So, I think that would be against the spirit of the showcase. It sounds like it’s to give games a second chance to be seen where they may otherwise have been missed amongst all the bigger games released throughout the year.
Here’s an idea. itch.io has metadata for Average session duration. As it’s being run on itch.io, if the average session duration is About a half-hour (or less), then it would be elligible. I think most of mine are About an hour, simply because there isn’t an option for About two hours and A few hours generally seems too much.
@mathbrush helpfully tags his reviews with his estimated playtime, and a fair number of the 15-30 minute ones are parser games (I see recent ones include A Thing of Wretchedness, Creative Cooking, a couple EctoComp games…) So there are certainly more short choice games - even beyond the fact that there are more choice games, period - but I think there are definitely some parser authors who might want to enter the jam!
I think that will prove impossible to police as the Comp grows in age and notoriety. Are we supposed to unknow about it if we write a short game next year? It will impact the medium simply by existing. And I think that’s okay.
In point of fact the terminology I used wasn’t “play” or “read”, it was “complete a playthrough”. And parser games are still composed of text, therefore reading speed still affects how fast they can be completed. (So do other factors such as the difficulty of the puzzles, but the same can be said of many choice games.) There are corners of the parser world that skew towards longer games, just as there are corners of the choice world that do, but short games in both formats exist. There were a number of parser entries in the Single Choice Jam that would qualify, for instance.
The kinds of games that can be done at this length may not be to everyone’s tastes, but if the event is not of interest to you, you are not at all required to participate. It’s fine if not every event is for everyone.
ECTOCOMP’s got a bunch, yeah. Zombie Eye Campfire Tales immediately comes to mind. I got the complete experience in about ten minutes.
Labyrinthine Library was supposed to be about a 20 minute experience, but after spending a long time planning out the puzzles on paper, I think we misjudged how hard they were to newcomers.
I would definitely say some of the mini parser games in ectocomp would be playable through in less than half an hour (if you don’t get stuck anywhere )
Yes, it is quite subjective for parser games. @joshg completed “Magor Investigates” (IFComp game) in 22 minutes. @vivdunstan used less than thirty minutes too. But the author labeled it 1,5 hours which to me was a mistake but it is very hard for authors to estimate due to puzzles. But I think most experienced parser players could solve it in less than 30 minutes so to me that game is eligible.
Good suggestion. It took me a lot longer when I was play testing, but the final game is a lot more “on rails” and better hinted, so I could imagine that being completed in 30 minutes if you follow the obvious path without examining everything.
Gauging the playtime of a traditional parser game with puzzles is always tricky and any assessment about it is going to be questionable. We don’t have a yardstick that is generally acceptable for it like we have the average reading time for static fiction. I think If we measure the playtime of such a game from start to finish for many players and average them, the deviation from the average would be so big that the mean value would be meaningless.
A more objective measure like typing a perfect walkthrough, would make a game like Advent440 completable under 15 minutes. At about 170 rooms and 80 nontrivial interactions, no sane person would claim that it is a short game. One could devise a more complex formula that takes into account the size of the game in rooms, the number of non-trivial interactions, the number of puzzles, Zarf’s difficulty rating, etc. to work out a definite answer. Good luck getting an agreement on such a formula.
That leaves us with only one option, eyeballing. And that is what we do and is subjective to the core.
Eyeballing is perfectly acceptable! As @EJoyce said:
That said - the whole purpose of this competition is to celebrate a type of game that typically gets short shrift (heh) in the usual IF competitions. Longer games, regardless of type, already have several comps where they can shine, so anything “left out” of this comp should be able to find a home elsewhere.
This is a really cool idea–personally I feel like when judging e.g. IFComp games, with the number of entries, it’s easy for shorter works to get lost in the shuffle. Revisiting gives them some “breathing room”. Looking forward to seeing what authors choose to showcase.
I should also say, I think this is a great idea. I enjoy judging ECTOCOMP because my schedule tends to be a mess this time of year, and it’s nice being able to play through bite-sized works in between other responsibilities.
This is exciting! Looking back on the year in games is always fun, and I can think of a bunch of excellent short games from 2023 that deserve more attention.
I don’t want this discussion to take up too much of the air in the thread, but I’d like to explain the reasoning behind our use of estimated playthrough time as the criterion to qualify for this comp.
We discussed using in-game word count (i.e. excluding code) as the criterion, which would have been more objective, but we ultimately didn’t go with it because we thought that would be unfair to parser games, as the count would be more of a pain to get. I’ve done it for the Lady Thalia games by find-and-replacing any text inside angle brackets with nothing—though that’s not quite accurate because it cuts out the link text as well—but imagining doing it for my Inform 7 games gives me a headache.
We ultimately settled on going by play time because IFComp and Spring Thing already make entrants categorize their games that way, so we thought it would be something that authors were already accustomed to doing, and they may indeed have already done it for the games they wanted to enter.
In addition, since most of the games being entered have already been released, authors have had some opportunity to get feedback on how long a playthrough takes, as that’s something that is included in reviews with some regularity.
We are of course aware that it varies somewhat by player, which is why (as stated) we’re not going to be huge sticklers about it.
Aha… that is fairly ironic in hindsight, no? Regardless, I have complete faith in you two. This is going to be a cool showcase and I can’t wait to see what folks rustle up.
but please wait until the post-comp release is, indeed, released.
)
