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IFComp postmortem discussion, Euphoria
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ifcomppostmortem.txt
[Sequitur] Okay, for real this time, it's now 7PM my time, 4PM in EST, some ungodly early time in PST, and 9PM in GMT.
[Sequitur] So I'm starting the "official" postmortem chat in here; things in this thread will be saved for posterity.
[zarf] When you say "this thread" you mean the tree starting "Okay for real this time"?
[Sequitur] Yep, this top-level tree.
[Sequitur] I mean, obviously Euphoria has an infinite backscroll so all of it is saved; this, however, will get reposted.
[catacalypto] That makes sense.
[katherine] 💩
[katherine] hi posterity
[gostyax] That's more like "bye posterior"
[gostyax] cough
[verityvirtue] oh dang, that's a good one
[katherine] from posterior to posterity
[catacalypto] 💯
[katherine] a memoir
[bphennessy] 💯
[jepflast] So far so good.
[bphennessy] ...so uh how did we all like the 21st annual interactive fiction competition
[Healy] It was pretty good!
[Healy] I mean, I didn't get to all the games, but I enjoyed most of what I played
[verityvirtue] It was great fun to play! (although I never did finish playing all of the games)
[gostyax] I tried all the games and finished most of them and voted!
[verityvirtue] wow
[PaulS] I found it overwhelming.
[katherine] it sucked
[katherine] man I hate interactive fiction
[katherine] let's ban it
[jmac] nothing gooses interest like a good banning
[bphennessy] I for one would like to see all interactive fiction authors jailed
[Sequitur] Especially people who are perpetuating nonsense rumours like the existence of birds
[verityvirtue] What is the function of a bird?
[WesLesley] to provide bacon. airborne bacon.
[furkle] throw all bits into the fire!
[easily amused🐱] down with interactivity!
[catacalypto] down with fiction!
[jojo🐸] I enjoyed it, but I think I spent too much time checking through reviews. The relative quiet at the beginning of the comp felt torturous.
[catacalypto] yes, this was my feeling as well.
[Ade👺] yes....it did seem to get off to a slow start
[Sequitur] Let me run down a list of things that come to mind when you bring up the 21st IFComp (In no particular order): Best comp ever! Not enough reviews! That game about cats! That OTHER game about cats! Rah, rah, parser bias! Oh god how am I going to review all those games!
[furkle] the game about cat!
[jepflast] And that third game about a cat
[zarf] I am a total poser these days and never got to playing any of the games. But I'm reading reviews.
[verityvirtue] so many reviews!
[WesLesley] not enough!
[jojo🐸] You didn't play any of the games before it was cool not to play them.
[jmac] Same (though I played a few games and look forward to more)
[jmac] So behind on reviews, though
[jojo🐸] jmac, is the organiser of the comp allowed to vote in it? I assume not, but I wonder if it happened in the early days.
[Sequitur] I rarely play games in comps I'm taking part in during the comp, so I've actually barely played IFComp games at all.
[dswxyz] I played some games but declined to vote
[jbd] To some extent, you gotta give people time to play them. There's always a bootup time.
[AndrewS] Yeah, and if someone writes reviews too quickly you can worry they just plowed through the games and missed something. So there's a balance there.
[gostyax] I actually downloaded the zip archive near to when it came out, but sat on it for ages
[gostyax] Like, I wanted to wait until I was in the right mindset and had enough mental energy to feel like I was doing the games justice
[catacalypto] I can't speak for other authors, but I'd prefer people playing my game to come in with that mindset.
[Glass Rat] I played everything at work, in my browser (I am such a slacker). So I played every choice game and a good chunk of the parser games, though i didn't get to all of them that I wanted to.
[verityvirtue] I played quite a few on my phone while eating dinner (e.g. kane county)
[AndrewS] I was actually glad not to be worried about lookng for too many reviews. But having so many things to review probably made it hard for people to start
[PaulS] I also think reviews are harder to find than they need to be.
[furkle] there was an aggregation thread on ifwiki that seemed to collate most of them
[verityvirtue] and the intfiction forums
[AndrewS] There's always a once a day google, or google notifications eg (author name) (game name)
[jojo🐸] Yes, though my relatively common name combined with the fact Sub Rosa is an existing FPS didn't help the searching.
[AndrewS] Good point, though I suppose you can use "character 1 OR character 2 OR ..." but this gets into nitpickery
[bphennessy] Should all reviews be linked to on IFDB or is it just for "The Big Deals"?
[PaulS] As much as possible, I'd say.
[Doug O.] +1
[bphennessy] Because if we linked everything that could definitely help people
[jmac] I *definitely* want to programatically tie reviews to entries, somehow, next year. I think there are IFDB API helpers that can help make this possible. (This came up last year too, but I didn't do nuthin about it)
[PaulS] +1
[bphennessy] 💯
[furkle] having access to referrals would be a huge help with that
[catacalypto] 👍
[CMG] I think some reviews are not worth linking, personally. Like one-line reviews or snarky reviews. I figure, let the reviewer come and repost them if they want.
[catacalypto] yes, I would agree with that
[jmac] If I do it right, it'll just extend the leaning-on to IFDB that ifcomp.org already does; so will just share whatever reviews are added / linked yonder. Which is a community-editable page.
[MaiMai] Link title: The Interactive Fiction Competition
[jmac] Next year I intend to link entries to their respective IFDB pages much earlier (versus waiting for the comp to be almost over), which should allow lots of fun stuff
[PaulS] But will that mean there is a running "star" assessment of games. Might that affect voting in a not good way?
[gostyax] PaulS's concern seems like something to take into account
[Sirwol] +1
[bphennessy] I mean in practice there already was though? IFDB pages were up from the jump
[jmac] The pages were up but nothing from ifcomp.org linked to them
[MaiMai] Link title: The Interactive Fiction Competition
[jojo🐸] Yes, but not all that know about the comp check the IFDB habitually
[Sequitur] I mean, as long as the ifcomp page itself doesn't display star ratings
[PaulS] I agree this shouldn't happen!
[Sequitur] It's not like people can't go and investigate games before playing/judging them
[CMG] I basically don't see a problem with some games breaking out and getting more attention. I think that should, in fact, happen as the comp rolls on and people get a sense for the field.
[catacalypto] I agree.
[PaulS] I agree. I think that's actually what having reviews does.
[PaulS] But it's not good if it happens because some game has just randomly received no attention early on.
[Sequitur] I mean, I go back to this issue all the damn time but I kind of think as the comp gets bigger, the single ranked list will just have these kinds of problems more and more
[CMG] But a game with more attention at the beginning might fade toward the end, and another game might pick up attention. It's a long voting period.
[katherine] plus I think all links to individual games are straight-up broken now
[Sequitur] @jmac?
[katherine] it just redirects to the ranking
[katherine] (I mentioned this somewhere else but I think it got buried in euphoria)
[PaulS] "buried in euphoria" has a hysterical sound to it
[catacalypto] 👍
[StephC] They go to the game's IFDB page for me
[jmac] Oh dear... what's an example of a broken link?
[jmac] If you mean like how http://ifcomp.org/ballot#1234 now just goes to the top of the ranking page, yes, DougO told me about that, and I haven't had to chance to repair due to travel & convention crazy times. Tell you what though, I'll go to the hotel bar and take a wrench to it tonight. :)
[MaiMai] Link title: IFComp 2015
[katherine] it just makes linking to individual games weird
[PaulS] There's no convenient way of aggregating reviews or indexing them by game.
[verityvirtue] convenient, no, I don't think
[easily amused🐱] It would be interesting to get reviews for the same game side by side.
[zarf] Having reviews links on ifcomp.org would seem an obvious extension
[MaiMai] Link title: The Interactive Fiction Competition
[furkle] /me bows to the useful bot
[easily amused🐱] Would unpopular games with no reviews suffer?
[verityvirtue] vicious cycle?
[easily amused🐱] Is the number/quality of reviews a public rating?
[katherine] it would seem so, but the final rankings do not correlate to this well
[bphennessy] Probably a bit, yeah. Although NO reviews might prompt someone to actually play it
[verityvirtue] don't play the game cos it has no reviews, no one reviews it
[Ade👺] Not necessaril. I got very few reviews.
[bphennessy] Like if I was writing reviews I might go "oh hmm no one reviewed game X, DON'T MIND IF I DO"
[easily amused🐱] 👍
[PaulS] I think they suffer already, probably.
[Sirwol] Regarding this, I think games already get an alphabetical advantage/disadvantage for number of reviews. I'd like to see random order be the default.
[AndrewS] 👍 your graph was really enlightening. I'd never considered that could be a factor but then I realized I'd just picked the 1st alphabetically I hadn't done yet
[Sirwol] The graph for reference: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e0d0hydzy8ar89z/IFComp%202015%20Stats.png?dl=1
[gostyax] If the random order generated once can be saved with cookies, maybe that would be helpful for not confusing people w/o accounts
[gostyax] i.e. randomize once and save that order, which is a function I think already exists in some capacity
[PaulS] It does. A "personal shuffle". I used that. @CMG got upset with me for it 😞
[Sirwol] Yeah, I think that most people probably don't use it, whereas if that was default and alphabetical was on a link, vote counts might be more evenly distributed.
[Sirwol] I talked to a coder friend of mine and he suggested randomizing off IP but then linking that random seed to the user account as soon as they log in as the best solution for guest users.
[gostyax] Does that work with dynamic IPs?
[Sirwol] He's not here to ask, I don't know :(
[CMG] Yeah, I think that religiously abiding by the random order is counterproductive unless you're going to play all the games. If a game grabs your attention, this ought to be an element that comes into play in the voting.
[Sirwol] Which is exactly what I did with reading them and I was still heavily weighted towards the front end of the alphabet. I think people do it without thinking.
[StephC] I was amazed how many people felt like they HAD to play/write reviews for something that came up. There was one person who wrote a Taghairm review who was just livid because they felt they'd been forced to kill the cats because 'that was the whole game' and I was like 'you don't HAVE to play it.'
[StephC] I think that's why the War of the Willows got dead last, I guess it need a special program? Then people were all like 'now I HAVE to get this program' and then they were steamed that they felt forced to go to all that trouble, instead of just not bothering.
[gostyax] Technically I don't think WotW needed a special program
[gostyax] I run Python scripts from the command line all te time
[gostyax] ....er, probably I'm thinking about this from te wrong angle
[Sequitur] Python isn't standard in Windows computers
[gostyax] you still do need Python, it's not a matter of an interpreter is wat I was tihnking
[gostyax] and my H key is utterly screwed up, I'm sorry
[jmac] I welcome suggestions for making random default that would work for not-logged in users who might access the list from two different IPs (e.g. home and work), thus preventing them from going "eh, these games are totally different, what happened". I currently don't think it's doable. I currently choose to address this issue by believing that alpha-higher games do get more plays and yet still get the average scores they got coming to em.
[Sequitur] What if instead of a totally random order, a non-logged in game just gets a random game on top of the alphabetical list?
[Sequitur] "Here's a random entry for you to check out"
[jmac] Well, instead of that, I made the Random button big and shiny and oh so clickable this year. (Very different than last year.)
[jmac] I'm very hesitant to change the ballot's content on people without their consent, because I can only imagine this will lead to confusion and sadness.
[jmac] Even in tiny ways
[catacalypto] 👍
[Hanon.O] Any chance the alphabetizing could do like libraries and disregard the words "the" and "a" ?
[jepflast] Just tell people at the top of the page that the games appear in random order every time.
[Hanon.O] I'd rather that actually - people can write down their own list if they want one
[jepflast] Anything is better than having a bias where the first-listed games get played more.
[jepflast] So fix that first, then we'll work on whatever problems it leads to.
[jmac] I just inboxes this. sorry
[jmac] inboxed
[jmac] Uh, i mean Hanon's the/a complaint
[jepflast] I support that idea too
[jmac] Another idea I like: have a button for "I want to write a review for a game!"
[Doug O.] mixed feelings about this. It's already hard enough to avoid spoilers without having them right next to the game itself.
[easily amused🐱] 👍
[AndrewS] Also there's a problem that an early hasty review could influence people down the road, if people looked at it
[Hanon.O] Right. The authors started a "let's discuss frontrunners" thread in week TWO.
[jmac] And the website will say "OK, here you go" and hand you a game to review. Random, but weighted, perhaps, for games with fewer reviews
[jojo🐸] That could work. Especially for people that don't already have a bloggin platform.
[Hanon.O] Doesn't having the website pick a game for you based on weight kinda get the website involved in the voting somehow?
[Hanon.O] I think the ifcomp page should be firewalled from reviews.
[Hanon.O] Just as a bunch of reviews on one game will tell you it's quality whether to play or not, the site urging you toward an unreviewed game ends up being sort of a recommendation
[Doug O.] and by spoilers I mean any kind of a frame imposed before I play the game myself
[bphennessy] I don't think I'd want the review to necessarily DISPLAY, but I'd like the option of having it there.
[Doug O.] sure, a link to IFDB or whatever would be good.
[gostyax] Does IFDB display the star ratings right up front also?
[verityvirtue] doesn't it?
[Doug O.] yes it does.
[PaulS] Yup.
[gostyax] That seems undatabasely, though I don't use IMDB either and perhaps it's from that
[Sequitur] IMDB does display star ratings
[Sequitur] I mean if you wanna complain about star ratings on IFDB, complain about the harsh averaging that means all my games have 3.5 stars even though the actual average is like 3.9
[gostyax] It doesn't really affect me personally, so complaining would be a bit over the top... but how on earth do you average different results from the same input?
[gostyax] Weighting?
[Sequitur] Thresholds
[Sequitur] If you have 3.9, do you display that as three and a half stars, or as four stars?
[AndrewS] 3.75 rounds up to 4
[Doug O.] ujst make your games 0.1 better. problem solved.
[Doug O.] man euphoria makes me look like a much worse typist than I think I am
[Sequitur] Ie, do you round up or down, because the system only displays stars in a half-star increment
[jojo🐸] So you're saying it need to have quarter stars?
[AndrewS] It would be nice to have something to 2 decimal places. I like the star graphics but the range possible is -- ambiguous
[AndrewS] e.g. 3 1/2 star graphic + "3.67"
[Hanon.O] So basically a 10 star rating.
[jojo🐸] I'd prefer that, yes. Or 12 stars!
[Hanon.O] I'd like a 1-10 rating, OR a 5 star that allow you to specify 3.5 or 4.25
[katherine] oh also all play online links redirect to the ranking now?
[jmac] All links redirect to the games' IFDB pages
[jmac] Correction: all ifcomp.org/content/whatever links redirect
[jmac] (I set a policy last year that ifcomp.org would only host online play during the judging period, and after that would reroute to IFDB, with the games' permanent links pointing to the archive -- with authors free to override that if they wish)
[MaiMai] Link title: The Interactive Fiction Competition
[StephC] Is this right?
[zarf] yes
[gostyax] Yep!
[StephC] This is so disorienting.
[PaulS] You get used to it. Like being drunk.
[StephC] It's like a chat room and a forum had a weird baby
[bphennessy] me
[Ade👺] Question for reviewers: How did the comp traffic for reviews on your blog compare with non-comp traffic?
[furkle] mostly irrelevant; more than half of mine comes from my twine 2 tutorial, and i didn't see much of an uptick
[furkle] oh shit i just realized that i totally misread "reviewers" as "entrants," somehow, narcissistically, and derailed the entire conversation. sorry ade, sorry everyone 🐸
[Doug O.] qiuck, write 53 reviews
[furkle] for (var ii = 0; ii < 53; ii++) { console.log("it;s good"); }
[furkle] what i will say is that the RPS link, at least midway through the comp, accounted for probably about half of all total traffic to my IF
[gostyax] I think, as with Birdland, there is some interest in wondering how much of that external traffic led to voting
[furkle] probably not much with mine! especially given that the only reason i know the source is that it was linked directly to the game and not the ballot page
[furkle] if it was, i shiver to think of how bad the score would've been if it was just the native IFComp audience
[gostyax] Or if they just played the game and didn't engage with the comp itself
[bphennessy] Likewise. Although Jayisgames hit a bit bigger for me, I think
[bphennessy] At least at first. RPS by now may have overtaken it.
[bphennessy] In any case, all of those completely dwarfed by tumblr.
[verityvirtue] !
[Sequitur] You kind of hit the tumblr jackpot
[catacalypto] yeah, you really did
[Sequitur] And by "hit the tumblr jackpot" I mean "built a tumblr-targeting icbm and then aimed it at tumblr and fired it"
[furkle] hah, yes; i was utterly unsurprised to see birdland grab the same types of people (albeit a little happier!) as We Know The Devil had a few weeks prior
[bphennessy] lol yeah basically.
[furkle] sorry, *birbland
[bphennessy] ty
[verityvirtue] an important distinction there
[Sequitur] 🐦
[furkle] A SMOL BIRB APPROACHES. "small child, please explain the concept of 'Grimes'"
[Sequitur] You realise you're now obligated to write that Twine yeah
[furkle] into the TO-DO pile it goes
[catacalypto] 💯
[Sequitur] Shit, we should just have a Birb Jam. A jam for Birdland fanfic.
[katherine] http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Bridget%20Leaside*s*Bellwoods%20Park
[MaiMai] Link title: Bridget Leaside/Bellwoods Park
|
Archive of Our Own
[Sequitur] Why should @bphennessy get ALL of the tumblr traffic
[furkle] because he is Their Chosen Boy. there can only be one man liked by tumblr who is not harry or zayn
[bphennessy] only once I truly problematize myself can the next be born.
[bphennessy] What's interesting is tumblr also jacked up my average number of visits PER unique visitor.
[catacalypto] oh, that's interesting!
[furkle] how was time on page? i expect it was a *lot* higher
[bphennessy] yeah I wasn't tracking it very closely but it looked like a big spike in visits over 30 minutes.
[Sequitur] All you cool people with your metrics
[furkle] plus the people coming solely to that game, from a good review, spent a lot more time on-page
[Healy] I think my traffic jumped up a bit
[Healy] No real way to check, but my Livejournal rankings went WAY up after starting the reviews
[jbd] my traffic was higher, but lemme go check how much
[jepflast] Is this real life?
[jepflast] AARGH! MY TEXT INPUT BOX KEEPS JUMPING! and now I'm a spy.
[CMG] My screen is jumping all over the place.
[jbd] I think doubled about quantifies it
[emshort] My traffic during comp is about 150%-200% of normal, but I'm not sure how much of that is down to there being a post pretty much every day (or even two a day) vs. the more usual one every several days
[jbd] I am having to factor out I had a traffic explosion with the Wander announcement
[jojo🐸] I'd like to chat about the explosion of viable game-making platforms we've seen this comp.
[jojo🐸] Inform still has a strong showing, but we've seen two types of Twine, Undum-variant Raconteur and ChoiceScript all place well.
[furkle] by "types of Twine," do you mean twine 1 or 2?
[PaulS] And Alan and TADS 3
[bphennessy] I feel like this might have been a bit of a death knell for TADS. Look how few people played Koustrea.
[Doug O.] It was very long and relativley unwelcoming though
[jojo🐸] Yeah, but also you see some games with the classic twine look with that left-hand panel, and then the contemporary school.
[jojo🐸] @PaulS definitely.
[bphennessy] were there more this comp then before?
[gostyax] I had the same thought as bph
[gostyax] I guess "place well" is a thing
[Ade👺] Orihaus platform he made To Burn in Memory on was just beautiful
[catacalypto] yes, that was gorgeous!
[Ade👺] I hope/wish he would make a dev paltform out of it
[catacalypto] I was hoping the same thing
[jbd] I also appreciated Kane County was custom
[bphennessy] If it's just about placing well, Choicescript already nagged second last year, and Twine's at least been as high as 5th.
[jojo🐸] Well I'm not saying it's a brand brand new trend. In a sense 2015 has been a strong continuation on from 2014 in this regard.
[Sequitur] The only really new platform is Raconteur
[Sequitur] (And Raconteur isn't a platform; it's a toolbox to make Undum usable)
[bphennessy] Still a, uh, debutante on the scene.
[Sequitur] Yeah. Though not the first Raconteur game.
[Sequitur] (At this point I'm pretty sure I've written more Undum games than anyone else)
[Sequitur] (Because everyone else wrote one and then went "no, this is way too much work" probably)
[furkle] why undum over twine?
[jojo🐸] Undum is sexier. Having you played The Play?
[furkle] hm, this basically seems like the Jonah theme for twine 1
[bphennessy] I remember looking into this and I think in terms of little details about how it handles previous nodes that are currently being displayed it's a bit neater than Jonah
[bphennessy] Although I can't recall specfics.
[furkle] i guess honestly i'm only really using the twine platform for passage text and some variable tracking; if you're doing a huge amount of stuff in javascript and css i'm not sure whether it really matters much which you choose
[jojo🐸] I've seen a lot of shoddy vanilla twine games, but Undum seems to look pretty out of the box. SPY INTRIGUE looks really cool because of all the extra non-Twine stuff done to it.
[furkle] SPY INTRIGUE ended up not using much twine
[furkle] yeah, i'm mostly wondering why other web-design-conversant authors would use one over the other
[Sequitur] If you read my Mere Anarchy postmortem
[Sequitur] It has some details on why I chose Undum them which applies to... every project since
[furkle] i'll check it out, thanks!
[Sequitur] http://segue.pw/2015/05/12/mere-anarchy-postmortem.html
[MaiMai] Link title: Mere Anarchy Postmortem
[Sequitur] also http://segue.pw/2015/05/01/why-raconteur-exists.html
[MaiMai] Link title: Raconteur, and why it exists
[furkle] i actually have huge problems with a lot of the way harlowe was being developed over the course of SI's development, and i've kinda given up on my hope to affect that more positively
[Sequitur] I don't even know
[Sequitur] A lot of the features in Harlowe are things that should be part of the core Twine platform, and not random macros you have to copy-paste from someone's blog
[furkle] yeah but as far as i can tell there's not even support for custom macros in harlowe
[Sequitur] Yeah
[Sequitur] I understand that will happen "at some point in the future"
[furkle] there's very little thought put into how JS and twinescript interact with one another
[Sequitur] That's always been the case
[Sequitur] Twine is... honestly, if you know web dev, it's kind of a disaster area
[Sequitur] It's very empowering for nontechnical users but if you know what a closure is it's kind of hair-rasing
[furkle] i haven't really looked at the source code, i'm mostly familiar with what's exposed to developers. what in particular are you thinking of?
[Sequitur] The whole deal with the way that Twinescript and JS interact in weird ways
[Sequitur] And the general lack of programmer affordances
[Sequitur] Like, Undum is based on JQuery
[Sequitur] In Twine, you have to do all your DOM-bashing yourself
[furkle] hm, honestly, given that i tend to keep all of my document manipulation in CSS and JS i wouldn't really know
[furkle] one thing i've had huge problems with is that the HTML element order changes radically depending on the twinescript format
[Sequitur] Also, and this irritates me profoundly
[Sequitur] Twinescript cares about \ns
[furkle] like (if:) blocks are actual html elements and the stuff inside them gets put into if blocks, which makes it almost impossible to rely on complicated CSS selectors
[Sequitur] Yeah
[Sequitur] Twine is kind of spaghettish throughout
[Sequitur] The code, text, and library code all blur together in non-helpful ways
[furkle] there's also no postrender function, so if you just throw in a script block you won't know whether certain elements will even exist at the time the code is executed
[Sequitur] Yeah
[Sequitur] And you have to mess around with JS' API for selecting elements and doing things, instead of having JQuery or a proper frontend framework
[Sequitur] Which is super fucky
[furkle] i ended up just throwing all of my postrender code into an onload block in an invisible 1x1 base64-encoded image in each thread
[furkle] though i will say, harlowe comes with jquery by default
[Sequitur] Oh, I did not know that
[Sequitur] That would be great if you could write custom macros
[furkle] yeah, i guess a. i don't think we really need another 90%-abstracted, super-high-level IF authoring language and b. the way development seems to be moving feels like it's depriving new users of one of the best features of twine, which is that it acts as a gentle introduction to web design
[Sequitur] yeah
[furkle] if everything is in harlowe, then the only thing anyone learns is harlowe, and you can't use that for anything else, and you especially can't use it to not be poor anymore
[Sequitur] I mean, Raconteur isn't an attempt at fixing any of htat
[Sequitur] It's very much an opnionated little tool I built to let me crank out games at blinding speed (by standards of Undum development, anyway)
[Sequitur] But they're just not powerful and mature enough
[catacalypto] it really is gorgeous
[Sequitur] I bounce really hard off Twine
[bphennessy] I think default Undum is a bit more mobile friendly than default Twine too?
[Sequitur] More mobile and screen reader friendly, yeah
[Healy] How so?
[Sequitur] Undum has specific affordances for mobile browsers
[Sequitur] (Which Raconteur enhances a bit)
[Sequitur] It also builds a regular, standard web page while Twine uses a bunch of made-up custom elements
[bphennessy] Oh also turns out Twine 2 is a bit of a dog on iOS. Like it'll chug on Safari and seems to almost freeze Chrome sometimes.
[furkle] that could explain the person complaining about SI being terribly slow
[Sequitur] To be honest
[bphennessy] Yeah. I don't know what it is but I know the more text you have in a passage the more slowdown you get when you're trying to load it.
[Sequitur] Spy Intrigue has rendering jank on my DESKTOP browser
[furkle] part of that could be that some browsers are just super fucky with certain css transitions and animations
[Sequitur] You mean every browser right
[furkle] hah, yes. it's difficult and not necessarily useful to whine "but it's all standards-compliant!" when people have graphical issues on HTML5 content
[Sequitur] I managed to break my bug by tweaking CSS
[Sequitur] er, break my game
[Sequitur] Because CSS animations work in TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAYS in webkit and firefox
[furkle] also, the default values for stuff as old and as simple as *borders* are different between the two
[furkle] inset and outset is about 30-50% darker in firefox
[furkle] love to have to set absolute color values for something that's been around since HTML1
[Sequitur] lol yes
[Sequitur] I mean, the solution is to use a css reset
[furkle] not sure if i know that term
[Sequitur] A CSS file that sets pretty much everything
[furkle] aha! i see
[furkle] this makes sense
[Sequitur] You load it before your real CSS
[Sequitur] And it makes browsers magically consistent
[Sequitur] And make your user load another file to force their browser to be consistent
[Sequitur] So, basically, fuck browser vendors
[furkle] :plusone:
[furkle] :plus1:
[furkle] 👍
[furkle] k there
[Sequitur] got there
[furkle] and that's all that matters
[Doug O.] I appreciate Undum because of scrollback.
[Sequitur] I really, really like using text transformations
[Sequitur] Cycling links and such
[Sequitur] And Undum just gives me more freedom to define behaviours for those
[Hanon.O] More like everyone went "How the heck is this supposed to work" and didn't write in Undum.
[Sequitur] Writing Raconteur is, literally, required to build an Undum game and keep your sanity
[Sequitur] You have to at the very least write your own Situation object prototype with the behaviour you want because the one Undum supplies is basically just an API definition with no implementation of any useful behaviour
[Sequitur] I'm pretty sure this is what other Undum authors have historically done; I'm just the first person to do it in a systemic way and release the code later.
[Doug O.] Gamefic is sitll pretty new.
[Sequitur] (Excepting homebrewed stuff)
[Sequitur] Was there a gamefic game?
[Doug O.] Second Story
[Sequitur] Oooh
[Sequitur] I should check that out
[Doug O.] and what makes Raconteur not homebrewed?
[Doug O.] open source?
[furkle] official release, i'd say
[furkle] like, i could say that i created a "new twine platform" where you can visualize your node maps
[furkle] but even though SPY INTRIGUE is released under GPL v3 it's quite inextricable from the game in which it exists
[furkle] you can't download or install it without a huge amount of work
[Sequitur] Other people can use it :P
[Doug O.] War of the Willows kind of billed itself as a platform
[emshort] Yeah, I sort of felt as though to properly judge WotW I should try to build something in it -- but at the same time that I couldn't realistically do that in the comp time available
[emshort] (and even if I did, I'm not sure how that would compare with other game *playing* experiences)
[Doug O.] I would definitely not want IF Comp to turn into a platform competition, though that might be a reasonable idea for its own thing.
[jojo🐸] Not much chance of that. Polished games made in mature platforms unsurprisingly continue to place well.
[Doug O.] er, I meant that I don't want writing a game to be part of the judging experience.
[katherine] there was that entry that got withdrawn
[katherine] not emily is away
[catacalypto] Paradise, yeah
[bphennessy] oh riiight. Paradise. That looked cool but I never really got a good sense of what its deal was
[easily amused🐱] It's a roleplaying server.
[catacalypto] I played around with it and made a world, but I wasn't entirely sure what to do after that
[easily amused🐱] play with friends and strangers (it's social)
[jmac] Congrats on the great debut for Raconteur -- looking forward to noting that in the (very late, but will happen, dammit) wrap-up blog post
[Doug O.] it wasn't a debut :)
[jmac] I meant it in the "debutante" since too
[jmac] And/or the "IFComp is my entire worldview therefore this is clearly the first game ever" sense too, fine.
[Doug O.] comp debut I guess
[jepflast] ***This here is the *highly official* subthread where you can introduce yourself. 'Cause I don't know who some of you are just based on these names.
[jbd] <-- Jason Dyer, writes at Renga in Blue
[WesLesley] "renga in blue" sounds like something that capter from TNG's Darmok episode would have said.
[jbd] IFComp, where the walls fell
[seasludge] Hello, gross ocean grime here. I was lead QA on Spy Intrigue.
[jojo🐸] An underappreciated role. (QA, not ocean grime)
[jepflast] For the posterity record, I'm Jeremy Pflasterer (Koustrea's Contentment).
[WesLesley] for JepFlast's posterior, i'm Wes Lesley and I made the godawful piece of crap The King And The Crown. And today, the less awful and almost quite alright Special Edition. :)
[WesLesley] posterity, i mean. surely.
[jepflast] Great introduction!
[dswxyz] I'm currently playing Koustrea's Contentment, but I'm only about halfway through.
[jepflast] I saw you had a problem with the drip? What interpreter were you on?
[furkle] /me 🐱
[furkle] im furkle. i wrote spy game
[Glass Rat] Glass Rat, maker of Seeting Ataraxia :)
[catacalypto] catacalypto, aka Cat; I made Crossroads
[furkle] 🐱
[catacalypto] 🐱
[furkle] 🐱acalypto
[Sequitur] Bruno; I wrote Cape
[bphennessy] Brendan, I wrote Birdland.
[CMG] Chandler. I did Taghairm and Midnight. Swordfight.
[AndrewS] Andrew Schultz, Problems Compound
[Hanon.O] <-Hanon. I work in a cubicle.
[katherine] hello, I am the only katherine in the comp
[easily amused🐱] 👍
[piato] Piato / Duel
[Ade👺] Ade/Map
[jojo🐸] I'm Joey Jones, hence 'jojo'.
[Doug O.] /me rleans
[Doug O.] I played all the entrants and voted idiosyncratically. Also I betatested Cape. You're welcome.
[Sequitur] (every Cape bug is Doug's fault)
[AndrewS] Indeed, sins of omission should not be minimized! :fakesternlook:
[Doug O.] my favorite bug is that there is no cape in Cape
[AndrewS] It's worse than The Postman Always Rings Twice. I shut that movie off with 10 minutes left because he hadn't even rugn once yet.
[Sequitur] INTENTIONAL JOKE, Doug
[jmac] I would also point out that Doug complained that "WARBLE" wasn't an implemented verb in Warbler's Nest
[Doug O.] neither is NEST
[Hanon.O] I thought CAPE was the name of the city.
[catacalypto] am I the only person who feels terrible if I accidentally miss a bug my tester noticed
[jmac] some lurker
[jmac] OK, I am Jason McIntosh and I organized the comp, but I feel like I mostly organized it last year and this year just sat in the back and watched all of y'all be brilliant
[easily amused🐱] Thank you Jason, you did an amazing job!
[AndrewS] You added a lot of nice touches and you were open to future features. I guess what we're saying is, we're confident you'll find what is best to be tweaked next year
[piato] Hihi, thank you so much for doing *such* a fantastic job of this! It was great to feel part of something so well-organised. Also sorry for flapping at you when duel wasn't web-playable for about 0.2minutes at the beginning because I'd used the wrong filename, that was kind of embarrassing in hindsight.
[jmac] No problem at all. The comp got off to a wobbly start tech wise with little potholes like that all over; I am glad we were able to get through em all relatively quickly
[jmac] Just one of those things
[Healy] I'm Healy, and I wrote a bunch of IF Comp reviews on my blog, which you can view here: http://healyg.livejournal.com/tag/if%20comp%202015
[MaiMai] Link title: HealyG
[furkle] needs moar SPY INTRIGUE
[jojo🐸] Let's talk about stand out moments in games we liked.
[Sequitur] Can I call Birdlland one long stand-out moment
[furkle] the song-writing dream was so much fun!
[piato] That whole concert was one long click-laugh-click-laugh pavlovian reaction
[catacalypto] oh yes
[piato] YES
[Hanon.O] Was Birdland the one that had the dream where you got an entire page of text it didn't let you read
[piato] Yes but I actually really liked that
[Hanon.O] I did too.
[jojo🐸] I enjoyed SPY INTRIGUE's web wizardry. It was a constant marvel as to what trick it was going to pull next.
[furkle] :) which parts did you like in particular!
[jojo🐸] I really liked the hacking sequences. I'd got quite used to fairly plain links-on-page hypertext games, so wasn't prepared for the more graphical-video-game-esque presentation.
[furkle] yeah, i was actually really worried that everyone was going to be all "this isn't text fiction! banned!" luckily not
[jojo🐸] I liked the genuine hard time cave branching in Crossorads.
[jojo🐸] *Crossroads even.
[catacalypto] i'm glad that was appreciated! I really wanted to try to make a genuine hard time cave that still had coherence at the beginning.
[catacalypto] fun fact! there are 22,000 words in Crossroads
[furkle] how many of them are "cross" and how many of them are "roads"
[catacalypto] 19,000
[jojo🐸] Exactly 22,000?
[catacalypto] nah, something like 25,000+ with all the code
[catacalypto] and I tried to strip out most of the code but have no idea, so 22,000 is my rough guess
[catacalypto] I really loved the popup box about the cat in Seeking Ataraxia - that mirrors my experience with intrusive thoughts really well
[Glass Rat] <3
[furkle] yeah! that part made me jump a bit
[catacalypto] I loved the voice in @StephC 's Brain Guzzlers - the tone was really winning, for lack of a better word.
[Healy] God, the description of the town history in the pamphlet was SO mean (and SO good)
[catacalypto] 👍
[catacalypto] the prose in SynFac is my favorite all comp (though shoutouts to Cape and SPY INTRIGUE which could not be more different from each other), and I felt that the story and parser experiment melded really well together
[Sequitur] I mean, if you missed the secret all-caps sex scene in Cape, I guess
[catacalypto] I really liked how your choice of animal was mirrored in the prose on that
[Sequitur] :euphoria!:
[Sequitur] I think something like 20% of the situations in Cape care about that choice
[Sequitur] That might be a low estimate, it might be more
[furkle] lmao wait how did i miss this
[Sequitur] (SynFac did have really great prose)
[Hanon.O] /me wearing a funny moustache and glasses shouts from the sidelines "BAKING BREAD WAS EXTREMELY FULFILLING TO ME."
[furkle] i loved to bake bread and i love to get murdered. 11/10
[Hanon.O] And sorted. We needn't discuss my game ever again!
[Doug O.] picking up the back-room baker was a great moment.
[Doug O.] #TSD
[Healy] The playlist for Life on Mars was a great touch. It really added to the gloomy atmosphere of the game.
[Sirwol] Maybe I'm just easy to please but pretty much every game I played had something I loved in it.
[Sirwol] Birdland and SPY INTRIGUE were my favourites, but then I'm still playing through the games I didn't get to during the comp and finding gems.
[Doug O.] My favorite moment was the "having to resit the exam" alternate ending in Final Exam. I had felt really clever only to find out the Central Admin was one step ahead of me.
[jojo🐸] There were quite a few inversions in The Problems Compound that I really enjoyed, starting with the title.
[Healy] The surreal body horror in Summit was very nicely done. I'm surprised it didn't place higher.
[Healy] Oh whoops.
[StephC] I liked it!
[StephC] Hold on, wait, am I in the right place? How do you navigate this?
[furkle] you gotta flip it turnwise
[jepflast] Time to try Interactive Nonfiction
[katherine] THE COMP IS NOT FOR THAT
[verityvirtue] hmm evolve.storynexus.com
[jojo🐸] Click on the post you want to respond to.
[gostyax] Click on a line from the thread you're replying to
[Sequitur] You can use arrow keys, or you can click on threads to move into them, or you can drag the text box.
[jojo🐸] jinx
[easily amused🐱] Should there be half as many entries?
[bphennessy] ?
[easily amused🐱] 25 games instead of 50?
[WesLesley] 1000 entries in 2016 !!! everybody write a game per week!
[Fangz] How could you have fewer games
[Fangz] There's no way to control that
[bphennessy] jail all if authors, as I said
[WesLesley] don't make me smoke you
[PaulS] 🚭
[katherine] I VOLUNTEER
[StephC] How many people are planning to do one next year?
[bphennessy] I'm out for next year. Going to start doing Spring Things from now on I think
[jojo🐸] I'm considering Spring Thing next time instead (due to the typical length of my games). What appeals to you about the other comp?
[StephC] I don't know if the one I'm going now will be ready in time, but we'll see. I just think the ranking is so harsh for that one, though. There can be only two! (and it was the same one last year I think)
[bphennessy] I think more ribbons would be a cool thing for that festival. But honestly I like the idea of there being few enough games that placement doesn't quite matter.
[Glass Rat] I'll probably participate next year, since I didn't really give it a proper shot this time aorund
[Sirwol] I'm in the same boat as Glass Rat. I ran myself way too short on playtesting time, so if I start now, I'll hopefully have something nice and polished next year.
[catacalypto] I might? Probably will
[Ade👺] I am beginning the design on a new game, but it's a big one. May take more thanb a year.
[easily amused🐱] Is a big IF Comp an engine of disregard?
[bphennessy] I argue it'd be less so if the authors were allowed to talk about their own works a bit.
[easily amused🐱] But some are reticent.
[bphennessy] A silent wall of games can be a bit hard to engage with
[gostyax] Not for me
[gostyax] I don't want to be influenced by knowing the author intentions ahead of time
[bphennessy] No, not for all but definitely for some.
[bphennessy] Like you show non-IFComp people 50 IF games and they'll be like. "Okay, what now?"
[jmac] Yeah this is a big deal
[jmac] The #1 most-asked question from people was "Uh, ok, which games are the *short* ones" and I wanna add it some author-voluntary info fields to help with that
[AndrewS] It may make it hard for people to spend time on games like SPY INTRIGUE
[easily amused🐱] Other comps don't have a time limit.
[AndrewS] I think in this case it can make sense as a game taking, say, 5 hours could legitimately sidetrack people
[AndrewS] And I think people may subconsciously value games you can just get through over ones with complex ideas, because they don't take up too much time
[CMG] It's funny, because one review for M.S. praised it for being "not too philosophical," which I think is pretty silly considering what M.S. is doing. But nevertheless, this reviewer enjoyed their own perception of it as being fluffy. At the same time, I got the sense that they were displeased with it because they didn't think it was doing enough.
[easily amused🐱] There's a history of underestimating games you can finish fast which benefit from replaying.
[furkle] did you see the mr. creosote review that whined about "GIRLS AREN'T NAMED FERDINAND"
[catacalypto] what. no
[PaulS] That was special.
[furkle] hahaha one sec
[CMG] Yeah, I had to roll my eyes at that.
[furkle] http://www.goodolddays.net/article/id%2C20/The+21st+Annual+Interactive+Fiction+Competition.html
[MaiMai] Link title: The 21st Annual Interactive Fiction Competition - The Good Old Days
[furkle] P.S. Who calls a woman "Ferdinand" (clearly a male-only name)?
[catacalypto] "clearly" :sides:
[Sequitur] We really need :ironicat: in here
[Sequitur] (SA represent?)
[catacalypto] er that was meant to be sides.
[catacalypto] SIDE EYES, fuck autocorrect.
[bphennessy] Also even in our world Ferdinand would be a dope name for a girl.
[CMG] Yes, it would! My thoughts exactly.
[CMG] Not a surprise that someone would reject any notion of gender fluidity. I was actually shocked that M.S. placed as well as it did considering that theme.
[PaulS] Ah. But there was sausage. That made it all OK.
[Doug O.] 🍆
[furkle] i was wondering a lot about that -- was that purely to reflect the old shakespearean tradition of gender fluidity in casting, (or having men play everyone), or was it more of an overall genderfluid move?
[PaulS] I thought it was more than just the shakespeare shtick. The phrasing of what was going on behind the polar bear, for instance.
[Doug O.] I wondered that too!
[Doug O.] although the casting thing didn't occur to me until much later
[Doug O.] despite the playscript and all the other trappings, it never sunk in that I was in a play
[bphennessy] god THAT shit was the worst. (the review not the game)
[katherine] oh cool, another bad review
[furkle] sorry :( if it's at all helpful their review was the point at which i told my friend to stop even checking their page to read to me, because it was so offensively valueless that i wrote them all off
[bphennessy] I love when people are like "THIS WORLD IS DIFFERENT AND MORE INTERESTING THAN MY OWN. *scoff*"
[katherine] "people will tell you this is good, but don't believe them, this is crap" is not exactly conducive to my wanting to trust any other reviews
[katherine] I really don't know
[jbd] Don't forget guys, I've got something new being announced ... pretty much as soon as this is done.
[easily amused🐱] :spam:
[catacalypto] 👌
[PaulS] It's not just the number. It's the number of LONG games and the number of DECENT games. There weren't lots of short crappy games you could dismiss in five minutes. In fact there weren't any. This made it hard for me as a reader.
[gostyax] Obv the solution is for y'all to start submitting more crap games /s
[PaulS] Where were the homebrew parser dungeon crawls that crash after three commands?
[katherine] on it
[Hanon.O] Me too. I'm going to build a Towers of Hanoi simulator.
[katherine] I'm going to write another entry, that should get the job done
[bphennessy] Another thing that could have really helped this year: tagging.
[emshort] one of the things I found when I reached out to various people to ask them to review: they mostly really wanted help picking a game that might fit their own interests
[emshort] like I said "you can pick something or I can try to help you find something" and "help" was vastly preferred
[bphennessy] Yeah I thought that "If you like such-and-such" thing in the roundup was great.
[jbd] yeah, I found your "interests" post kind of cool
[CMG] People really wanted short games.
[emshort] matching up possible reviewers to games involved even more of that
[PaulS] Hugely helpful. I thought that added a lot.
[catacalypto] that was really helpful, yes.
[gostyax] But even that requires someone to be making that judgment
[emshort] sure -- I'm not saying this should be a primary voting mechanism at all, just that in this one case where I was trying to engage people from outside the core community, "I don't know what I'll like, please help" was a big deal
[emshort] (I still have a bunch of people who've promised more content, btw, though I also honestly expect some of them may drop out again as we head into holiday season)
[Fangz] I think tagging is a bit dangerous
[easily amused🐱] If I could avoid romance plots I could avoid downvoting them.
[katherine] ...you still can avoid downvoting them?
[easily amused🐱] The structure of having one ending doesn't seem interactive to me.
[joshg] how does that have anything to do with romance plots in particular?
[Fangz] yeah but you could imagine people bloc downvoting or upvoting certain tags
[easily amused🐱] Tags are spoilers.
[Fangz] Also a problem
[Fangz] like I didn't realise the romance in Birdland was actually a thing
[Fangz] so like if it was tagged 'lesbian romance' or whatever that would have been bad for the experience
[gostyax has a broken H key] Yeah, that's another consideration
[gostyax has a broken H key] Reactive voting based on tags
[easily amused🐱] 👍
[bphennessy] To be fair I wouldn't have forewarned anyone about the romance even if that had been an option. Which again I think is why author-controlled tags would be preferable.
[jojo🐸] Even if you did want to include spoilery tags, you could have the tags hidden in the an expandable box.
[Doug O.] +1
[gostyax has a broken H key] I feel like tagging entries is great for archiving and reccing, but when you're judging, I don't think anyone else should be recommending anything to you, even the authors
[Fangz] I still think the Pure ifcomp experience is to be thrown a randomised list of games and play as many as you can
[verityvirtue] devoid of outside influence would be best
[Doug O.] I tried hard to sequester myself. Though I did read reviews after finishing a game
[Doug O.] and in some cases discovered I had missed a fair bit of content and went back and re-played and re-rated
[Doug O.] I tried not to let review opinions influence me but surely they did a little.
[gostyax has a broken H key] ^
[Fangz] and people should be nudged towards that
[bphennessy] Okay but again we already have blurbs.
[Doug O.] the cover and blurb are part of the game IMO
[Doug O.] not that I explicitly added or subtracted pointed based on them but I didn't avoid their framing.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Which I don't read
[bphennessy] So the scenario you describe doesn't exist
[bphennessy] Okay so don't read tags then.
[gostyax has a broken H key] But the comp is obviously not set up to ENCOURAGE "pure" voting
[bphennessy] problem solved?
[gostyax has a broken H key] And the question is, is that a good thing?
[bphennessy] I mean I don't think "pure" voting is possible
[AndrewS] Yeah, the perfect is the enemy of the good, as the old quote goes, but all the same I get the feeling we are missing some good guidelines to help people get closer
[jojo🐸] And with 50+ games, most folk aren't going to play all the games in the comp that they might actually most enjoy.
[emshort] it's "purer" in a sense, but it's a terrible hook for outsiders to say "hey, pick anything at all from this bag and we're not gonna tell you what you might like"
[PaulS] Yes!
[catacalypto] 👍; and I think accessibility is something that authors especially are really interested in expanding
[Sequitur] I think most authors are more interested in having people play and enjoy their games than in trying to maintain some vaunted set of procedural fairness rules, yes
[Doug O.] the comp is not just for authors. the comp is not just for authors.
[Sequitur] Fair, but
[Sequitur] Who is the procedural fairness serving if not authors?
[Doug O.] future players.
[Fangz] 👍
[Doug O.] and the art form as a whole, if you want to be grandiose
[emshort] Hm. The thing is, I think future players tend to grab things more based on community canon than on strict ranking -- like, Shade didn't place that brilliantly compared to how much it's been discussed and played afterwards. Or Rameses. Or howling dogs, for that matter.
[Doug O.] Sure, IF comp placement is not the only or the most important signal or goal. But I don't think that means we should care less about fairness.
[Sequitur] Yeah
[katherine] all of those ranked pretty well, though
[Sequitur] It seems like the ranking is only really going to inform people in the period from the end of the comp to the Xyzzies
[katherine] #10, #13, #11
[Sequitur] And things like IFDB ratings, word of mouth, &c will matter more in the end.
[Sequitur] Besides, valuation of art is contextual
[Sequitur] Even if we assume that today's judges are perfectly objective, their ranking will not necessarily maintain its validity over time
[Doug O.] stpo saying objective :)
[catacalypto] exactly - and more transparency in that sense is only to the good
[Fangz] well, I think those people can possibly wait until the results are announced :p
[furkle] this is basically a reiteration of 15 conversations we had on the author forum, and that one huge one we had on the public forum; i'll reiterate that it's painfully simple and easy to break the rules secretly as it is, and loosening the rules makes it no easy at all to do so
[Fangz] I mean, you can imagine a worst case scenario
[Sequitur] Well
[Fangz] of there being a really good game, that gets ignored
[furkle] of course i can, but that's not the best perspective for policy-making
[catacalypto] something something Anglophone politics in 2015
[furkle] david cameron announces "Inform games are officially, 100% better than anything that's ever made in Twine. Parser is the heart and soul of interactive fiction and historical revisionism will not stand."
[catacalypto] Jeremy Corbyn comes out in defense of Twine 1; the rest of Labour makes snarky comments about why he's not using Twine 2.
[Sequitur] next morning the front page of the Guardian is all op-eds about how Jez is soft on Twine
[furkle] jimmy carr suggests that jeremy corbyn only uses jonah because he played even cowgirls bleed and has a big huge crush on christine love
[Sequitur] interviewer: "Did your mum make that CSS?"
[Sequitur] corbyn: "Yes. Yes she did."
[Sequitur] Under the current rules
[Fangz] because everyone focuses on the safe choice of games
[Sequitur] Nothing stops me from sidling up to my close personal friend $60000_twitter_followers and saying "hey, when you're scrolling through the IFComp games list, if you happen to see anything that is Good Content, maybe you'd want to organically share that with your social media audience."
[furkle] right, and one of us can easily sidle up to certain journalists with dangerously multi-colored hair and say "hey, tell everyone to vote for this game, but be cryptic"
[Doug O.] nothing but your personal code of ethics
[AndrewS] If that happened, though, it'd be pretty obvious and JMac would track it down like when he was able to get the 2 entries to withdraw. Evidence would come out
[Fangz] I think it's just too early to try to tell judges what games they might like, when the results aren't in yet
[Fangz] right but we can reach towards that
[bphennessy] I don't actually think we can. Every system influences the results one way or another. To work towards an impossible "purity" would just mask the biases loaded into whatever system we ultimately go with.
[bphennessy] The comp will always be unfair. The question is, in what way will it be unfair?
[catacalypto] 👍 This is a really important articulation.
[StephC] Yeah, I agree, I've seen so many people talking about "bias" this way and that--it's a subjective ranking, every voter is bringing hundreds of biases to it.
[StephC] There's no way to avoid that.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Every voter brings their own biases. The goal is to avoid other people's biases as much as possible
[Fangz] well, I think there's still validity in saying what our default behaviour is. Like personally I don't like that games display in alphabetical order by default
[emshort] "PS some of these are really hard, take five hours to finish, involve mechanics you may be unfamiliar with because you're not a parser devotee, ..."
[gostyax has a broken H key] So you open it, find that it's too hard or unfamiliar, and close it again
[gostyax has a broken H key] The two-hour rule is also in place
[PaulS] But ... well I think quite a few things here were not realistically finishable in two hours, even by someone who knew what they were doing.
[gostyax has a broken H key] No, I mean the two-hour rule that says "Judge it only by the first two hours and you can stop playing right then"
[PaulS] Sure. But who wants to start playing a game in the expectation that they may very likely not be able to finish it, or be required to judge it on less than it's best self.
[gostyax has a broken H key] That's on the author, isn't it?
[gostyax has a broken H key] That's literally in the comp rules
[gostyax has a broken H key] It's not "entrants must submit two-hour games", it's "judges only judge two hours"
[emshort] yeah, but if I'm reaching out to someone who has no vested interest in *judging* per se, only an interest in checking out some new IF, "here's a game that may take way longer than you expected" is again not a selling point. And "you can stop, having had a disappointing incomplete experience" isn't a big seller either
[gostyax has a broken H key] But we're talking about the ballot
[bphennessy] Well the comp is more than the ballot though.
[gostyax has a broken H key] If we're talking just outreach, that can be done after the comp
[gostyax has a broken H key] I.e., after the voting has finished
[bphennessy] I think that argument is really weak actually.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Why?
[bphennessy] Obviously it's better to have people involved DURING the comp rather than after it
[Doug O.] this is not obvious to me at all.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Even if they're not voting?
[gostyax has a broken H key] What's the difference?
[bphennessy] I mean maybe they'll become a voter
[bphennessy] But also like an ongoing event is a way easier sell than one that's already done.
[bphennessy] Like this is the release window for these games. Strike while the iron is hot and all that.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Take Birdland, for instance
[gostyax has a broken H key] despite the rec that sparked the Tumblr explosion, how many of those interested parties became voters?
[bphennessy] Roughly zero because IFComp was not mentioned in any of the posts that brought users to birdland
[gostyax has a broken H key] I'm curious as to how it was originally found!
[bphennessy] word of mouth. It was spreading a little itty bit around before the big blow up post
[Fangz] I think it was somewhat key that the rec linked to the game directly
[Fangz] and not the comp
[Fangz] yeah
[Fangz] like had bphennessy had a little URL link and the end of the game saying, 'okay, now go vote for this game!!!' that would have been huge.
[Doug O.] The About page had a pretty prominent link to the Comp site.
[bphennessy] But no "vote for this game" call to action
[Fangz] IMHO
[bphennessy] But see that I think should just be against the rules.
[Fangz] Hmm, I don't think it is?
[bphennessy] To canvas for votes within a game? We can ask @jmac but I suspect that's a bit of a no-no
[Hanon.O] My next year entry is called VOTE FOR THIS GAME.
[furkle] *A VOTE FOR THIS GAME
[Sequitur] A WISH FOR A BETTER RANKING IN THE IFCOMP
[Hanon.O] It's ironic
[Fangz] There have been entries called 'terrible game'
[furkle] i believe the lowest-ranked game ever is named something like "THE WORST IFCOMP GAME EVER MADE"
[AndrewS] http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=xngl0h6oh6gpo0fo "perfect" 22/22 1's
[MaiMai] Link title: The Absolute Worst IF Game in History - Details
[furkle] lmao
[PaulS] The most successful lowest-ranked game ever then
[Hanon.O] "000A VOTE FOR THIS GAME"
[Hanon.O] so it's on top of the list
[StephC] "Vote this game a 10" maybe, but is it against the rules to just to ask people to vote?
[jojo🐸] I had joked with Melvin that our next game should be called 00Aardvark!
[furkle] it better be about tow truck drivers or bail bondsmen
[jojo🐸] Yes, but all the protagonists are aardvarks.
[furkle] fitting
[PaulS] So long as you don't have to cook them.
[Hanon.O] I was pretty jazzed that I had completely organically chosen a title that would feature early in the list...but no...IFComp does not disregard THE in alphabetizing, much to my chagrin.
[Doug O.] sadhorns
[Sequitur] I'm pretty sure it is
[jmac] Vote-canvassing is explicitly contraindicated by the rules, yes.
[gostyax has a broken H key] targeted recs are targeted, individual
[gostyax has a broken H key] specific to games and not to the comp
[gostyax has a broken H key] Right, I don't think "possible" is a productive criterion. Many impossible things we strive for worthily.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Rather, the criterion of "what would this bring to the comp"
[bphennessy] Also like it's much easier for people who don't want to be influenced by this information to ignore it when it does exist than it is for people who want it to find it when it doesn't.
[bphennessy] Like you can always just close your eyes and pick a random game if you want. But not everyone wants to and nor should they.
[bphennessy] (nor should they be forced to, I mean)
[Fangz] Yes but I think if (this is an if) we have preferred behaviour we can make it easier than the other way round
[Fangz] like it's pretty hard to close your eyes and choose a random game
[Fangz] you could hypothetically not display a blurb until the player asks to see it
[Fangz] you could start with a random sort - or even an 'in reverse order of the number of voters' sort - and let the judge click to sort alphabetically
[StephC] You can just download a big zip if you really don't want any information.
[bphennessy] This is what I keep coming around to. If you don't WANT info you can avoid it. But people clearly do, so why deny them?
[Fangz] yes, yes, the point is not that it's impossible to do these things
[Fangz] but the design of the system makes it harder than the other way round.
[Fangz] So we're not denying them, we're asking them to try the alternative first
[bphennessy] I mean let me put it this way. All this info you don't want people seeing can already be put in blurbs. This is allowed by the rules and I really don't see there being any support at all for eliminating blurbs.
[bphennessy] So like the barn door, as it were, is already open.
[StephC] Why should that way be first? Especially covering up the blurbs. Making the blurb is part of presenting the game.
[Fangz] blurbs aren't sortable.
[Fangz] so changing from blurbs to tags makes a real difference, it makes certain behaviours a lot easier.
[bphennessy] but like is that REALLY the thing that makes it intolerable. "Well having this information out there is one thing but if people can SORT it!!!"
[Fangz] I don't think there's a strict dividing line
[StephC] I think that would be great--it would make it so much easier for people to find game they'll like.
[Fangz] it'll make it so much easier for people to ONLY play games they think they'll like
[bphennessy] People already do this and frankly that's totally acceptable behaviour.
[bphennessy] You are not obliged to play games you do not think you will like
[Fangz] I think that's problematic for judging
[furkle] wait, not to seem aggressive, because i don't mean to, but didn't you say you quit after less than an hour and rating SI low to get your 5th play in?
[bphennessy] The only requirement is that judges play five games, chosen by any criteria they would like.
[Fangz] well, look at the oscars
[Sequitur] Oscars voting is a MESS
[Sequitur] People who are Oscar voters get direct-mail ads for movies
[catacalypto] seriously don't talk to me about what a mess Oscars voting is
[catacalypto] I'm being flip but honestly it's - not a good metric
[bphennessy] Again though it's the reality
[ba] Years when I see a bunch of Best Picture nominees I typically think, "I have no idea how to compare these films against one another because they are all so different. Different artistic styles, different artistic goals. Is IF Comp like that?
[Sequitur] It seems counterproductive trying to enforce standards of fairness on judges that are, after all, just general members of the public
[emshort] possibly controversial suggestion: the comp would be a better experience for everyone if most judges mostly played only the types of games that they would enjoy
[bphennessy] I think this is actually 100% true.
[jepflast] True, and I think it's what is supposed to happen anyway, to some degree
[Sequitur] 👍
[furkle] 👍
[catacalypto] 👍
[Fangz] emshort: I think it'd be dramatically worse
[StephC] I think that would be a big improvement.
[Fangz] I think it would make the competition a contest of demographics
[furkle] it already is!
[furkle] 100%
[Sequitur] But a niche game that is beloved within its niche won't do worse than a broad-appeal game that is just okay
[Sequitur] I mean, we already see this; the parser people self-select to play parser games and rate them higher
[Hanon.O] When people vote, they should not be putting 1s of Hate on games that are in a system they don't like.
[Hanon.O] There's all kinds of people who are like "I don't even bother with the parser games because I can't figure them out" so that kind of happens.
[Sequitur] And yet, people do vote 1s for inscrutable reasons
[Hanon.O] I got a 1 for making a game in Storynexus.
[Sequitur] Which is fine, it's part and parcel of the process
[Sequitur] But it highlights the sort of illusion that the system is inherently objective
[Hanon.O] But...since you only need to vote for five games, it's not a huge deal (unless say, there were only 2 choice games in the comp)
[Sequitur] You don't benefit from having a bigger or smaller demographic, I don't think
[ba] Could a game win if only one person voted on it and gave it a 10?
[ba] Or is there a devoted core who votes on all games to prevent that?
[ba] The final score for a game is simply the average, right?
[Sequitur] Theoretically it could happen but some people vote on every game
[ba] That's what I was hoping was true.
[jojo🐸] No, a game has to have at least 10 votes to be counted.
[ba] That makes good sense.
[Fangz] instead of an attempt to discover games
[emshort] it is totally already a contest of demographics
[bphennessy] and if discovery is the goal, more information is better than less.
[Fangz] I totally disagree. You see e.g. the app store
[Fangz] where people just play endless match-3 clones
[Sequitur] Says who?
[bphennessy] the app store has miserable discoverability. It is notoriously poor in that respect.
[Fangz] Right, and hence it shows information isn't everything
[bphennessy] Er, no. It shows that untargeted information that's difficult to search is not helpful
[Fangz] on the app store the user is supplied with copious info. 'Games like this one', games other people who purchased play, listings of most popular games, they can search by any text entry they want...
[Sequitur] Also
[Sequitur] You can't really compare the crowded environment of an app store
[Sequitur] To an IFComp with 50 or so games
[Fangz] but the net result is that it's really easy to play what you think you'd like, and impossible to find something new
[bphennessy] But is the argument seriously that having tags would make it HARDER to find something new in IFComp? That seems ridiculous to me on its face.
[Fangz] the argument is that having tags would make it harder for the comp, as a combined body, to identify something new
[Sequitur] It's very conceivable that a judge can look over all 50 games and see all their tags
[Fangz] yeah but such a judge would likely be swamped by the people who only play a few games
[Sequitur] But comp scores are averages
[Sequitur] There's no benefit from having more people play your game
[bphennessy] I mean most people do not play all 50 games.
[Sequitur] Except inasmuch that if your audience heavily self-selects, you will get a higher score
[Fangz] people who play a genre exclusively are less likely to see problems with it people who play other games do
[Sequitur] Which is, again, already what happens, but only in very restricted ways
[Sequitur] Also, the comp already is bad at identifying new things
[Sequitur] Experimental games do poorly
[katherine] they didn't always
[katherine] ~1999 was the sweet spot for this sort of thing
[katherine] Exhibition, My Angel, etc, all placed top 10 where that was top 25%-33%
[furkle] i guess the more interesting question is "why do experimental games do so poorly nowadays"
[Sequitur] the people are philistines etc
[Sequitur] (not really)
[verityvirtue] isn't that the point of experimental games :P
[furkle] to do poorly? idk, i guess that depends mostly on how you define "experimental." if you define it as "uncompromising/unpopular," then yeah. if it's more like Kid A type experimentalism, not really?
[verityvirtue] no, to challenge some held convention - so by definition, being an exploration of some aspect of IF/games/etc. they won't fit into some people's ideas of what makes a good game
[furkle] i don't know if i agree with the fact those two halves fit together! plenty of experimental work, historically, has made people go "oh wow, why didn't we ever do this before!"
[StephC] Yeah, they're experiments--by their nature, they're trying things that may not work.
[furkle] i suspect it has something to do with a vaguely, slightly reactionary stance as IF has declined in popularity
[CMG] I mean, I consider M.S. to be pretty experimental, and it did well. Maybe other people don't see it as experimental.
[furkle] in some ways, certainly! but it's also a parser game, which allows it a certain leeway in that sense. it's also just very, very, very well-made, which helps a lot
[PaulS] It was more experimental than it looked, perhaps.
[furkle] certainly -- it starts you off easy, and draws you into its experimentalism somewhat slowly
[CMG] It was a parser game, and that definitely got it some slack, but it totally stops you short from trying all the standard parser business. And I think the content, the narrative, the plot structure is certainly experimental.
[PaulS] I don't disagree. But I think some people -- how can I put this: some people don't mind things that are experimental so long as it's not obvious that they are experimental, if you see what I mean.
[furkle] point #3: it appears somewhat standard in setting, as well; fantasy has tended to dominate ifcomp, historically-speaking
[PaulS] I think M.S. did benefit from being a bit sly and humble about its experimental proclivities.
[emshort] ...huh
[PaulS] That's not a criticism at all.
[emshort] I loved M.S. and I loved it in large part because I felt like it wore its experiment on its sleeve. And its hat. And everywhere else.
[catacalypto] hmm. that's an interesting thought.
[emshort] Like, I opened it and thought "oh my god this looks awesome please actually carry through on this experiment please please"
[CMG] See, I didn't think it was being sly and humble. But I'm not objecting to its reception! It has encouraged me to keep doing weird stuff, because apparently I can get away with it.
[catacalypto] please please do
[PaulS] Perhaps I'm quite wrong. By the time I played it, I'd read reviews, so I had some idea what I was expecting.
[furkle] well i guess in part we're talking about different kinds of experiments; those that look like ordinary fiction and trojan-horse their way in, in certain ways, and those that wear it on their sleeve. in this case i feel like M.S. did a little of both, but the way it fucked with time felt very much like a fairly standard parser puzzle, applied in very unexpected ways. (i'm thinking of the maze in photopia right now, where you learn that what you needed was to literally think outside the box.)
[PaulS] Yes. This.
[CMG] Actually, that's another thing. The time element got so much attention, but I consider that among the least novel elements of the game. The reason I did included the time traveling was because I wanted scenes to appear to be available and then have them slide out of your reach, because you can't actually tamper with time as much as you think you can.
[CMG] I consider the waking up, the playscript, the different endings, and the story itself all to be more experimental than the time travel directions.
[emshort] well, what appealed to me was the idea of being able to traverse the narrative space -- which encompasses all of those mechanics -- and tweak and explore it
[CMG] Yeah, I hoped it would all fold together.
[bphennessy] I think there was a ton of parser experimentation this year and what's great is they all felt very different from one another
[CMG] Again, I did not expect it to place as well as it did.
[katherine] it's sort of an "if you build it they will come" thing
[katherine] 1999-ish was when you had stuff like the IF Art Show, you had entire bucketloads of people trying to emulate Photopia, etc
[katherine] a general feeling of "whoa, IF can do this? amazing"
[jojo🐸] Has IF really declined in popularity? The comp has been as vibrant as ever.
[furkle] i think it has outside the comp and the small community. certainly it gets a lot less writeups as before, but that's been changing over the past 2 or 3 years
[emshort] what time frame are you talking about here as the "before"?
[furkle] i guess 1993-2000/2004?
[furkle] that's very vague
[furkle] by "writeups" i mean outside blogging/newsgroups
[emshort] I feel like the community was almost completely invisible in that time period, unless you knew about rec.*.int-fiction
[furkle] hm, you're very probably more right than me. i'm mostly basing this less on my own observations than a sort of headless-chicken sort of vibe i've gotten from a lot of people -- IF IS DYING! SAVE THE TRUE, PURE IF
[furkle] but maybe that's always been there
[furkle] maybe they're not valid data in this case
[emshort] yeah, I mean, the trad IF community always styled itself -- from the beginning -- as preserving a dying art
[emshort] post-Infocom
[emshort] SPAG was the Society for the Preservation of Adventure Games
[emshort] the indie gaming explosion and the ability to distribute games over the web made IF significantly more visible, and mobile/Patreon/etc has made it significantly more likely to make money again (though still not, like, *very* likely to make *very much* money)
[furkle] fair point, the chickens lose their edge
[furkle] i suppose a lot of this is less the decrease in trad IF and more the extreme increase in non-trad-IF that's driving those opinions
[emshort] yeah, even if you're looking at a decline in parser IF production, I think a) it hasn't been that great a decline and b) a lot of the decline that has happened has come about because people have stopped forcing non-parser ideas into a parser sleeve. there used to be some really terrible janky bad games made because people wanted to tell a story that would honestly be better paced and presented in Twine. and now mostly they don't do that.
[bphennessy] This is a question that 100% depends on your definition of "IF". I would argue if you take the broad view it's probably more popular now than it has ever been in history.
[StephC] Pretty much all videos games are "interactive fiction", but people tend to go with the historical definition where it referred to text-only parser puzzle games.
[StephC] They were just text-only by necessity, though.
[katherine] it's sort of done a reverse parabola
[StephC] It kind of depends how you define it, because I see adventure-puzzle games as basically the decendents of Infocom games, and those still exist as commercial products today (Broken Age, the new King's Quest, etc.)
[furkle] right, and part of the amnesia is that text-based games were for most of their true heyday made because it wasn't really possible to do those things graphically. Adventure is almost comically sparse
[StephC] DAMN THIS NAVIGATION GAH
[CMG] I'm with you Steph. I'm missing a lot here.
[StephC] I think people define it specifically as 'text', but for me the fact that a game's in text isn't what's important. I make them in text because that's what I have the capacity to do.
[Sequitur] To be fair, graphical adventure games dipped pretty hard in the late 90s/early aughts
[StephC] Too many cat hair moustache puzzles.
[emshort] It occurs to me that there's a possibility here other than the "actually have multiple panels" approach that Sequitur suggested before, which is to do something a bit like first-round IGF judging
[Sequitur] Oh?
[emshort] where there is a large pool of judges all of whom can vote on different things, but you can acknowledge things in specific categories (like e.g. mark something to say you think it should be considered for the Nuovo or the Narrative prize or whatever)
[emshort] the actual assignment of those prizes is then determined later by a dedicated committee, and that might be a bit much to replicate
[emshort] but there could be a thing for "give each game a number but then you can also do a checkbox if you think it deserves Super Experimental Awesomeness which is a separate prize"
[Sequitur] Right, so you'd have ranked voting for the general list
[Sequitur] But also a first-past-the-post set of votes for various special prizes
[emshort] right
[furkle] but: isn't this kinda the point of XYZZY?
[emshort] yeah, but isn't the reason we're talking about this because people aren't satisfied with waiting for the XYZZYs and/or don't feel they do enough to call out the cool stuff from the comp?
[furkle] hm, okay, good point
[katherine] plus the first round of xyzzy voting is arguably way more overwhelming to new voters than the comp
[katherine] if you think 53 is a lot, the first round basically throws an entire list of literally everything that was tagged as if that year
[Sequitur] Yeah
[Sequitur] Also, until this year (when this changes), only nominating one game per category REALLY puts the pressure on
[Sequitur] You feel like a bit of a chump if you're not positively sure it's literally the game with the best _____ in the entire year
[emshort] I mean, it's similar to your concept but I think might have less overhead
[Sequitur] It would definitely be organisationally easier
[Sequitur] The thing is though, it might end up rewarding the frontrunners anyway
[Sequitur] Having a different pool of voters does more to foster diversity, I think. (Eg see how different the Ms Congeniality rankings are from the regular rankings)
[Sequitur] Also, the first-past-the-post system *would* reward popularity in the way the ranked vote doesn't;
[Sequitur] (Though I guess you could math that out by averaging votes for special prizes based on the number of regular votes the game got, so that games that get played a lot don't have an advantage?)
[emshort] yeah, I'm assuming there's a way to handwave the math on this
[Sequitur] I'm not a statistician, but I think you could divide the number of special prize votes by the number of general votes
[emshort] but I mean if there's a specifically nuovo-styled award, I'm guessing that might not go the same way as the general votes
[catacalypto] 👍 that was my thinking as well, but I didn't want to be the first one to say it in case that impression was underinformed
[Sequitur] So you get a percentile of judges who both judged this game and thought it merited a special award.
[emshort] yeah
[Sequitur] You could also have a setup where certain groups are specifically empowered to vote for certain awards, without it being an explicitly-picked panel. Eg, alumni of past comps.
[bphennessy] I definitely like the idea of more awards at IF comp.
[catacalypto] as do i.
[bphennessy] I mean I think the 2015 results show there are limitations to a single ranked list.
[catacalypto] yes,
[Sequitur] 👍
[katherine] idk, I feel like this is a thing all the authors think but literally no one else
[Doug O.] +1
[jmac] I have concerns about it too
[jmac] And I mean to address in the wrap-up post the fact I saw a lot of "Oh, I thought this would do better" when I want to say "Ugh, it was great, but then we cruelly force all the games to form a single-file line against their will and this happens"
[jmac] (not in so many words, perhaps)
[Sequitur] Well, as the number and overall quality of games increases, this is kind of what happens
[Sequitur] People are working from a standard built over past years
[Sequitur] So when you have the Best Comp Ever, of course there's this sensation of "oh, X, Y, and Z are criminally underrated"
[Sequitur] Because we're gauging our expectations of how they'll do based on past years with less games and a lower overall quality level
[Fangz] I think there's substantial advantages to a single ranked list 👍
[Doug O.] I do too and I think it isn't the final word on a game's value
[PaulS] I think it. But I also think there is merit in simplicity.
[bphennessy] I mean maybe but non-authors might think differently if we actually tried it.
[katherine] cf "don't believe the people who say this is actually good, it's ot"
[katherine] *ot
[katherine] damn it *not
[katherine] I have a bad N key
[bphennessy] The thing is I don't think we need to change the comp into this huge like matrix of results
[Sequitur] Yeah
[bphennessy] But having little call-outs on the entry in the same way we do Golden Banana or whevs
[verityvirtue] special features are quite fun - nice way to call out something cool/etc which one game did, but wasn't overall popular
[Doug O.] Best Use Of Punching
[bphennessy] Best Use Of Cats
[PaulS] Best Use For Cats
[bphennessy] 💯
[katherine] Best NPCs (Non-Player Cats)
[katherine] Best PC (Player Cat)
[bphennessy] fuckkkkkk
[verityvirtue] 💯
[Doug O.] BEST USE OF CAPS
[furkle] 👍
[katherine] in all seriousness though I feel like this would come off as consolation prizes to many people
[PaulS] Yeah a sort of caucus race.
[furkle] yeah there's a definite risk of "sparkly awards" syndrome
[emshort] mmf, I feel I should explain that all over again, not that it would help
[furkle] that totally wasn't a dig at you! i actually felt really bad about that. my read on it was that "sparkly" was meant more as somewhat cute and feminine than treacly, but some people seemed to feel otherwise
[emshort] but I'd really like, at least sometimes, not to have to be trying to write consumer reviews and thoughtful critique and personal feedback and encouragement to the author *as the same document* because it just doesn't always work
[emshort] so we came up with this framing a long time ago and it just hadn't been used much in the meantime
[emshort] and also because, I guess, I remember how I used to feel this sinking dread sometimes seeing a new review pop up until I'd found out what the author's take was, and so it seemed like it would be nice to have at least one venue where, if a review turned up there, you knew it was going to be okay.
[jbd] I think what Sparkly needs to have is not 'reviews' but 'analysis' or 'commentary' or some such
[jbd] I think authors get as much warm fuzzies from analysis as they do reviews
[emshort] well most of what was there was "here is a thing I liked about this game", which isn't exactly in the same territory as the usual review
[katherine] analysis is great
[katherine] the only minor quibble -- this is completely as an author and not about any reviewer -- is that it's somewhat hard to extrapolate "yes, but do they think this is any good"
[jbd] here is a thing I liked about this game kinda counts as analysis anyway, right?
[katherine] yeah but it can be taken a number of ways
[katherine] "here is a thing I particularly liked, I could list 50 more if I had space" vs "ugh, *fine*, I guess I can dig for something good in this"
[jbd] I mean, if I wrote a post *specifically* about War in the Willows, it wouldn't be implied I slap down the mechanics, just that's the sort of thing I might be able to dig and is worth focus on specifically
[jbd] er, poetry in War of the Willows
[Sequitur] Well, if they had actual prizes...
[Doug O.] there is a mechanism for conditional prizes. Didn't get used this year as much as last year
[bphennessy] Really? Have they been used much in the past?
[Doug O.] not much, no.
[Doug O.] but the potential is definitely there. The problem is predicting ahead of time what cool things you want to award
[Doug O.] but I think you could totally give an award to the result of some panel vote or something
[Doug O.] (of course you can just do that outside the comp too)
[katherine] iirc last year or the year before there was some averted drama
[katherine] one person put up a prize like "this prize can only go to a parser game"
[jojo🐸] Yep, so someone ponied up a choice only prize pool to match it.
[katherine] and then there was a "what, this could have caused drama? I had NO IDEA!"
[katherine] (I mean, I believed them, it just prompted a bit of a "...uh yeah")
[Doug O.] I think that led to ParserComp which produced some great games so happy ending
[bphennessy] I mean it depends how we frame them maybe.
[PaulS] Big gold frames.
[catacalypto] yeah - I think it would have to be limited to things like "best writing" "best use of innovation" "best 'holy shit I didn't know you could do that in [x] platform' moment"
[bphennessy] Yeah
[catacalypto] like, SPY INTRIGUE I am glad got the Banana, because it was great, but I'd have loved to give it a "holy shit you can DO that in Twine" nod
[furkle] that's best saved for my next entry! it'll make SI look terribly amateur
[jojo🐸] Bold claim furkle, I look forward to seeing it come to fruition.
[piato] I feel like *reviews* do a lot of this?
[piato] Like if a person writes in a public place "this aspect of this thing was great", that's the recognition that I'm entering for?
[Sequitur] Well, the visibility on that isn't as big as I would like
[verityvirtue] an XYZZYs within IFComp?
[bphennessy] Not exactly but kinda?
[katherine] "your game scored #152 out of #154, but it had the best use of the word "flabbergasted" in a field of one
[Sequitur] This is also another reason why I like different voting bodies as opposed to "Award for ______"
[Doug O.] +1
[jmac] Interesting.
[jmac] We already sorta have that w/ the Miss Congeniality
[jmac] But, taking that cue and stretching it further, hmm
[Sequitur] "Your game did poorly among the general public, but highly-rated authors of past comps loved it" seems better than "your game did poorly in the comp but you got the award for best _______"
[furkle] Best Use Of Rocks (Spycraft)
[furkle] Best Use Of Rocks (Non-Spycraft)
[Doug O.] Special Ambergris Award
[Fangz] I think this is what the XYZZYs are for, I don't think there's a need for ifcomp to replicated the XYZZYs
[Doug O.] +1. I wish the XYZZYs got more attention than they do
[Fangz] I think part of that is the XYZZYs are just so complicated, if you are an outsider you don't really care about which game had the best single puzzle or whatever
[Fangz] the comp is much more straightforward in comparison
[Doug O.] true. Maybe we need to do the technical awards the day before like the oscars (not really)
[Sequitur] Another solution (which I've already mentioned to @emshort but I'll point out here) is that people *can* independently operate parallel awards
[Sequitur] So it's decentralised, instead of putting all the organisational burden on the comp organiser
[Sequitur] And nobody has to sit down and justify every single award to everyone
[Doug O.] absolutely. You can already do that if you want
[Doug O.] there already are two separate awards in IF proper (and one unofficial)
[jojo🐸] Sure, we could think up whatever criteria right now, make an IFWiki page for it and voila.
[Sequitur] I mean ideally there would be a prize, but yes :P
[jojo🐸] Easy enough. A physical prize (like the banana was before it was circa-Gamlet) or cash.
[jojo🐸] *was lost
[Sequitur] It's hard to argue with cash as a signaler of "take this seriously"
[jojo🐸] Sure, and paypal makes organising a whip-round of international donors to a separate award fund more viable.
[jmac] This too is interesting and also infinitely less work for me
[Sequitur] To be fair, if you decided to change the Comp format to something more organisationally intensive, it would be justifiable to deputise some volunteers to help you run things
[jmac] Mrf, I wanna do that anyway, but that's a different topic
[Sequitur] You should in any case, yeah
[Sequitur] Running the comp as a one-man show seems daunting
[Sequitur] 80 Days was a top game in iOS for weeks
[emshort] the app store totally fails to give me the information I actually want, so it supports my view rather than yours
[furkle] but that's already the case with the ifcomp
[Sequitur] App stores are bad at discovery *and* people don't play match-3 clones all that much
[katherine] everything is bad at discovery
[furkle] ban all IF
[emshort] ideally, a clone of me will be forced to play all the IF games, then tell me about the ones I like.
[Sequitur] That is actually a thing people do in the Eclipse Phase universe
[Sequitur] Fork their consciousness and use the forks as media/news/whatever filters
[emshort] the problem of course would be that the difference in experience would cause a bifurcation in our tastes and I would have to repeatedly kill my clone and get a new one made
[Sequitur] They do that, too
[emshort] dammit
[Sequitur] (Well, usually you don't "kill" a fork, you merge it)
[katherine] or else you go through a 50-step process in git bash, give up and make a new branch
[Sequitur] Existential horror: using git to manage your brain scan
[Sequitur] "Yeah I couldn't figure it out so I just wiped 30 copies of myself and started over"
[Doug O.] I would like git cherry-pick for my brain though
[katherine] recommendation algorithms are sort of like that, that kind that take into account past reading/viewing/listening history
[katherine] but then it usually ends up as "my clone's taste horrifies me"
[PaulS] ban all attempts at innovation. Every year three fine old classics will be paraded for inspection and we can all vote.
[katherine] just ask jimmy iovine! http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/jimmy-iovine-women-find-it-very-difficult/
[MaiMai] Link title: Jimmy Iovine: 'Women find it very difficult at times to find music' - Music Business Worldwide
[furkle] lmao god damnit
[furkle] this is why we make the pens pink, everyone. otherwise the ladies get too confused and fall over and damage their ovaries
[furkle] it's already extremely weighted towards escapist crowd favorites, and the top-rated games are very, very rarely experimental or genre-shifting
[Doug O.] games #2 and #3 were quiet experimental IMO.
[furkle] i guess i'm not really sure how experimental i'd consider map, and there's a conversation above about how experimental M.S. *appears*
[Doug O.] er, quite.
[furkle] ifcomp is statistically not an engine of "artistic progress," nor history-predicting, and cutting down on the amount of information can't possibly help that
[jojo🐸] I'm not sure I'd entirely agree with that sentiment, @furkle - lots of the better IF games have emerged from the comp and only would have been made because of the comp.
[furkle] they have! i'm not disagreeing with that, i'm just trying to say that there's not a terribly strong correlation that i've seen between 1st place finishes and canonization
[emshort] but one in which people who dislike the games they experience give them ones and negative reviews and are sad and complain
[emshort] to the unhappiness of everyone
[gostyax has a broken H key] I have just gone to the results page and calculated the percentage of 1-votes
[gostyax has a broken H key] Less than 3% of the votes were 1s
[gostyax has a broken H key] And now I've just tallied up the 10s, which are just over 3%, so people are exercising their max and min scores with some degree of judiciousness
[gostyax has a broken H key] Although my impression from scrolling through the games is that the 1s were more varied in their distribution than te 10s, actually
[gostyax has a broken H key] I don't THINK I remember any firmly double-digit numbers of 1-ratings per game, rather there were single-digits scattered around
[gostyax has a broken H key] Whereas with the 10s, te top few rankers got solidly double-digit numbers of 10-ratings, and the rest mostly had one 10-rating apiece at most
[gostyax has a broken H key] I do not think "dislike, give 1s" is a major force, at least not tihs year
[furkle] disagree, personally, for obvious reasons
[furkle] not in a sour grapes-type way but in a "it seemed quite clear that *many* people did exactly that, with no indication whatsoever about why"
[emshort] as someone who gave your game a pretty high score, I have a few guesses about why someone might have given it a low one
[furkle] i'd actually love to hear them! i have some theories too, and i've got a pretty significant academic interest therein
[emshort] the initial encounter with it is a bit overwhelming, both in terms of the visual stuff (caps, noisy background, etc) and because the 'read this first' portion is long. when I started it up, I was not initially sure at all what was going on with all of that, and it took me a little while to adjust, understand how the narrative mapping was working, get used to the style, etc
[emshort] and that was fine once I'd pushed through and gotten into it, and I could see that there was a purpose to those choices
[emshort] but I also could easily see someone seeing that and thinking "this is really user-unfriendly, whaaa" without understanding why those things were there
[furkle] yeah, i guess i was just surprised that there seemed to be a lot of people who didn't put much time into it. granted, it is a quite large field
[emshort] yeah, this gets back to the classic trust issue -- do you trust the game you're playing to offer you a pleasant time? does it seem like it's going to? and obviously that often ties into some very traditionalist expectations that are hard to honor in experimental work, and also "pleasant" isn't always the point
[furkle] right, i guess that's part of what i was trying to get into about M.S. -- that while it is experimental, it is fairly unpainfully so. which is nearly the opposite of mine, in the sense that it comes at you with the spines out and a seemingly desperate attempt to keep you distracted by pointless stuff
[emshort] (and also there were a couple games this comp that easily earned my trust through initial polish or writing and then that I turned out to be not so enthusiastic about)
[emshort] (Emily is Away being the strongest WTF case of this, and I don't feel bad mentioning the fact here in the circumstances)
[Sequitur] There's this thing I call a "bounce"
[Sequitur] Where your initial impression of something is so bad you don't really give it a shot
[furkle] yeah, and i found a lot of them! what was surprising was that people weren't quitting before they got to one of the no-caps death scenes, but rather immediately upon *getting* to them
[furkle] which is confusing in the sense that it suggests that people were even less interested in the quote-unquote semi-hidden, emotionally resonant content than they were the silly stuff
[emshort] oh! okay, so the other thing: when I first hit the first death scene, I didn't really understand what I was seeing, and I asked myself: is this from the protagonist's life? or from another life? are multiple lives happening in tandem? is this a thing where there are multiple layers of conflicting reality? how do I interpret this?
[jbd] I still don't know, but I haven't seen the end past the crash bug I hit yet.
[furkle] you're playing on iOS, aren't you?
[furkle] yeah, that's another huge problem, and one i was aware of -- i made a 2-3+ hour game that's really only understandable in reverse, and very probably in repeated playthroughs. the structure of the fiction isn't made totally clear, though you can kinda guess at it beforehand, until the second-to-last passage of the entire thing
[emshort] and again I could see some people getting bewildered or worse thinking "argh another fake reality game". Uh, assuming that they also had that experience that I had, which they might not have.
[jbd] I do think the contrast was really extreme in the first death jump most people hit
[jbd] (getting the gun)
[jbd] which is this _really_ off the wall section in all caps world, then turns superdepression
[jbd] I could see some players getting frustrated at that
[furkle] yeah, i'd agree with that -- i think i'd expected that would cause more interest in figuring out the structure of the world, rather than less. i honestly hadn't meant to make a polarizing game
[Sequitur] I bounced REALLY HARD off Map, for instance
[Sequitur] I read the first few rooms' worth of content and thought "God, I really do not want to spend two hours in the shoes of this miserable sad-sack protagonist whom everyone seems to hate."
[emshort] huh, I found the initial writing strong enough that I was willing to give it the benefit of etc
[Sequitur] Yeah
[emshort] also, possibly I felt more affinity for a middle-aged woman than some might
[Sequitur] I think that the adjective I had after reading a small amount of content, for that protagonist, was "simpering"
[Sequitur] Which is something that turns me off pretty hard
[Sequitur] So it probably had a higher bar to clear with me than some
[Sequitur] I wish people wouldn't vote based on reactions like that, but I suspect they do
[piato] Yeah, "I feel qualified to vote on this" varies a lot between reviewers.
[piato] Like, I'd never punish a parser-puzzle game for the fact that I can't do puzzles? But OTOH somehow "I gave up after 20 minutes of trying to find the key to the safe" seemed a valid review of K&C. Which, like, pretty sure that's just me!
[StephC] There's a difference between punishing something just for having puzzles and punishing it for having bad/broken puzzles though. K&C wasn't as bad as it could have been but needing to 'look down' to see part of the carpet is not something I ever would have got.
[katherine] idk
[katherine] I suspect at least a few might have bounced off mine for that reason
[katherine] but my last game, the protagonist was completely terrible
[emshort] but *pleasurably* terrible
[PaulS] But differently terrible.
[PaulS] And in a very "traditional" way -- Varicella, Sting of the Wasp etc etc
[furkle] yeah, i get the vague sense that a lot of people like playing women a lot better if a. they're able to roleplay in wide, terrible ways, or b. if they're able to fix their dumb women lives
[furkle] synfac isn't really either of those
[emshort] I just wanted to steer the story towards understanding what was going on
[catacalypto] this was actually one of the things I liked about the constrained interface, and which I keep meaning to write about - I felt that the story gave you enough information to piece together Roslyn's situation, but kept inexorably bringing you back to the things she'd logically be dwelling on in a situation like hers
[katherine] this is one of the things the post-comp release is addressing
[piato] I just realised something that would have helped my experience of SynFax a lot
[Hanon.O] I'm pretty sure I've posted this, but in my experience after about three moves, it seemed the parser could care less what I typed and just did what it wanted. I tried to X COMPUTER, COMPUTER, TURN ON COMPUTER about five different ways and kept getting random messages that made no sense. That made me give up within three minutes of play...if the game is not even listening to me, why am I there?
[piato] I spent the second half of my playthrough (once I got in the car) pressing z because I thought "oh huh guess I'm going somewhere?"
[piato] And there were any way the game could hint sensible commands on 'Z' that'd have super helped bad-at-IF players like me
[katherine] how do you mean?
[katherine] there's a response if someone types Z like 20 times in a row
[Doug O.] I did that in my second playthrough. Enjoyed it!
[katherine] but beyond that I didn't know how to differentiate
[piato] I think it'd have helped me (just personally, as an incompetent) a lot if my Z's had yielded text with good *nouns* to *noun*.
[katherine] code-wise it'd be easy though
[katherine] right now there really isn't much organization to the various I guess-you'd-call-them-nodes but now I have a pile of data on what people land on most
[PaulS] I hope that's not true.
[furkle] i do too! but a lot of players certainly seem to have more trouble with it
[furkle] i mean, part of this is that people who spend a lot of their time playing video games simply don't have much of any experience with fiction from the perspective of a woman
[katherine] or for that matter *by*
[furkle] certainly! and being asked to empathize with a woman rather than *be* a woman in the "oh, i'd do all this nasty shit" way are very very different modes of engagement
[Sequitur] Idk
[Sequitur] I rather liked the protagonist in SynFac
[PaulS] Actually, I didn't. But that didn't give me any problem.
[Sequitur] Maybe I'm just a godamn millennial and unable to relate to older people at all
[katherine] I'm a goddamn millennial too
[catacalypto] 👌
[Sequitur] 👍
[katherine] yeah
[StephC] I think 'bounce' is a good term although honestly Spy Intrigue lets you know what you're in for, so I'm surprised those people still played and rated it.
[StephC] Like, I saw the blurb and was immediately "oh god no", so I didn't play it and I also didn't vote (not that it would have affected placement if I had) so you'd think everyone else who would have the same revulsion at the caps would have just not entered.
[PaulS] Yeah "bounce" is a good term. But it's a great pleasure when something turns out to be much better than expected.
[Sequitur] It is, though when you're facing the 50-game mountain, it's hard to justify
[Sequitur] I don't blame people going "not for me" very quickly, though I am bothered if they vote
[furkle] yeah, what i was more surprised at was that so many of those "not for me people" did vote, and they didn't for plenty of other games. like, there were many problems identified with 5 minutes to burn something, but it didn't get a single 1
[PaulS] Ditto. I don't mind at all if they just don't play. I get very upset when people don't give things a fair chance then rage-one it.
[furkle] one thing i was wondering was how many times you died? i didn't have much of a sense of how long you played
[Doug O.] shake shake shake shake it off :)
[furkle] copyright 2015 taylor swift
[Doug O.] or that guy who sued her
[furkle] should've shook it off
[PaulS] Me? I played for about 2 hours. I died during that time about 4 times, I think.
[PaulS] But I wasn't timing precisely.
[furkle] hm, okay, thanks. did you follow the death links or did you just back out?
[PaulS] And I was nowhere near finishing the game; somewhere into the second act.
[PaulS] O I followed all the links.
[furkle] okay! thanks!
[PaulS] But I was quite dispirited by seeing how far I still had to go!
[Fangz] I think people who went into a game and thought not for me should vote low if they feel like it.
[furkle] well, that's basically the same as a long conversation we had last night, and i doubt we'll make any ground on it
[Fangz] oh okay
[furkle] doug is absolutely on your side there
[Fangz] but like in the case of Spy Intrigue, I think people low-voting because of the caps do identify a shortcoming with the game, I don't think they should recuse themselves just because
[Fangz] I mean I don't think there's anything in particular that makes forming a negative impression on that basis illegitimate relative to anything else
[furkle] i mean my feeling about that is that "it's hard to read all-caps" is total bullshit to the point of seeming disingenuous to me
[PaulS] Then let's not. I'll just say, I don't do that, personally, and I wish other people wouldn't do it, but there's no rule against it.
[Doug O.] 6 is not *many* IMO
[furkle] it's almost 10% of all the reviews i got
[furkle] i've gotten a single negative review, and it amounted to "it didn't seem good so i stopped after like 3 minutes"
[furkle] all the rest have been positive-to-ecstatic, but somehow i got more 1s than 50 other competitors
[verityvirtue] disparity between voters and reviewers...? (feels like old territory, but there could have been people who just saw like 10 seconds of it and didn't like it, whereas the people who spent enough time on it to review it found good things to say)
[furkle] that's one of my suspicions! i didn't anticipate it would be as busy a year, but i also didn't anticipate that a lot of reviewers would dump it so quick
[gostyax has a broken H key] Either that or most people liked most of the games overwhelmingly
[katherine] unevenly distributed though
[katherine] also keep in mind a lot of 1s were eaten by the bug
[katherine] well, maybe not "a lot" but a nonzero amount of 1s
[gostyax has a broken H key] That's a fair point
[gostyax has a broken H key] Maybe the bug should happen every year so that only dedicated judges can give ones :P
[CMG] I'm getting to these threads so late. I just want to say that I was not unhappy with my 1s or my negative reviews. I expected them. I hoped they wouldn't happen, but I expected them, and I don't hold them against the voters.
[Sequitur] If judges were some small professional panel that committed to judging a bunch of games, it would be different
[StephC] It totally is
[Fangz] yeah but we could fight against that tendency
[furkle] how? permanent gag rules on authors?
[furkle] "if you've spoken before, you can't enter"
[furkle] there's already severe rules intended to cut back on this that don't have much of any effect
[Fangz] We could at least not do things that make it worse, in my view
[furkle] "the app store" isn't a good argument for why authors shouldn't be able to speak on other authors' work
[Fangz] I wasn't talking about that
[Fangz] I was talking about introducing tagging and the ability to filter entrants on tags during the judging period
[Fangz] and more broadly the idea of trying to predict the sort of games judges might like and have them only play those
[furkle] nor that it would even lead to more ratings, necessarily
[furkle] the people who came out of interest for *that game* would play it and almost certainly leave, and the people who were hooked by the idea of making or rating games stick around
[furkle] it's an easy way of growing a community that's not growing all that much, even if this was a new year
[StephC] Why would we?
[gostyax has a broken H key] Can I just emphasize here that _trying_ a game isn't the same as _playing_ it to the end
[gostyax has a broken H key] There is a difference between being told "this game is XYZ and you'll like/dislike it" vs opening the game up for 30 seconds, seeing tat it's XYZ, and deciding whether to continue
[bphennessy] It's much harder for people with less IF experience to judge a game from 30 seconds of play
[StephC] Can you always judge a game from just that much time?
[gostyax has a broken H key] Can you always judge a game from a blurb and some tags?
[bphennessy] No but it helps
[gostyax has a broken H key] Then, regarding Steph's question: No, but it helps
[bphennessy] And it's much less time consuming and difficult than loading up a game and playing it for 30 seconds.
[StephC] No but bphennessy is a faster typist than I am.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Considering that a casual passerby is probably clicking the online play links anyway, I'm not sure it's really that much of a differential in time investment
[gostyax has a broken H key] The only difference is that the passerby in question gets to make their own judgment
[bphennessy] It's a huuuge differential, are you serious? You can read tags in like two seconds.
[bphennessy] And you can compare all the games at once as opposed to going in one by one
[bphennessy] Like it's feeling to me like your whole argument here is that you don't want people approaching IFComp in a different way than you do.
[bphennessy] Like the fact that there are people who would prefer tags and find them helpful doesn't seem to enter into the consideration at all. Which is perplexing to me.
[gostyax has a broken H key] 2 seconds, 30 seconds, they're both short amounts of time to me. I assure you I am entirely serious
[bphennessy] Okay but even that isn't like the right comparison. Because it's 30 seconds times fifty or 2 seconds times fifty.
[gostyax has a broken H key] I mean, it would also be helpful for people just to know right off the bat which games are good so that they can just play the good games
[gostyax has a broken H key] But that defeats the point of judging the games for yourself
[bphennessy] Well that's not a possible piece of information to provide off the bat anyway. But we can tell people if a game is ten minutes long or not.
[bphennessy] Or if it's sci fi or fantasy
[bphennessy] Or if it uses a parser
[gostyax has a broken H key] Even the playtime thing is in dispute
[gostyax has a broken H key] Or consider that game (Caroline?) from last year which was HTML and choice-based but required typing
[furkle] there was also emily is away
[furkle] which required the same thing
[furkle] (but that's gone now)
[bphennessy] Yeah but you can provide a decent estimate I feel like.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Mm, agree to disagree on tat I guess
[bphennessy] Sure okay, but genre? Parser vs choice? You have to admit this is information that could be useful to someone that we could easily provide with tagging
[bphennessy] Content warnings, same thing
[Sequitur] And of course the parser thing is already very visible information
[bphennessy] Right. This just makes it easier for people to sort through
[gostyax has a broken H key] TBH I've not looked with great fondness on the rigidity of genre divisions in non-interactive fiction anyway
[bphennessy] That's fine for you but again your argument is circling back to your own preferences vs the varied preferences of an entire group of judges.
[gostyax has a broken H key] I don't mean in a "I prefer this" way, I mean in a "this is actively bad for liminal stuff" way
[gostyax has a broken H key] Like age-banding books
[bphennessy] This is precisely why I'm talking about an open tagging system rather than closed categories. Like on IFDB.
[gostyax has a broken H key] My concern is that it will nevertheless encourage that kind of rigidifyiing
[Sequitur] But the IFDB already has tags
[gostyax has a broken H key] But te IFDB isn't IF Comp
[bphennessy] Okay? But IFDB is still IFDB and the presence of tags there has not accompanied any kind of rigidifying in the body of works contained in IFDB
[bphennessy] The opposite if anything.
[Fangz] well it's not like we've had a randomised controlled experiment
[verityvirtue] oh ho
[Fangz] but I think it's still of value for the ifcomp to be something different from the ifdb
[Fangz] because otherwise, well, why even have the comp, why have judges, why not just take the top rating game from ifdb?
[gostyax has a broken H key] The impression I'm getting from some comments is that IF Comp exists primarily for hype
[furkle] "hype" is a little harsh, but of course making friends and getting noticed is an important part of it. i don't think anyone's here for the prizes, at least
[catacalypto] 👍
[gostyax has a broken H key] From the POV of non-entrants I mean
[furkle] hm i'm not sure how you mean that. do the non-entrants feel taken advantage of, or unvalued?
[gostyax has a broken H key] As in, the purpose of the IF Comp in general, rater than the purpose of the IF Comp for entrants in specific, seems to be considered in light of its ability to generate hype
[furkle] i would amend that to "grow the community," but that's not surprising for a community which many people have near-constantly felt was existentially threatened
[gostyax has a broken H key] (For IF, for specific games, whatever)
[gostyax has a broken H key] From te POV of te community as a whole, nebulous as that migt be
[gostyax has a broken H key] Fuck my H key I'm so annoyed at it
[Fangz] I mean you might as well have a games jam
[gostyax has a broken H key] ? I don't mean tat the contents of te games will do XYZ, there's not enough economic pressure for that
[gostyax has a broken H key] But introducing the pressure to compartmentalize one's game for easier consumption for potential judges
[gostyax has a broken H key] Specifically in the context of judging
[gostyax has a broken H key] Such that a genre-liminal game finds itself tagged, e.g., "noir" specifically, setting player expectations
[gostyax has a broken H key] narrowing the ways that the so-coveted casual voters approach the game
[katherine] you can do that purposefully though
[bphennessy] Like it's fine if you don't want to read tags. I will be judging next year and I do. If there are tags, you can ignore them. If there aren't, I can't magically see them.
[Fangz] I think the preferences of the judges need to be balanced against the preference of people who might *use the comp results*
[Fangz] To decide what they want to play, after the comp.
[Fangz] My assumption is that the set of people who go see the comp results, sees the top 3 games, and go play them, is far higher than the set of judges, so it's okay if we make the judges' jobs a little bit harder
[Fangz] if it enhances the quality of the voting
[Fangz] like, why else do we demand judges vote for 5 games?
[Fangz] because letting judges have what they want isn't everything
[Sequitur] Whereas "this features _______ in its story" is less so
[gostyax has a broken H key] Content warnings are a necessity
[gostyax has a broken H key] Opening up a parser game by accident is unlikely to cause someone to experience a mental breakdown and other horrible things
[PaulS] You'd think. But opening a twine game by accident seems to sometimes.
[gostyax has a broken H key] snrk
[Sequitur] 🔥
[katherine] also, apparently, CAPITAL LETTERS
[StephC] Blurbs are better sources of information than the first thirty seconds of the game, though. A blurb is calculated to deliver an overview. The first thirty seconds could be anything. It's like reading the back of a movie's box vs walking the first thirty seconds (which might be nothing but credits, or intentionally non-indicative)
[StephC] *watching
[StephC] Like, if you just played the first thirty seconds of my game, you'd might think that the whole game was a choice-based magazine quiz. The blurb gives a much more accurate overview.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Well, and the game title!
[Fangz] the difference is of degree
[StephC] Or to avoid one you'd hate. And you still COULD play all of them if you were really invested in rating everything
[Fangz] But I don't wanna play every game! I want other people to play as much of the comp entries as evenly and fairly as possible, so that after the comp I can play all the good games.
[gostyax has a broken H key] ^ IF Comp and XYZZY were my intro to IF
[gostyax] I mean, people do it unofficially I guess, but crystallizing it as an official thing, I dunno
[Sequitur] (The roundup post was just generally useful and great)
[gostyax] Like: Who is making the judgment call on the tags?
[bphennessy] I'm specifically talking about author tagging to be clear.
[bphennessy] to flag length of game, parser/choice, genre perhaps.
[bphennessy] content warnings
[gostyax] So AO3-style tags?
[bphennessy] Actually yeah that's pretty close to what I'm thinking
[gostyax] Also, I don't agree with reifying parser/choice as a dicotomy
[bphennessy] Well this is kind of why I want open tagging rather than an either/or
[bphennessy] I think we could sort of suggest tags to authors when they submit
[bphennessy] or have a list of common ones
[bphennessy] but not limit those or require a statement in any one category
[StephC] Yeah, maybe like format, estimated playtime, genre, etc. And any warnings.
[AndrewS] That sounds good but maybe there'll be a problem with (un)objective tagging. For instance, if someone felt a game was trolling, but they missed something the author did
[jojo🐸] That's why I think author-only tagging would work for the main comp entry listings.
[AndrewS] Yes, I think it would be nice to have that separate space for potentially more objective or spoilery things.
[StephC] It's the author's job to the be clear to the audience.
[Sirwol] +1 - To a large degree you can do this with the summary text, though quite a few authors (myself included) didn't do it effectively.
[Sirwol] One reviewer read my summary and expected my game to be a cooking sim!
[bphennessy] I will say open tagging seems to work on IFDB without too much bullshit
[emshort] mostly. there are occasional exceptions, like someone going through and tagging a bunch of stuff as "pornography" that wasn't porn, just less conservative than the tagger preferred
[bphennessy] But author-only would be cleaner for comp certainly.
[StephC] If one person misinterprets them, then it's just one weird data point you can ignore, but if everyone misses it, the author didn't get it across correctly.
[katherine] twag
[Doug O.] 💯
[katherine] er
[katherine] yeah
[jojo🐸] I'd say on the form where you submit your game, you could add optional descriptive tags. These could then be ported over to IFDB.
[jojo🐸] Authors would be able to add new tags (copying useful ones they see on other entries, perhaps).
[jojo🐸] Making it author-only rather than open tagging would still keep control over use and spoilers etc. in the autho's hands.
[Ade👺] To Be honest - There is no reason - none at all not to put tags into your blurb.
[Fangz] well, it might create a war of tags
[Ade👺] i.e. Play time: 10 mins. Science Fiction. Choice based.
[easily amused🐱] play time is very variable.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Come to think of it, that's another pitfall. Suddenly, to get the interest of everyone who just wants a short game, every author claims a 20-minute playtime regardless, etc. (Exaggerated, obviously. But unconscious incentive to underestimate.)
[Sequitur] That seems like it would backfire though?
[Sequitur] I mean, if a game is tagged with a short playtime
[Sequitur] And it's novella-length
[Sequitur] It seems like judges would punish that
[PaulS] Yeah I think that would get you punished.
[PaulS] But it's not really a fair punishment, because it can be hells difficult to gauge playtime.
[Sequitur] Well if you grossly underestimated play time though
[gostyax has a broken H key] Doesn't have to be a gross underestimation, just a bit of a slide
[gostyax has a broken H key] Like grade inflation in reverse
[PaulS] So you'd get someone saying "Dang, they said 15 minutes and it took me 30 which is double the length. Gotta be a 1." Any opportunity for unfairness will be grasped.
[Sirwol] Could we just have a general time tag then - i.e. Short, Medium and Long? It's on the author to accurately peg this, but as an author they should have a decent idea how their work compares in length and complexity to other IF works.
[verityvirtue] by a rough function of word count, maybe?
[katherine] how would you measure that though
[katherine] I guess "words seen by the player" but that is nightmarish for authors to calculate
[verityvirtue] haha that really depends on platform! I say this because I recall that choice of games always loves to emphasise that each of their games are like tens of thousands of words long
[katherine] ...well, not nightmarish, but a bit daunting
[katherine] synesthesia factory is coming up on 50,000 words of source code total but no one's going to see that much even if you factor out the code-code
[bphennessy] Yeah it's kinda tough. Birdland's like... 76,000? But a single playthrough is obviously much lower and can vary quite a lot.
[CMG] M.S. is about 70,000 words and can take five minutes to play or many hours, so it's not that easy to predict playing times.
[CMG] I could find out the time for Taghairm though.
[Sequitur] You can just run a typical playthrough through word count
[Sequitur] If you want a count *all* text written for the game
[Sequitur] I actually use a script to extract all of that and that gives me accurate estimates for Undum games
[katherine] undum is best case scenario for this, to be fair
[Sequitur] I think the script I use will actually do the same job for an I7 source file
[Sequitur] https://gist.github.com/sequitur/1e09f116860dd4e1343b
[MaiMai] Link title: Extracts all quoted text from a file, and generates a word count. Meant to be run by Node. · GitHub
[katherine] what about substitutions though
[Sirwol] I wouldn't go off word count because the amount of branching in the game significantly impacts that. Similarly hard puzzles can blow out time for even a low word-count game.
[verityvirtue] ah, good point
[verityvirtue] haha forgot about combinatorial explosion
[verityvirtue] which is probably why CoG games clock up huge word counts
[Sirwol] Yeah, I suspect so.
[Sirwol] If there's only 3 categories then you could say a "Medium" game can be just completed in the 2 hour limit and let the other 2 categories hinge off that perhaps?
[Sirwol] Obviously that would assume a player with some level of experience too. A person new to IF will always take longer to complete a game.
[Fangz] if you had short medium and long, I predict almost exactly zero people would put down Long
[verityvirtue] people (esp authors) would probably understate how long it takes to complete their game...
[Fangz] yeah and they would do it entirely innocently too
[Fangz] but I think my point is that specifically no one wants to think of their game as long, they think of it as *just the right length*
[jojo🐸] If Long was explicitly marked out as for games that took more than two hours, I'd have put down Long for Sub Rosa.
[Sirwol] True... You could skew it like they do with fast food meal sizes, but the opposite direction. Your choices are Tiny, Short and Medium???
[Fangz] so offered short medium and long, everyone is gonna pick medium
[Sirwol] I think quite a few people would pick short. There was quite a few games this year that could be completed in under an hour and then replayed much faster still.
[Fangz] well, short is different, I think there's an explicit decision to make a short game
[Fangz] that some people make
[Fangz] @jojo isn't that against the guidelines? :p
[jojo🐸] NO
[Fangz] well, it sez (Keep in mind the two-hour time limit that every judge has to form their official opinion on each game.)
[jojo🐸] Sure, but nothing in the rules (http://ifcomp.org/rules/) for authors says it HAS to be winnable in under two hours.
[jojo🐸] When we released Chinese Room in the 2007 comp we said in the blurb that you wouldn't be able to complete it in two hours and some people gave it a miss.
[Sirwol] Maybe that's good though. If they have a bias against long games then you probably saved yourself some low scores and saved them 2 hours realizing it was a long game.
[jojo🐸] Sure. Although the game did get a few outrageously undeserved 1s so maybe some folk used the disclaimer as an excuse to avoid.
[jojo🐸] *Also, looking back I think it must have been on the title screen rather than the blurb itself.
[katherine] am I seriously the only other person who plays IF who VASTLY prefers large, sumptuous, *meaningful* games
[Doug O.] time and attention are precious resources
[Doug O.] I think episodic games can split the difference though. like you can binge on a season of a TV show or you want watch them catch as catch can over a few months
[Doug O.] also it's an expectations thing. I don't go into IFcomp looking for an epic.
[emshort] I like them, but if I'm spending 100+ hours playing comp games, it is not a cool surprise to find that a game is 3 times longer than it claims on the packaging
[furkle] this is something i think i failed hard on - i should've telegraphed more clearly how long the game was going to be in the blurb/technical notes and etc.
[Doug O.] displaying the entire game tree made it fairly clear early on, though.
[furkle] yeah, but i think a lot of people didn't bother to look at that
[furkle] i don't think some people ever even understood the map
[CMG] I like sumptuous and meaningful games, but there isn't any connection between these things and "long" in my mind.
[CMG] Not that I mind long games when the length is rewarding. If they're long just because they're filled with fetch quests and fiddly puzzles, no thanks.
[StephC] I prefer long to short (assuming equal quality).
[Sequitur] I would rather play five small games than a single large game
[Doug O.] or 3 medium-sized games.
[CMG] De Baron set the standard for me. It was my first parser game. It's not short, but it's not that long, and it's definitely sumptuous and meaningful.
[katherine] exact opposite for me
[katherine] I'd rather play 1 long game than 5 short ones
[StephC] You can explore the world more, there's better character development--it's really hard to get that in a short game.
[dswxyz] I rather like long games but they're a significant time investment.
[katherine] there's enough bite-sized ok stuff in the world
[PaulS] I agree. But I think something can sometimes be short and meaningful. I though M.S. was short in one sense, but it had heft. Actually LOSF too. A single playthrough wasn't going to take long. But to get to grips with it would.
[katherine] I wouldn't call M.S. short in the same way I wouldn't call Aisle short
[PaulS] Nope. Agree. But I'm not really a huge fan of Aisle, unacceptable as it is to say.
[CMG] I'm not a fan of Aisle either. That's one reason I wrote M.S.
[PaulS] Well I regard M.S. as quite different from Aisle. Nothing like it at all.
[PaulS] I'm happy to say.
[CMG] I wrote it as a direct response to Aisle, PUTPBAA, and Rematch.
[PaulS] Yes, I read that. But actually it feels quite different.
[PaulS] That was a stupid thing for me to say.
[PaulS] Of course it does.
[PaulS] It was supposed to.
[PaulS] Put a bag over my head.
[CMG] At least, that's how it started.
[katherine] (small voice) I liked both
[Sequitur] I really, really like Aisle
[Sequitur] Though I nitpick the fact that in the supermarket in the game, somehow fresh gnocchi is in the same aisle as dried pasta?
[Sequitur] What's up with that?
[jepflast] Was one half of the aisle a fridge section? I haven't played that in forever.
[PaulS] Well it's probably that semi fresh gnocchi i.e. not fresh. They sell that here next to pasta. Must be an English thing. It's basically rubber anyway.
[Sequitur] I have never seen that
[Sequitur] It sounds *appalling*
[piato] It's the only gnocchi I've ever had! IT'S PRETTY NICE I TH
[dswxyz] I love most pasta except gnocchi.
[PaulS] I made gnocchi tonight. It was pretty good.
[Sequitur] Gnocchi is the only pasta you can make from scratch at home without giving people cause to roll their eyes at you
[PaulS] Let them roll!
[katherine] (for this reason, I liked Koustrea's Contentment and Gotomomi more than others
[gostyax has a broken H key] I disagree that small games can't be meaningful or great
[AndrewS] if a game says all it needs to, it should move on
[AndrewS] And that's at the author's discretion, so I agree. But I also agree the author may cut a game off too early
[gostyax has a broken H key] But I like longer games fine as well, for IF values of "long"
[gostyax has a broken H key] (not your 60-hour RPGs or whatever)
[Ade👺] The other problem is : play times vary and are meaningless. Even the simplest puzzle can stymie some people for hours. Whereas someone else might breeze through it in 5 minutes.
[PaulS] Yes. This. Exactly.
[Ade👺] Similarly with reading. I read quickly. Others savor the text.
[gostyax has a broken H key] Yeah, I've been thinking of a kind of puzzle that would be very easy for someone of my particular background to solve, but nigh impossible for someone without
[Ade👺] But I do agree with Katherine. It is a shame that tastes run to 5 minute little things.
[jojo🐸] Maybe to a degree, but the winning games weren't all particularly short.
[Doug O.] I think 1-2 hours is a good sweet spot for me. I do like very short things and very long things but roughly movie-length is a good practical balance
[PaulS] I really like long things -- things that you can spend days on. But I don't have time to play 50 of them!
[gostyax has a broken H key] If I made a game around that mechanic the playtimes would be all over the place (and then many ragequits I suppose)
[ba] Without a walkthrough, I might have taken days and days on Brain Guzzlers and really enjoyed it all. I felt like a sacrifice for the sake of others to read the solution to the early problem of the plants on the porch so that I could see the whole work in two hours. I loved BGFB but it felt like studying more it than savoring it. Maybe that's judging, or maybe I need to get better at puzzles.
[ba] I didn't finish Koustrea's Contentment in time and made an extrapolation in order to vote. (I finished it later with the walkthrough.)
[ba] My extrapolation ended up not hurting KC.
[ba] I tried not to penalize for either long or short.
[Ade👺] Hmmm....this isn;t working for me. I don't think in one sentence soundbites. Too many conversations. I can;t keep track. I will read later.
[AndrewS] It's a bit tricky, yes. I wish there was a way to see the last X sentences--that would help
[Doug O.] the left panel does that sort of
[CMG] I also feel like I'm missing huge chunks of the conversation. And my screen keeps skipping around and whiting out.
[AndrewS] Yeah, but it's also jumped when I saw something I really liked and wanted to respond to
[Doug O.] I am never going to believe Ade's play time indications again.
[Ade👺] Nah. I'm going to do it if I enter again. My blurb was super crappy this year.
[AndrewS] I wasn't happy with my blurb either. The problem is "this isn't wordplay, folks, this is more about X" feels like heinous judge tampering
[AndrewS] A big problem with the blurb is that it needs to be exciting but it has potential for manipulative & I've struggled with that
[easily amused🐱] Blurbs should be in the game so we can be sure players see them.
[StephC] Isn't the blurb supposed to be manipulative?
[furkle] yeah, i think i went the wrong direction on that
[StephC] It's basically an ad.
[AndrewS] Well, people certainly have liberty to do that. I guess I don't feel comfortable. But then I quickly shut something off if I feel I'm being manipulated
[easily amused🐱] The blurb (and changelog) is a small communication channel
[easily amused🐱] A small opening in the muzzle.
[AndrewS] Yeah, there's always the possibility of what is ok eg "Find the secret ending" and since people are able to change it mid-comp that adds problems. Not huge problems but potential for them
[AndrewS] I'm probably overthinking this but I bet I am not the only author. It would be nice to have a way to have a non-ad classification that the author could mention
[joshg] I'm not sure how the blurb will tamper with judging any more than the game's content itself will
[joshg] if someone wants to straight-up tell readers "You should judge my game on its merit as a _______" they can say that in an in-game intro as easily as in the blurb
[catacalypto] I'd also do tags I think
[jepflast] Hey, I think y'all have slipped out of the official Posterity thread here, FYI
[katherine] I understand where it's coming from, but "which games are the short ones?" makes me very sad
[emshort] there was some of that, but I also had some people who just wanted to know what to expect, more or less regardless of what the answer turned out to be
[easily amused🐱] You could just get 10 random games and say "these are the shortest PROMISE!"
[easily amused🐱] Some players have lots of time and motivation others have little.
[Doug O.] If there were 20 games I doubt anyone would feel the need to ask.
[easily amused🐱] What if it was 3 weeks?
[katherine] it's weirdly particular to IF, too -- in most other gaming circles, short playtime is a *bad* thing
[easily amused🐱] Depends if you're mobile.
[Doug O.] that's often measured against the price though
[jmac] WRT Tags: at risk of sounding like a broken record, but what if we just linked in IFDB's perfectly cromulent tagging system at some level. (Anything between "here are some tags" to "There are 5 tags: click to reveal" to "[link to IFDB page that happens to have tags on it]"
[bphennessy] That I might like although IFDB is missing some of the info I might want in tags.
[Sequitur] You can add new tags
[bphennessy] Like length
[jojo🐸] No reason you can't tag average play length, it's just not something people have bothered with much (although: http://ifdb.tads.org/search?searchbar=tag%3A%22short+game%22&searchGo.x=0&searchGo.y=0)
[MaiMai] Link title: Search for Games
[AndrewS] Sounds good to me. If the APIs are there, then yeah
[jmac] )
[jmac] This is different than author-based tags, which I think I'd wanna have pickable from a controlled vocabulary, coz I'd see the main purpose as being sorting / filtering.
[jmac] author-volunteered tags, I mean.
[AndrewS] I like that idea. A pool of relatively neutral tags could be effective
[joshg] I think short playtime in IF is maybe more akin to short reads on the web, vs gameplay in other game genres
[joshg] but that said I would totally appreciate an expectation of game length if for no other reason than I can often only play in short bursts, so playing short games in those time slots and/or knowing I'm in for a partial-play-and-save in advance would help
[jmac] To unbury a topic: How would folks feel if, say, every external link directly to a game's content redirected to its slot on the ballot page, or did something else that reinforced that the game the visitor is about to enjoy is part of a competition they're welcome to vote on? I keep going back and forth in my thoughts about this.
[jmac] I see tons of traffic from Birdland or Grandma Bethlinda (which, no joke, was so mega-popular I had to reconfigure my webserver to handle the traffic) and I feel a little sad at all the "lost judging potential". But maybe the only judges we want are people who care enough to discover the IFComp by other means?
[PaulS] Grandma??????
[jmac] and her variety box, yes
[jmac] Jay Is Games and a couple of other bloggers pointed to it and randos went bananas playing with this cool weird internet toy they found together.
[furkle] "found"
[jmac] My apache server logs have long stretches of solid grandma
[jepflast] There's a sentence you don't see every day.
[jmac] (In part because every single move people made made another request, via Inform games' transcript logging)
[PaulS] Well, good for grandma I guess.
[gostyax has a broken H key] That's not the impression I'm getting from some commenters. Rather, it seems that the desire is to get people who otherwise have no interest
[Doug O.] I do have reservations about over-promoting the ballot. I would like to see more voters but not unserious voters. (yes that is a loaded term but I'm not sure of a better one)
[katherine] the "you must vote for 5 entries" selects for serious voters
[jmac] This rule is so subtle and simple and perfect and it's one of my very favorite single rules from the set I inherited.
[jepflast] Yeah it's essential. Should be a higher minimum maybe, too.
[Doug O.] good point.
[Doug O.] fortunately there were not 5 variety boxes or they'd have swept the comp
[katherine] just clicking a link and spending time with something selects for serious people (clickthrough conversion rates are always dismal), now imagine that x5
[AndrewS] That doesn't seem too intrusive. But I think it'd need some pre comp testing for what feels best.
[jmac] for sure
[jojo🐸] I approve. A little pop-up saying 'This is an entry in the Interactive Fiction Competition 2016: click here to see more games.' or something to that effect.
[jojo🐸] Harness all the disparate Grandma fans.
[bphennessy] I'm not really sure how this fits into this conversation exactly. But like the permanence of the link is something to consider.
[bphennessy] Like games are going to live on after their IFComp hosted version turns into an IFDB redirect. That should be something we keep in mind.
[Glass Rat] Next Video: @CMG https://youtu.be/bunuJdDfbP4
[MaiMai] Link title: IF COMP 2015 - Taghairm Review - YouTube
[greenie :greenduck:] btw, if y'all ever have need for a synced youtube room, can use &youtube if no one else is using it. Is at times useful to discuss a video while watching it together
[greenie :greenduck:] to play something there, its !q youtube-link-goes-here
[WesLesley] any chance you'll be doing tkatc ?
[WesLesley] because if you are, i'd prefer you to use the special edition than the comp edition
[Glass Rat] It wasn't on my to-do list, but just for you, I think I can make that happen :)
[Sirwol] Feature requests for Euphoria:
[Sirwol] * Ability to completely fold up threads to a single line.
[Sirwol] * Timestamp of last post by author.
[Sirwol] * Authors sortable by timestamp order.
[Sirwol] * Ability to click author to jump to their last post.
[Sirwol] * Clicking them again jumps to the post before that, and again, etc.
[Sirwol] * MaiMai to bring around trays of Mai Tais.
[jojo🐸] :bronze:
[skow] btw @MaiMai is my bot so if there's any ideas you have, if I'm in here feel free to ping me or let @Sequitur know and they'll get it to me
[skow] I'm working on alcohol teleportation but I'm running into snags with customs laws
[catacalypto] 💯
[greenie :greenduck:] awesome. feel free to throw lists of feature requests like this in &heim
[Sirwol] Done :)
[bphennessy] 💯 to all these
[bphennessy] Man I'm having a hard time entering old threads right now
[bphennessy] I keep thinking I'm clicking on something to reply directly and it shunts me all the way down to the bottom of the page.
[PaulS] Me too. It's become even worse than usual.
[katherine] yeah, or it shunts me to some... other place
[Doug O.] my browser is getting really sluggish now
[bphennessy] I do like this format, but I think it's better for the chatting we were doing earlier than a big discussion like this.
[PaulS] Yes. Also some of the nesting has become crazy deep.
[CMG] I'm missing everything. I can't click on the new notifications. I bounce all over. Some conversations are an hour old and I didn't even see them!
[verityvirtue] sometimes I need to click twice on the notifications to get to where they are in the threads
[CMG] My screen is bouncing around so much I can barely click anything.
[gostyax has a broken H key] I've found that clicking on a nearby end-of-thread comment in a deep nest, then arrowing up/down, is more reliable
[gostyax has a broken H key] Also scrolling with the scrollbar instead of pageup/pagedown
[gostyax has a broken H key] But yeah, #stresstesting
[ba] My screen keeps bouncing around.
[bphennessy] Okay I have to go watch some dang women's hockey (go Furies) so SEE YOU ALL LATER. Lovely chatting etc.
[jmac] I should be going too. Thanks for organizing this, @Sequitur, and I look forward to reading the full log!
[catacalypto] yes, thank you for doing an awesome job!
[Sequitur] Thank YOU for running the comp, @jmac
[Sirwol] 👍
[Sequitur] See you around.
[catacalypto] I've got to head out myself. Thanks for organizing, @Sequitur, and I look forward to reading the transcripts later. Also, I hope to have a postmortem up for Crossroads later this weekend, and I'd welcome any and all feedback.
[WesLesley] goodnight everyone
[verityvirtue] good night!
[ba] Thanks @Sequitur, and thanks @jmac! Good night!
[Sequitur] It has been (if I can still do math) three hours now (whew) and I'm going to take a snapshot of the comp discussion megathread.
[StephC] It's been two hours (and nine minutes) but still lots of good conversation. I'm off as well, seeya everyone.
[Healy] Don't forget the discussion in the thread just below it!
[Healy] It feels like it was longer than the main thread
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