IFComp News: 2015: A great year for the IFComp

The 21st Annual Interactive Fiction Competition ended last week, with Steph Cherrywell’s Brain Guzzlers from Beyond! leading a pack of truly excellent and diverse work from dozens of authors. Judges submitted 206 ballots (each rating five or more games), neatly meeting my hopes to see the comp exceed 199 judges for the first time ever within a single year.

More than one critic named 2015 the greatest year for the IFComp since its inception in 1995. I wish to avoid setting any official high-water marks for myself or future IFComp organizers, but I will absolutely acknowledge the tremendous quality of this year’s entrants. The hundreds of judges agreed, with submitted ratings almost half a point higher than last year’s, on average.

I overheard a lot of people making statements to the tune of “Gee, I thought this game I liked [or wrote] would rank higher.” I dare say that makes the understandable mistake of reading an entry’s final rank as an objective score, when in fact it’s an entirely relative position, the spot where it happened to end up when forced into a single-file line comprising many titles worth playing. While always true with the IFComp, I predict that this year in particular has given the world not just a few medal-winners but a long list of fantastic new work, one that folks will continue to play and discuss for years to come.

Some trivia about this year’s entries:

• This is the third year running that a horror-themed game built with Inform took first place (and the second year for a comedy/horror blend, specifically, to do so). Not to suggest that the B-movie pastiche of Brain Guzzlers shares much topically with the Lovecraftian slacker-saga of Hunger Daemon or the unsettlingly alien perspective of Coloratura, of course.

• For the second year in a row, the top Twine-based game – Brendan Patrick Hennesy’s Birdland, fourth place in 2015 – has placed one slot higher than than the previous year’s top Twine entry, making for the highest rank that any Twine-built entry has so far earned in the competition.

• The fifth-place winner, Bruno Dias’s Cape, represents the IFComp debut of a game built with Raconteur. This is that author’s own open-source abstraction upon Undum, aiming to make that IF authoring system friendlier to create with.

• I wish to extend special recognition to Marco Vallarino’s Darkiss - Chapter 1 and Hugo Labrande’s Life on Mars? – winners of 12th and 13th place, this year – as the first two IFComp entries to take advantage of last year’s rule change allowing for new translations of previously released games. These two entries originated from the Italian and French IF communities, respectively, and arrived at the 2015 IFComp translated by their own original authors.

  I very much hope that this becomes another year-after-year trend.

• Twenty-first place may not seem like an impressive number by itself, but I know for a fact that a big chunk of internet just loved Arthur DiBianca’s Grandma Bethlinda’s Variety Box, discovering the game by way of several blogs and excitedly trading hints in their attached comment sections. I believe that, for the most part, these players neither knew nor cared about the game’s context within a competition.

  These folks had so much fun that I had to spend an hour or two mid-comp furiously reconfiguring my server, as their constant play (with every move generating more automatically logged transcript entries) began to paralyze the IFComp’s web and database servers – which is how I became cognizant of the above facts.

  I have to assume that, if one ultimately middle-of-the-pack game accidentally revealed how much attention and affection it received from the wider internet, then the same could likely be said for much of the whole 53-game field. And I have no problem at all with this notion.

A few parting links:

• Emily Short, author of many IFComp reviews over the years, launched a new effort called the IF Comp Review Collective in late October, inviting people from both inside and outside the core community to deeply review individual IFComp games. This inaugural effort resulted in over a dozen thoughtful game reviews from several interesting folks.

• Lots of authors have been sharing post-mortems and retrospectives of their entries on the intfiction.org forums.

• Bruno Dias hosted a two-hour wrap-up chat on Saturday about this year’s competition on the IF room in Euphoria.io, making a raw text log available.

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