/playthrough via the auto tester (when reported as averages over 100 separate runs on different seeds and different rules on reselection of choices). 159 (ectoocomp) is ~9.8-10.2k words/playthrough on the automatic tester and seems to be ranging more out towards 30-45mins despite the tester telling me in theory the playthrough length by number of words should be similar, possibly because there is the possibility to retrace steps and go back through different paths, maybe some of the decisions are a bit harder to decide, some monitoring of stats involved, and the different structure of the game’s endings? And I’d actually agree with people playing these games that Grove feels like a shorter game, I was surprised when the auto tester told me the average playthrough count was theoretically fairly similar for both. If you look at individual runs, the games can move out both shorter and longer than the average counts, and the early deaths possible in 159 are probably “falsely” skewing the average count lower for that game as well, as I can’t tell the tester to only try again rather than restart from those points unless I do some reprograming of the game itself.
Games with lots of puzzles or need to hunt down clues often take me a lot longer than an interactive story that may be longer in length as well. Not sure that this can really be handled though as a rule in any better way than a word count cut off.
Gameplay can definitely affect the average play time but mostly to make it take longer than the word count would suggest, so if anything the word count guideline should tend to be overly permissive, rather than overly restrictive. (Edit: Unless I guess you have some sort of hub passage that’s frequently returned to and just repeats the same text every time so people aren’t reading it again?)
That being said, due to widespread opposition to the word count limit being an actual rule, it is in fact a guideline, and if your game is commonly reported as having play times under half an hour we will accept it even if it’s over 8,000 words per playthrough.