Rolling IF COMP

ifcomp.org

2012 competition starts in a few days, I think (scheduled for Oct 1st) and I'm in the mood to play a bunch of them this year and vote. I know there are a couple other IF fans on ILX. We should talk about the games!

Since there's nothing to talk about yet, tho, here are some of my historical IF faves:

Slouching Towards Bedlam
Violet
Risorgimento Represso
Scavenger
Another Earth, Another Sky
Photopia
Tapestry

We can talk about non-IF Comp games too!

I followed the IF scene until 2004 or so. I think I'll try out some of this year's games.

i still have a fondness for IF games but they usually take more effort that i'm willing to put in to really appreciate, these days

Woo, yeah! Definitely agree with you about the greatness of the first two in the list. Not sure if I've played the middle three, and thought the latter two somewhat overrated, though certainly not bad.

Played 'The Primrose Path' recently which I was quite impressed by - not huge, but an interesting concept and good characterisation.

Mordy's IntroComp game is also worth a play.

Aw, that's really kind to say emil.y. I keep thinking about either going back to it to finish it, or writing a new game. I think my programming skills have improved enough, and the new Inform is intuitive enough, that I could actually design it the way I wanted to originally. (I had mapped out an elaborate stage lighting based puzzle, but couldn't figure out how to code it.)

Risorgimento Represso: is like a slapstick hijinks puzzle intensive game about a chef
Scavenger: is a kinda RPGish post-apocolyptic game - tbh I probably remember it as better than it was
Another Earth, Another Sky: a super cute superhero game about two siblings who gain super powers, iirc

Risorgimento Represso: is like a slapstick hijinks puzzle intensive game about a chef

Ahh, pretty sure I have played this one, actually. Good, if I remember it right.

Games are now up! http://www.ifcomp.org/comp12/download.html

i'll have a look at this year's crop when i get my internet back at home

i'm far less patient of imperfection than i used to be when i'd play any old pish as a kid tho

lol that the first game I tried (body bargain) turns out to be about otherkin surgery

i've played far too much aif to be weirded out by much

aif! u kno what was a fucked up game? rogue cop.

ah, the classics.

yes it was.

Okay, I'm going in. Wish me luck.

First game I got was absolute garbage. I'll try again tomorrow.

First two I tried were trad IF sci-fi and I really am not in the mood for that. Gave up on both within ten minutes - will probably pick them up again to rate fairly as they seemed functional, just stylistically yawn-inducing.

I'm going with 'A Killer Headache' for my first full run as that's what I've been suffering from most of the day, so maybe it'll resonate with me.

I've played a few of these now. Not particularly impressed by the standard, to be honest. The ones I've liked the most are A Killer Headache, Guilded Youth, and Sunday Afternoon, if anyone's looking for recommendations. But even those ones could do with either polishing or expansion (obviously IF comp games have to be playable within two hours, so there aren't going to be any crazily expansive games, but with Sunday Afternoon I actually felt it should be an IntroComp entry... it would definitely be a winning one if it was).

Also: almost all of the web games being on Twine annoyed me. Though I think last year was the year for a lot of rubbish written in 'Choice Of' script, so I guess you'll always have a glut of people trying out whatever free new thing there is.

oh god Twine is horrible and fugly iirc

Fish Bowl is okay. A bit too on rails for me, and as with most on rails IF i don't know if the story entirely justifies the interaction, but it's well-told and reasonably atmospheric.

10 games in and the only good ones were Sunday Afternoon and Spiral. Didn't care for Fish Bowl although the title object was certainly interesting.

I thought Fish Bowl had promise but just didn't go anywhere with it. Didn't help that I found a bug that meant I had to restart - I put all my stuff down before going in the sea (seemed logical to me, why would I go swimming with all my items on hand?) and then couldn't pick up the fish again.

Don't think I've played Spiral yet, will give it a go.

The only other one I've tried that seemed okay was Changes, but I got stuck - is it reasonable to do hints here if others have played/are playing things, or should we leave that until after the comp?

i think they all have walkthroughs if you download them, maybe keep hints off here until voting ends?

Hooray, I wasn't sure I'd be able to, but this year I can once again follow my usual procedure for IF comps: read about the entries on http://pissylittlesausages.wordpress.com instead of playing them

No walkthrough in Changes. I got stuck early on too -- seems I have to get the lemur out of the bushes but I couldn't figure out how. I didn't care for the adjective-heavy prose: "The trees here are huge: massive columnar towers..."

There actually is a walkthrough, but in-game rather than packaged as another file. Just type 'walkthrough'. I succumbed in the end and realised I was after the wrong target. You have to go through several other animals before you can get at the lemur.

Didn't finish it within the two hour limit but will give it a good score. I like the mechanic. No problems with the writing myself - no literary genius there but so much better than a lot of IF.

self-consciously literary writing - even if done well - kills a lot of IF for me. there's a sweet spot where the language shdn't overwhelm the gameplay if it's gonna function as an immersive game

Yeah, I didn't find that with this - a couple of pleased-with-themselves phrases here and there, maybe? But otherwise mostly functional and fluid.

I have a real love for IF where language itself is the focus, but I think those are a separate category, really.

IF where language itself is the focus

In a Nord and Bert word games style or a Photopia minimal-interaction-but-look-at-my-prose style?

I would like to hear about more games that do the former. I wanted very much to like Earl Grey an ifcomp or two ago but it didn't quite gel for me; found myself thinking about it quite a bit after the fact, though, so that's a point in its favour.

I really liked Earl Grey! Think there were a few moments where I did find myself banging my head against the wall for a while, though.

Never played Nord & Bert but yes, word games and language puzzles are what I mean - my favourite one is probably Ad Verbum, and there was a good one from last year's comp called PataNoir.

In a Manor of Speaking from this year does this to a certain extent, more based around idiomatic phrases, but it didn't work for me. Not particularly well implemented and too many extraneous rooms.

I tried two more over the last week - Spiral and Shuffling Around. The former seemed great but tough, so I've filed it as something to go back to. The latter is a much, much better word game than the one I mentioned before, based on anagramming. There are a few bugs that affect hints and presentation, but nothing that fucks up gameplay, which I thought was absolutely wonderful.

Feeling slightly better about the general standard now I've played through a good few that I actually like, but there is an awful lot of dross out there.

Results: http://ifcomp.org/comp12/results.html

2013 games up, if anyone's interested.

Bump for the daytime. I've played three so far: two buggy as shit, poorly written, barely finished, just... ugh. The other one, however, is absolutely brilliant, and probably jumped straight into my favourite IFs ever list.

Looks like there might be a crapload of Twine games again this year, FFS.

I see there was a piece about this year's ifcomp in the Guardian, by Leigh Alexander:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/interactive-fiction-awards-games

I always mean to get round to judging or at least playing more than a couple of entries and never manage it. Maybe this year. Anyone played (or written, for that matter!) any of this year's entrants?

I have played through most of them, of course. Figured it would be a bit unseemly to be the only person posting in a thread for three years in a row. Most of the parser games can be played online now, so if you don't have an interpreter you can still play.

My recommendations:

Hunger Daemon - funny, old-school parser game set in an Old Ones worshipping cult.

Jacqueline, Jungle Queen - crashed-plane adventure romp where you acquire special abilities through the course of play. Also funny.

Creatures Such As We - built with 'choice of' game script, a very well-written love story and meditation on game creation/reception, set on the moon.

Alethicorp - corporate website/job simulator/dystopian conspiracy.

Transparent - this one kind of lacks the directional 'push' of games I'd normally recommend, but is a good haunted house explorer, and has a lot of potential.

Also recommended to varying degrees: Tea Ceremony, the Black Lily (definitely play this if you like giallos), Missive, Ugly Oafs, Jesse Stavro's Doorway, the Contortionist, Zest.

The Porpentine games seemed particularly boring to me this year, but if you must play one then go with With Those We Love Alive. I can't stand games where you have to click around a bunch of things to see if anything's changed, and for about a thousand turns, nothing does. It's so tedious. On the plus side, the idea of taking the game into the real world and actually drawing on your own skin is *excellent* and it does deserve some praise for that. Also I never play games with sound on and I'm getting the feeling that's a big part of Porpentine games, so maybe that's part of why I find them dull?

Guess what time it is

https://ifcomp.org/ballot

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/11/06/interactive-fiction-competition-2017/

Eat Me is fucking fantastic.

Funniest-guy-in-the-world and a very dear friend died this past week. Feels impossible to memorialize such an intelligent and chaotic and wonderful firework of a man, but I’d like to share a game he made with the board, not IF but a good point and click that made the rounds a few years ago.

https://partyissuchsweetsorrow.vice.com/

We were texting on Christmas, he was a terrific confidante and always saw the way through any difficult interpersonal conundrum and he gave me the best adobo recipe and hand-held me through the difficult first couple days of Baldur’s Gate this past summer. Love you Tony

Sorry for your loss :(

I'm a fan of P&C so I will be sure to check this out away from the office.

Sorry fgti. </3

I started playing the game and it's delightful (never played a P&C game on my phone before, works great).

I'm so sorry, fgti. I remember playing that game a long time ago, it's a good one!

The 2024 IF Comp is accepting votes until Oct 15

https://ifcomp.org/ballot

So far I've enjoyed The Bat and Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe the most of these (both from established authors which is kind of a shame, always nice to see a newer author bring their A game in a comp). Still got a few to try out, though.

I'd love to hear people's thoughts about the IF Comp scene and how it relates to today's interactive fiction.

I hung around rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction between '95 and '06 and haven't kept up with it since, but it's been fascinating to me to see how things have developed. There's still a scene for TADS, Inform, GLULX. I think about parser fiction a lot because I think it has a lot of the same inherent structural limitations that chatbots do, and I do recall that even back in the '00s those limitations were well-known and being discussed. And I definitely see it having a lot of influence on the works itself, for better or for worse. One of the games says that "Generative artificial intelligence was used to make game text." Another of the games has AI art as its cover. "The Shyler Project" is based around an AI chatbot.

I guess there's a larger question, for me, of creating in a format that's, IDK, suboptimally effective. Parser fic as a commercially viable game experience has been more or less dead since about '89. LucasArts style adventures have a commercial niche. My perception is that "Interactive Fiction" has a lot more cultural relevance, as well as commercial viability, as visual novels today than they do as parser-based text adventures.

I ran into a younger person recently talking about interactive fiction, and she knew who Emily Short is, and liked, I guess, Counterfeit Monkey? But she wasn't able to figure out how to play Galatea.

This doesn't seem _related_ to the games of Anna Anthropy, which are, like, I guess itch.io games? I'm not a serious gamer. I know itch.io exists and is influential as a creative medium. I know Mighty Jill Off - I did before it became briefly viral again recently - and I knew about Encyclopedia Fuckme. She's probably, or at least possibly, done stuff that's not lesbian kink. It's not that there weren't "adult" games ever in IF Comp, but they were very deliberately stupid and very puerile, in ways that the Anthropy games I've played aren't.

So I'm definitely most intrigued by "LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST" and I'm going to play it. The thing about the visual novel scene is that... I feel like visual novels are fundamentally _horny_ in a way that Infocom interactive fiction isn't (sorry, "Plundered Hearts" and "Leather Goddesses of Phobos").

Beyond that, there's this whole genre of games where an essential part of it is that every single person is queer in some way. This is my favorite genre of games. It's the only genres of games I want to play, honestly. And there are some games like that in this year's IF Comp that I'm interested in too. Those games, to me, they come off more like "Pokemon but Jessie and James aren't just an implied queer couple, and also everybody else is also queer". So I'm excited for those games.

Here's where a point would go if I had one.

I guess there's a larger question, for me, of creating in a format that's, IDK, suboptimally effective. Parser fic as a commercially viable game experience has been more or less dead since about '89. LucasArts style adventures have a commercial niche. My perception is that "Interactive Fiction" has a lot more cultural relevance, as well as commercial viability, as visual novels today than they do as parser-based text adventures.

I completely disagree about "suboptimally effective". Visual novels and Twine games don't have the sense of being in a world that you can manipulate that parser games do. Parser IF (okay, good parser IF) allows you to push and pull and tweak and explore and find secrets and interact with almost everything. VN and Twine mostly (mostly!) tell you a story where you can change a few parameters along the way to see how that affects the outcome. Completely different ways of playing a game.

The thing that got me to accept Twine as a format after being an old curmudgeon about it was definitely the blossoming queer scene that unfolded around it - it was such an interesting development of a subculture and I loved to see it. A lot of the games themselves weren't that great imo, but they stood as expressions of self and creativity that were worthy just by dint of being that.

I have yet to try Latex, Leather etc, but hopefully it will be fun!

The Shyler Project is really interesting. I got a lot of experience with various forms of mental health support. I know there's been a lot of talk about AI mental health, and I genuinely, honestly, think it could be helpful. Because humans are, well, human. I want to fix people when they're broken, people want to fix me when I'm broken. Watching other people suffer and not being able to _fix_ things is so fucking hard. Being part of that, helping people, without...

I mean spoilers but The AI trauma dumps. At that point it's fundamentally different from the structured support I've gotten and more like the peer support I've gotten. Yeah I help other people to avoid dealing with my own problems. So an AI that has its own problems, that to me is more _real_ than any AI I've seen.

Bez sez in er genre field: "Is this sci-fi or is this real life by now?"

Real life. I cried during Part Two. That's good. It's hard to me to feel safe to cry sometimes.

IDK. Great fucking game. Emotionally and narratively. It really speaks to my experience with community support. And with, like... like there's this whole debate in game design over whether or not the protagonist should be a "featureless protagonist". And Jaiden ("Juniper" in the credits) isn't a featureless protagonist. They (how do I write about this game? What are Jaiden's pronouns?) have a literal voice. Shyler has a voice, a human voice. Shyler-as-AI is a fictional construct. It (you know, pronouns, etc) fails the reverse-Turing test for me. It just so perfectly articulates the relation between queerness, mental health, disability. I read Shyler as someone who's trying to construct a healthy sense of self when all it has is a bunch of fucked up shit its negligently abusive creators fed it, who blame it for the fucked up shit _they_ did to it, who actually try to eradicate it, to make it bear the consequences of _their_ mistakes. Super fucking relatable. And part of that inversion is that I perceive Shyler as the protagonist. I perceive myself as playing as Shyler. I'm making choices as "Jaiden", but I'm making choices _for_ Shyler, _about_ Shyler, based on what Shyler wants. So I feel more like Shyler than I do like Jaiden, playing the game.

Excellent game. I'm really glad I had the opportunity to play it.

-

Playing "You" now, which leans more into the "amnesia" trope - featureless protagonist, trying to figure out who they are. There's something implicitly queer about that, this desire for self-discovery, but in the old parser IF games it never played out like that. I don't really see it as a self-discovery game, either, from the bit I've played. This isn't a parser game but easily could have played as one. There's a central puzzle and metafictional elements. For me, the problem was that the quest giver parsed the items I gave it in a way different than I understood it. I thought I was giving it something old, and it took it as something borrowed. I thought I was giving it something borrowed, and it took it as something new. Maybe that's on purpose. Maybe it's being clever. I don't like it. I feel like the game is fucking with me.

-

SEXTUPLE L:

The beginning sez:

This game is going to hurt.
If you think it's made just for you, it is.

This game is _definitely_ made just for me. If I could invite this game back to my place and show it what's in my suitcase, I would.

The first time the word "shibari" comes up I think of the Very Online anglosphere argument over whether it should be called "shibari" or "kinbaku".

anyway I'm going to be a while on this one. This is hot. I love this game. The person who made it, they're cool, they're not really like me, they're cool. I love this game. I'm glad the IF Comp has this game, has a game like this, in it.

I completely disagree about "suboptimally effective". Visual novels and Twine games don't have the sense of being in a world that you can manipulate that parser games do. Parser IF (okay, good parser IF) allows you to push and pull and tweak and explore and find secrets and interact with almost everything. VN and Twine mostly (mostly!) tell you a story where you can change a few parameters along the way to see how that affects the outcome. Completely different ways of playing a game.

― emil.y

Well I mean in terms of _audience_, by "effective". Certain formats limit one's audience. And those are the formats I feel most comfortable in, so....

Oh, sorry, I misread what you meant then. I know you went on to talk about commercial viability in that paragraph but yeah, still thought you meant effectiveness in terms of 'fun' or something and then related it to commercial stuff afterwards. Bad reading comprehension on my part.

Two hours is a long time, it turns out, haha. I've finished the second act of LLLLL and I'm having to take a break. I fucking hate Gestirn. Valerie is a garbage piece of shit human being, but the person I hate most is fucking Gestirn.

There's shit about my life that's just fucking hard to talk about. Even though L is a guy and I'm a woman... So far what I know of Artemis, I'd like to be more like her... I relate a lot to L and his insecurity.

Anyway this game is fucking great. Because I can't tell my own story, really. The best I can say is play this, or read this, or listen to this, and maybe things will make a little more sense. It's not something I can talk to trans people about because I don't know the sorts of trans people I can say "tranny" around. It's really frustrating. The protag here, L, somebody who feels good calling himself a tranny and a faggot, I find him super relatable.