Musings On The IFComp
It’s that time of year again: the IFComp – the big comp of the interactive fiction world – is looming. Although a while off yet (it should start around the time the next issue of the newsletter is out), for anyone planning to enter the comp, it’s probably approaching way too quickly for their liking.
As far as competitions go in the IF world, the IFComp is THE comp. The IF equivalent, if you will, of the Oscars. It even carries a decent cash prize for the first place and an abundance of prizes for those who don’t fare as well (I came 23rd in 2004 and got a nice prize). IF itself might not be a commercial prospect any more, but the IFComp is the one guaranteed way of ensuring you get something for your trouble. (Of course, it’s worth mentioning that if you're writing a game purely for the prizes, you're missing the point. Aside from anything else, the sheer amount of time and effort that would be required to write a game capable of winning a decent cash prize wouldn’t be worth it on a cash-per-hour-of-game-writing basis. You'd be better off getting a part time job where you definitely get paid at the end of it, instead of writing a game where you only get paid if you do really well.) There are other comps out there – the numerous ADRIFT Comps, the Spring Thing, the One Room Comp, the Intro Comp, the Art Comp and so on and so forth – but none of them carry anything like the same kind of impact as the IFComp, both from the way the comp is perceived and the amount of feedback you tend to receive for games entered in it.* Which isn't to say that the comp doesn’t have its own problems.
* The ADRIFT entries in the IFComp 2005 gained around ten or eleven reviews each; the ones in the Spring Thing 2006 only three.
For one, while there are undoubtedly a few genuinely brilliant games entered every year, and quite a few others that are way above average, there are also a good deal of entries that no one, probably not even their own authors, would try to claim were genuinely brilliant. Or even above average. Some games are just plain bad: not been tested, written by people who don’t seem to know what they're doing, some even by people who don’t speak the English language well enough to make themselves understood let alone write a game in it. You can often tell a true stinker straight off from the poorly written introduction (generally littered with more spelling mistakes and/or grammatical errors than you could shake a stick at) which, being the first thing potential players see, should be as close to perfect as it’s possible to make an introduction.
Then there are the joke entries. And the IFComp, being the biggest comp around, tends to attract more than its fair share of joke entries. Why is something of a mystery, but then I guess every community attracts its fair share of idiots along the way.
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell a genuinely bad game written by someone who doesn’t have a clue from a deliberate joke game. Take the notorious Paul Panks, he of Westfront PC fame, who holds the unique, though hardly sought after, record of coming last in the IFComp for two years running. His entry in 2004 was called Ninja and it finished at the lowest placed position in the comp. He re-entered the game (a breach of the comp rules surely?) with a very minor change the following year, now calling it Ninja 2, where it again came last place. Were they joke entries? Or just remarkably bad games? Judging from the usual kind of games Panks writes, and self-promotes to a painful degree on the RAIF/RGIF newsgroups, it’s hard to say for sure.
Some games are obvious joke entries and don’t pretend to be anything else. One of the ADRIFT games last year was called PTbadsixandoneeighth or Have You Seen The Muffin Man? He Is Quite Large. Thankfully everyone realised it was a deliberately bad game (a goal it achieved very well, I might add) and didn’t knock ADRIFT for the quality of this game it had produced.
This year will hopefully see a stronger ADRIFT showing than ever in the comp. While I doubt very much we’ll see an ADRIFT game finishing in first place, or even in the top five, it’s possible one might crack the top ten for the first time since The PK Girl in 2002. Last year we came close – games at 11, 12 and 14 – so hopefully this year we’ll do even better.
As to whether an ADRIFT game is ever going to win the IFComp, I really couldn’t say. As it’s my chosen system (and this is the ADRIFT newsletter after all), I’d like to say yes… but at the same time, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, my actual response would more likely be no. The stigma of ADRIFT’s early years, when it produced countless terrible games and gained for itself a terrible reputation as a result, might finally be dying down, but there's still a long, long way to go before it achieves the same kind of recognition as Tads and Inform have*. Maybe ADRIFT 5 will change all that, although only having a few glimpses of what it will be like, and no experience of using it, it’s difficult to say. Hopefully in a few months, and certainly by the IFComp 2007, we’ll see just what ADRIFT 5 can do, and then we’ll be able to tell whether it can hold its own against the big boys.
* Although it’s worth mentioning that the worst games in the IFComp for the past two years haven't been ADRIFT games.
So will an ADRIFT game win the IFComp this year? No. Not a chance. Next year? No. In five years time? Ten years?
Who can say…? But it'll certainly be interesting seeing how things stand in another five years.