Does Anybody Care?
The recent Inside ADRIFT Spring Comp 2005 was in some ways a
success and in others a failure.
A success: it got five entries. Now that might not sound like a huge
amount, particularly when compared to the 30+ entries in the yearly
IFComp – but in a community the size of the ADRIFT one, which rarely
has more than 30-40 active members at any one time, it’s a notable
achievement all the same. It’s also a larger number of entries than any
other Spring Comp has received so it’s a success for that reason alone
if nothing else. On top of that, it also attracted a couple of games by
newcomers which is always a nice thing to have.
A failure: it got a grand total of six votes. Six. Of which four were from
people who were competitors in the Comp itself. Only two other people
out of all the current users of ADRIFT bothered to vote. However you
look at it, that’s a pretty poor turnout. Just as well the ADRIFT Comp
didn’t have the same kind of requirement as most Comps have – i.e.
that the people who enter them aren’t allowed to vote – because
otherwise the total number of voters would have been even smaller.
So just why is there such a poor turnout for Comps? I can think of
several reasons offhand:
1. People can’t be bothered.
2. People are bothered but don’t have the time to play through five
games in the Comp’s two week judging period.
3. People have played the games, not liked them much, and decided
not to vote.
4. They don’t like Comps full stop and have no interest in voting for the
games in them.
5. They meant to vote but never got round to it.
6. They didn’t like the games and decided not to vote in case they
ended up annoying the game’s author by giving his game a poor vote.
7. They prefer to lurk as opposed to actually participating.
8. The recent problems with the ADRIFT forum (hopefully now fixed)
left them unable to get access to the games until it was too late.
9. They played some of the games but didn’t get around to playing
them all and figured that just voting for the ones they played wasn’t fair
on the ones they hadn’t played.
10. They’ve entered a game in the Comp and feel it’s a bit unsporting
voting for the other games.
I can imagine a few people citing point 2 as their reason because
unless you have lots of free time, two weeks isn't really long enough to
play through five full size games (even if two of them were quite small).
You could certainly play some of all of the games but three of them
were big and would likely take a fair amount of time to reach the ending. Point 5 might be a valid point but it’s a bit unlikely that people
forgot about the deadline. Point 8 is probably also an issue. Regular
forum members know about the other ADRIFT sites and so the main
forum being down wouldn’t affect them too much but any newcomers
likely wouldn’t be aware. Point 9 might also be an issue for the same
reason as point 2. Point 10? Could well be a valid point. Can you enter
a Comp yourself and give a totally honest vote to the other games,
knowing that it might be your good vote to another game that allows it
to beat your own? In an ideal world, you could. In real life, personal
opinions probably intrude and affect your overall vote. But the main
reason for more people not participating in the voting process?
Simple. Point 1: they can’t be bothered.
Yep, the ‘lack of feedback’ issue rears its ugly head once again. It’s no
secret to anyone who’s been a member of the ADRIFT community for
more than a few months that while people are happy to encourage
others to write games, offer advice, beta-test them, give ideas,
opinions, etc, etc, but when the game is done and ready to be played…
everyone goes mysteriously quiet. You might a review after a while. You
might, if you're especially lucky, even get a brief comment on the forum
about your game. Once in a blue moon there'll even be a full blown
discussion but don’t hold your breath waiting for one about your game
because you'll be waiting a long, long time. But more often than not,
you'll get precious little feedback at all. The Reviews Exchange has
gone some way towards ensuring that more reviews are written but
speaking as the poor fool who organises it every couple of months, it’s
not always easy to get contributions and there are still a good number
of games that go unreviewed and their authors get no feedback upon.
Competitions used to be the one way of actually getting some much
needed feedback on your games because the majority of the ADRIFT
community (or a sizeable portion of it at least) would take part, play the
games, vote on them and some would even go as far as to review
them. But even that seems to have dried up recently. In a smallish
community that nevertheless boasts upwards of thirty active members,
just six votes for the first competition of the year is a pitiful amount.
What were the other people doing? Yes, they’ve got lives outside the
Comp but showing their support would have been nice.
Okay, writing ADRIFT games and voting on them isn't a way of life: it’s
a hobby. You don’t get paid for what you do and you're very unlikely to
gain any recognition from the rest of the IF world for your efforts*. You
write them because you like writing them or because you want to win a
competition and show everyone how good you are. Or simply because
it’s a hobby and it passes the time. Or maybe you do it for the
recognition, to know that there are a few people out there who actually
want to play your games. Of course, if you get no feedback at all for
your efforts, it’s often hard to know if anyone likes them or, indeed, if
anyone is even playing them. You might as well decide to jack it all in
and do something more worthwhile with your time instead.
* You might, of course. The rest of the IF world isn't quite as anti-ADRIFT as it used to be a few years ago but don’t go expecting the
RAIF crowd to proclaim your new ADRIFT game as superior to
Photopia or City Of Secrets any time soon.
Which brings me back to the recent Spring Comp and its poor turnout of
voters. Six people voted in the Comp out of a community of perhaps
thirty to forty regular members, and some ten to twenty casual
members. Six out of a possible sixty isn't a good amount however you
look at it. It doesn’t say to anyone planning to write a game for a comp
that doing so is a good idea. More than anything else, it says that
people don’t care about competitions and that there's no reason to
enter them.
So c’mon, people, the next time a competition is run: either enter a
game or vote on the entries. Or, better still, do both! Or one day it might
well turn out that a competition is announced and no one enters
because they’ve seen the lack of enthusiasm for previous ones. And as
competition games comprise the bulk of all released ADRIFT games
these days, that would be a pretty disastrous thing to happen.