On one hand, competitions are good for Adrift - they get people to write lots of games (see the third and fourth One Hour Game Competitions for proof), they produce some pretty decent efforts and they also get quite a few people to write games who otherwise never seem to bother.

On the other hand, it could also be argued that they're bad - people tend to work on their competition games at the expense of their larger efforts (competition games generally tend to be smaller than most other games as they're written within strict limits) and their larger efforts seldom get completed. After all, a game which takes an hour to write is far easier to finish than a game which takes a month or two months or a year… How many full size games, you could ask, have been left unfinished as a result of the writer taking time out to write a small competition game and then never being able to get the full size game finished once the competition game is out of the way? Probably quite a few.

And then there's the fact that a fair few games written for competitions are downright awful. Of course, the same could be said, truthfully, about a fair few of the games not written for comps.

Personally, I like competitions. One reason is for the feedback they generate. Feedback is, and always has been, and probably always will be, a major problem in the Adrift community. Most times you release a game and you never really know what people think about it. You might get a review after a while, you might even get two or three if you're really lucky, but considering the size of the community and how many people regularly post on the forum, the amount of feedback you get on any game you might write (which is, after all, one of the main reasons the forum is there) is quite poor. The forum sees maybe a couple hundred posts a week from several dozen people, yet of these perhaps 1 in every 10 (if that) ever provide feedback on the games written. Disappointing, and hardly an encouragement for people to write games. After all, we're not doing it for the money, are we? Feedback for competition games tends to be a little more forthcoming. People seem to feel they have an obligation to at least scribble a few comments about the games they've played and some even go as far as writing full length reviews which give you good pointers on what you're doing right and wrong in the game-making process. More often than not, you get more feedback from a single comp game than from two or three noncomp games. Games entered in the IFComp (the biggie as far as comps are concerned) are likely to garner at least three times the reviews and feedback as a game written at any other time; while the feedback won't always be glowing, most will at least be helpful. And sometimes, negative comments are as useful as positive ones. Someone pointing out what you're doing wrong so you can improve your game-making techniques in the future is every bit as valuable as someone heaping praise upon you. And negative comments now that you act on mean there's a better chance of getting praise heaped on you the next time.

Another reason I like competitions? The sheer thrill of it. Writing games tends to be, for the most part, a long and arduous process. You plot out your game, you write your game, you have you game tested, you amend your game, you release your game. True, you might enjoy the actual writing process but after you've played it through half a dozen times to get rid of errors, bugs and guess the verb problems, you're probably pretty glad to see the back of it. Entering it in a competition and pitting yourself against other entrants tends to be interesting and, dare I say it, exciting. Maybe even worth writing the games in the first place. And while there's no guarantee that you're going to win, it's always well worth following the progress of the comp as it winds its way towards the deadline date just to see what happens.

Of course, it's best to win and no one likes to come last so in a way I guess competitions encourage people to try harder with their games than they would otherwise. If you're just going to release your game to the general populace and might never receive feedback on it, you might consider missing a few things out just to get it done more quickly. So entering a game in a competition means games of a higher quality than otherwise? You'd think so, but past experience tends to indicate that, for the most part, people take little effort in ensuring their comp games are any better than their non-comp games. I've played some comp games that are very good, but then I've also played a lot of comp games that are very bad. Some are so bad you wonder why they ever got released in the first place; sometimes the game in question has such glaring errors in it right from the very first location that you find yourself sitting there and staring in dismay at the screen that someone ever considered it worthy of entering in a competition.

Of course, in comp games it's not always possible to cover everything. In particular if you're writing a one hour game, you won't have the time to deal with every guess the verb issue which arises and corners will necessarily have to be cut in order to get the game done within the required time limit. Sometimes, unfortunately, the cutting of corners results in a game that is practically unplayable. The latest one hour comp produced at least three that I really had to force myself to play and I was left with the feeling afterwards that these games had been written purely for a joke, albeit not a very funny one.

But like I said before, I like comps. Over the past year or so, competitions have comprised the bulk of the Adrift games written. Take them away and the sum total of full sized games released last year might not even hit double figures. True, a lot of the games written for comps are bad and should never have seen the light of day in the first place, but they also produce good games. So… considering all the above, are comps a good idea? Do they leave the community with few full sized games to get their teeth into and instead leave it with nothing more than minute efforts that were thrown together in the space of a few hours and probably not even tested? If there was never another competition, would the world of interactive fiction suffer as a result? In all honesty, the community - particularly the Adrift community - could manage without the majority of its comps. The only comp that the whole IF community would be worse off without is the IFComp, which is pretty much the only way someone writing Adrift games is going to get recognition from outside the island that is the Adrift community.

But would the Adrift community suffer as a result of no further comps?

In a way it would, because comps - even the one hour comps (or maybe *especially* the one hour comps) - produce decent games. Take them away and the community would be worse off for their loss.

At the same time, the community would survive. Up until the last year or thereabouts, there were few comps in the Adrift world and of the few that *did* exist, they didn't get a whole lot of entries. Two comps in 2001 had just a single entry; the end of year 2002 comp had just two. Recently, things have improved to the point where the number of entries generally exceeds the minimum requirement by quite a bit. The end of year 2003 comp had a minimum requirement of three entries but got six. Hopefully this year the number of entries will have increased again.

So do we need competitions in the Adrift community?

Points for: they produce lots of games; they encourage people to write games who otherwise wouldn't; they keep interest in Adrift alive and flourishing; they give the impression to the rest of the IF community that Adrift is producing lots and lots of games (whereas the truth of the matter is that fewer full size games are being written now than ever before).

Points against: they produce a lot of bad games; they drag people away from writing their full size games and they lose focus and never return; too many comps means less prestige from winning (after all, if there was one comp a year and you won it, it would be a big deal; if there was one comp every week, winning wouldn't be as big a deal as you'd be forgotten 7 days from now). I guess what it all comes down to is the individual. Some are fond of comps; some dislike them. Some feel that more comps would be a good idea - maybe one every month; some feel that less comps would be a good idea - maybe one per year and leave it at that.

Myself, I love comps. I don't feel that more of my time is spent writing comp games than anything else I write. I don't feel that, bad games aside, the community suffers as a result of too many comps. While I certainly wouldn't like a comp every month, I certainly wouldn't like as few as one a year either. What I most like about comps, though, is that they motivate people to write games. Consider how many people have written games for comps that have never written a full size game (7 in the latest comp out of 12 writers) and you begin to see that without comps, you wouldn't get half as many people writing games full stop. Some people have problems with full size games and will probably never write one no matter how long they struggle with it. But along comes a comp where they realise that whatever they write is going to be judged less harshly than it might otherwise be judged and they find the willpower to actually go ahead and write a game.

Take comps away from the Adrift community and the community would definitely suffer as a result. So while comps might produce bad games, they also produce lots of games, good ones amongst them, and sometimes you just have to take the bad with the good.

Roll on the next comp!