IFComp News: 2014: A year of firsts among fives

Thus ends the 20th annual Interactive Fiction Competition. As I have said elsewhere and repeatedly, I could not have asked for a better welcome as my own first time organizing the event. I look forward to many more years with the IFComp.

I have a lot of thoughts about this year’s collection of forty-two entries, but I’d like to begin by sharing some observations about the entries that finished at the top of the list this year.

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  The top five games were created with five different systems, running the gamut of different player experiences. This variety is unprecedented for the IFComp, and it is my single favorite fact of the this year’s outcome. For me, it speaks to the ongoing growth of and experimentation with new forms interactive fiction — even as it holds true to its roots.

  
  

  Counting from the top, we have:

  
  
  
  
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    A Parser IF created with Inform

    
    
  
  
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    A CYOA made with ChoiceScript

    
    
  
  
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    Another parser game, but this time made in Quest

    
    
  
  
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    A wholly hand-rolled game masquerading as a corporate website (and thus an unusual sort of hypertext IF)

    
    
  
  
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    A multimedia hypertext made with Twine

    
    
  
  
  
  


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  Creatures Such As We , by the author of last year’s first-place winner Lynnea Glasser, placed better than any non-parser game ever has. The record was previously held by Dierdra “Squinky” Kiai’s The Play , which took third place in 2011.

  
  


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  Steph Cherrywell’s Jacqueline, Jungle Queen! represents the first appearance of a Quest-authored game in the top ten, let alone the top three. (Last year, Alex Warren’s Moquette captured 15th place.)

  
  


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  Porpentine and Brenda Neotenomie’s With Those We Love Alive fared the best of any Twine-based game so far, arriving one place better than last year’s Solarium by Alan DeNiro.

  
  

  I also find it quite impressive that this game’s ratings were quite divided, with the highest standard deviation among all the entries, and the work still managed to land in the top five.

  
  


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  If we count co-credits, then women outnumber men two-to-one among the top five games’ creators.

  
  


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  Two game titles found among the top five are from famous quotations — one from Carl Sagan, and one from the Bhagavad Gita.

  
  

As I now find myself marveling at trivia, I’ll leave the list there. Suffice to say that — not even delving deeply into the content of these games — the diversity of form on display here makes me feel very proud to have helped bring attention and accolade to these works and their creators. This speaks to a bright future where IF keeps evolving, finding new ways to be brilliant, and new people to be brilliant through.

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