Ok, so as the title says. Curious in general and with regards to my own games. I think I have some learning to do here! So here I am (no complaints here, please don’t get me wrong, I’m genuinely interested. Can’t learn if you don’t ask ) I got the impression that some players were slow/reluctant to pick up my IFComp game, but I also noticed mine’s the only one without a single vote in ectocomp so far as well and it’s had about 20 visits total from ectocomp, so kinda a pattern forming.
Obviously early days and there’s a lot of games sitting on 1-2 votes so it’s far from alone there, but there’s also games with 8-20 so there seems to be a bit of a jump between games that get a lot of attention early, and those which do not. So, what do you look for when deciding which comp entries to play? (And you can be as critical as you like if you want to get specific with mine, or just as a general non-specific what you would or wouldn’t look for.)
I haven’t time to play Ectocomp games at the moment, so I went and had a look at the grid. From the outside, your games appear to me to be in every way as appealing as any of the other scores of games. I find your blurbs enticing, though they don’t tell me if it’s a parser game or choice-based game – but almost none of the blurbs do. If I’m short on time, I look for parser games first because I’m more interested in them, but (a) that’s me and (b) I think numerically this is not the majority approach.
So unless your games are especially long (haven’t tried them) or truly terrible (joke - I doubt it) I’m assuming it’s just chance/maths. Someone has to be the last game voted for in every competition. Today it’s you. There’s a month to go. There are also people who’ll play every game who’ll inevitably come to yours at some point, whether early in the run or late.
Well it could be, not counting anything out at this stage . No, the Grand Guignol game isn’t particularly long. Thanks for the feedback by the way .
Anyways all good. I’m not overly stressed about it, was just curious what might be going on.
I’m happy to hear what is generally attracting people in even if it’s not specific to my game.
I didn’t look at the list of authors until last night. I had been going through low rated games one at a time and saw yours and was surprised it wasn’t done yet. I posted in discord:
that just leaves jacic’s game. I wonder why it’s not rated yet? Jacic always makes very short, well-written choicescript games
(And I meant very short in a positive way to express that they’re not intimidatingly long 1,000,000 word games like some Choicescript games).
When I tried yours close to midnight last night, I saw that it mentioned stat conservation, so I figured it must be relatively long. I also used a technique I sometimes do to estimate the size of choice-based games where I click options really fast without looking until I get to the end. I reached an exploration hub that I couldn’t easily get out of, so that made the game feel substantial. Soon my mind I have classified it as “looks awesome but I have to set aside a hefty chunk of time before I can play it”.
Thanks @mathbrush! Always appreciate hearing your thoughts . I may have accidentally set expectations about the length, especially with the comment about stat conservation. (I should remember than CSGs tend to have a reputation for generally being very long). I think from memory it’s only about 25k (incl code) give or take, although it possibly could have done with being a bit longer. I’ve had some extra thoughts since I “finished it”. Always the way .
Anyway, absolutely no pressure on anyone (including you!) to play or rate it, I was starting to wonder if there was something unappealing about the way I was presenting games I could work on, but it might turn out to be a length expectation or just random things especially given the high number of entries this year .
I think shorter games are getting the earlier attention. Source: my own choices of what to play so far, haha. It just feels right to start with lower-commitment games before diving into some of the longer GGs. I only just started a game that’s long enough I wasn’t able to finish within 40 minutes.
I also know as a reviewer that I’ll probably sit with my experience of a longer game before I give it a rating or review. I’ll want to think/talk about it, maybe look for reviews from other people to see if they interpreted/experienced anything differently. It’s a slower process for longer games, at least for me; even after I play I’ll probably give it some thought before I assign numerical value. (I hate reducing creative effort to a number, tbh, so I tend to put it off anyway, and that goes double for longer games.)
It’s early days, too, and I’m sure at least some people had Halloween events that took up that first weekend. My sense is that the longer games will take a little more time to get more attention.
PS - Before posting the above I realized I should check which game is yours, and it’s one of the two I’ve got open in my browser. Happy to say that I’m genuinely excited to play it (I love merfolk horror), but since it’s text heavy and had a resource-management element I wanted to give it a little more time and make sure I was in the right mood, and that just didn’t happen this weekend. I’d guess at least some other players have the same approach.
This may not be at play here because your LPM game doesn’t have a ton of ratings either, but I will say that when one person submits multiple games to a comp, once I’ve played one game of theirs, I will deprioritize the others a little, because especially as someone who is not just a judge but a reviewer I want to spread the love around and make sure my limited time and energy is reaching the most people and not just the most games.
If one or more of the additional games has a premise that intrigues me and I liked the first game I played/like the author’s work generally, I will try to get the additional game(s) in towards the end of the comp when my priorities switch from reviewing and spreading attention around to rating as many games as possible, but I don’t always quite manage it. (In IFComp, for example, I worked in Penthesileia in my last week rating frenzy but still haven’t gotten to Fantasy Opera.)
For me it varies a lot by comp. ECTOCOMP has a way to see which entries have the least votes, and I tend to use that to sort them, because the scoring algorithm heavily penalizes them based on that. IFComp doesn’t show the vote numbers (and doesn’t have that penalty), but does show estimated length, so I’ll pick based on how much free time I have to fill. Spring Thing doesn’t do either.
If something sounds really good based on other reviews, and/or is by an author I know I really like, that’ll bump it up the queue. Nils Fagerburg’s parser-choice system is something I always try to play if I can, for example, because I like seeing new experiments in that area. And for anything except IFComp, I generally won’t run a native executable.
And then, past those heuristics, it all comes down to the names, cover art, and blurbs.
I play games by people I know first. I don’t mean “well-regarded authors,” though they may be that, I mean people I interact with regularly. I want to support their work.
After, it’s mostly down to blurb and art. And vibes. Near the end of an event, I might look for recommendations.
I guess there are some caveats. For instance, if I’m reviewing things, I’m not interested in writing the tenth review in a month of something.
I will not play parser games unless they have a good web version or else they work well in Lectrote. I don’t prefer other, custom interpreters, though that doesn’t apply to a lot of games.
Looking back over the list of IFComp games and thinking about which initially appealed to me the most, they tended to be ones that clearly conveyed a core gameplay mechanic (e.g. wordplay, deduction) that sounded fun to me, or that conveyed a strong sense of the narrative/characters that intrigued me in some way.
I’m usually out and about these days, so any game I could reasonably play on mobile is very helpful. I have played parser games on mobile before, but the way the browser focuses and unfocuses on the text input and then changes the position of the viewer can be so disorienting that I have to stop playing it. It’s why I gravitate toward choice games as my first choice, even if I’m fonder of parser games overall.
Okay, being jokingly flippant aside, it’s sorta true. I have authors whose work I have come to know and seeing a new game from them becomes a must play. I see games from people I’ve interacted with elsewhere and I’m immediately interested. I think it’s important to acknowledge that and acknowledge that it’s both unavoidable and okay.
That said, there are games and authors every comp that are entirely new to me, and I’m a sucker for a solid premise and blurb. That’s more likely to suck me in than the cover, frankly.
Looking back at previous competition years (IFComp, EctoComp, Spring Thing, Concours FI Francophone, ParserComp), I tried to find common characteristics in the games I chose to play and review first.
-Method of interaction (click/type) has become less and less important over the years. (I used to play parsers to exhaustion and then pick up a few choice-based games almost as an afterthought. Not so anymore.)
-Cover art doesn’t really factor in my choice to play a particular game. It may attract me to read the blurb sooner, but I don’t make up my mind until I’ve read all the blurbs. (Maybe a lingering sub-conscious effect of having noticed games with pretty pictures first may be in play, but I try not to let it influence my choice.)
-See above: the blurb. If it tells me about an interesting gameplay mechanic I’ll be interested. If I see the game is a genre I normally enjoy (SF, Historical,…) I’ll check it out. The setting of a game is immensely important to me (and closely related to the genre.) Drop a few words about a half-submerged ancient temple or the wreck of a space-station in orbit around Neptune and I’ll be hanging on your lips.
-Size: In every comp, I prioritise bigger games if there’s a way to get an estimate of the length. In EctoComp, I remind myself to play Petite Mort games because of this. I would miss real little gems if I didn’t.
-But thinking about all of the things I mentioned, there’s something that still goes above and beyond those for determining my initial response and eagerness to play a specific game: the title.
Grip me with your title and I’ll discard all of the above and happily dive into your IF-piece.
It’s worth noting that Sam Kabo Ashwell has a bunch of posts about IFComp blurbs. One talking specifically about how to write one, and several where he goes through and reviews a bunch of them.
First of all: writing blurbs is difficult. For many IF authors, they’re the most painful paragraphs to write in the entire process. Ideally, you shouldn’t leave it until the last minute. Think about your blurb as you write the game! Write a bunch of different blurbs in different styles to see which you like the most!
Secondly, writing a blurb is an art, and art resists rules. Very good blurbs can absolutely break a lot of these guidelines: if you’re already writing very good blurbs, you need no advice from me.
I’m a lot more likely to play a game if I can download it, since I usually play on my laptop on my long train commute. At the beginning of the comp I go through the list, download everything I’m interested in into a folder on a mostly vibes-based basis, then I can open that folder and pick one at random to play. Though somtimes I’ll read an interesting review and add that game to my to-play list.
It depends on time as well. For EctoComp I know I have a lot of free time this month and many entries are short, so I have downloaded every downloadable English game (including One Fifty-Nine and Find and Keeper as of this morning! Thank you for adding those).
For bigger comps or when I have less time, I prioritise my favourite genres (mystery, fantasy, wordplay) and also interesting blurbs. I don’t consider cover art much.
I look for polish. Sometimes covers and blurbs have a “slapped together” quality that makes me worry that the games themselves will share the same quality.
Sometimes authors will also over-explain themselves in blurbs, announcing that “This is my first game!” or “I hope you enjoy it,” etc. I was guilty of this myself when I first released games into competitions, but I have come to recognize it as a warning sign. It often means that the author doesn’t think the game can speak for itself, that the game must be preemptively contextualized and/or defended, and if the author thinks this… the author is usually right. Not always, but usually.
Blurb brevity. Rather than a warning sign, that’s a selling point. The ability to quickly and confidently summarize/sell a game. If a blurb rambles on and on for many paragraphs, I worry the game will also ramble. If a blurb is neat and tidy, I think to myself: This author probably has control of the material.
I also just have my favorite genres. I gravitate towards the weird and fantastical. I drift away from Infocom references, since I have never played an Infocom game and the nostalgia feels like a shibboleth that locks me out.
For me, I very intentionally make the answer to this question, “Is it next on my personal random shuffle?” for exactly this reason: I want to judge the games, not the cover art nor blurbs. Playing them in a random order is really the only fair way I can do that.
Well, you’ve got a few votes now, and I must admit I didn’t look at your IFComp entry until I saw it had relatively few votes–but since I liked it, that makes me more likely to look at either of your entries.
A tangent about folks generally worrying our entries aren’t rated as much as average: I suspect most will be rated less than the average, because a few entries tend to be outliers. We’re already seeing this with the entries with 10 ratings, even though the average only just eclipsed 5 ratings. Three of four are people who are well respected in the community for their writing and general contributions. So people are likely to give them a look first, then move on. The other one has a really catchy title which made me laugh. I don’t recognize the author.
This effect seems like it’ll be particularly pronounced early on. But eventually people look for other games, which makes up the gap a bit. Still, it feels like I’m not keeping up with the Joneses or whatever, even though I know better!
Number crunching: I plugged the numbers in when we had 312 votes (310 = average 5) & got a median of 4 and mode of 3. If someone rates 3 games with 4 ratings that will change the median to 5.
Note from IFComp: Pharos Fidelis had 0 votes for a while but hit top 20 comfortably. So lack of votes isn’t an indication of lack of perceived quality. But yeah, it can still feel like you’re left out. I’ve been there too.
I hope this helps people, even if we generally don’t enjoy number crunching.
Note from IFComp: Pharos Fidelis had 0 votes for a while but hit top 20 comfortably. So lack of votes isn’t an indication of lack of perceived quality. But yeah, it can still feel like you’re left out. I’ve been there too.
Even already in this comp I’ve seen it. I just played a game with 3 ratings that I thought was great, could have been in the IFComp top 15 (for my tastes).
) I got the impression that some players were slow/reluctant to pick up my IFComp game, but I also noticed mine’s the only one without a single vote in ectocomp so far as well and it’s had about 20 visits total from ectocomp, so kinda a pattern forming.
(joke - I doubt it) I’m assuming it’s just chance/maths. Someone has to be the last game voted for in every competition. Today it’s you. There’s a month to go. There are also people who’ll play every game who’ll inevitably come to yours at some point, whether early in the run or late.
. I may have accidentally set expectations about the length, especially with the comment about stat conservation. (I should remember than CSGs tend to have a reputation for generally being very long). I think from memory it’s only about 25k (incl code) give or take, although it possibly could have done with being a bit longer. I’ve had some extra thoughts since I “finished it”. Always the way 
.