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Welcome to the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Fifty-eight new IF works await your play and rating at the IFComp website.
Our guidelines for judges remain this year as they have been in years past, and we request that all first-time judges read them prior to digging in. The summary:
Anyone who didn’t enter a game this year can help judge IFComp. (Exception: Please do not rate any games that you tested or otherwise played before October 1, 2016.)
To have your ratings counted, you must rate at least five games by November 15, 2016.
Rate games according to your own taste and principles, and assign your own meaning to all 10 possible rating-values (not just “1” and “10”).
Please do not rate games you haven’t played. It’s OK to have a ballot with lots of unrated games, so long as you have at least five rated by mid-November.
Questions about judging always welcome at ifcomp@ifcomp.org, or the IFComp Twitter account.
A special note to Mac users this year: The most recent version of macOS, Sierra, has demonstrated incompatibilities with several older IF interpreters, including Zoom, Spatterlight, and Gargoyle. If you have trouble running these programs, consider Lectrote, a new interpreter by Andrew Plotkin. You can also try playing the games in a web browser.
Several games this year were disqualified from competing due to their having already been released in other venues prior to the start of the judging period. While this rule has been attached to IFComp for most of its history, I sympathize with those who overlook it due to its unusual nature, and I will do my best to clarify its presence next year.
As a sort of consolation prize to these authors (and an oblique way of encouraging myself to fix this flaw for 2017), allow me to list some interesting new IF works you might like to check out – even if you can’t rate them in the competition.
Open Sorcery by Abigail Corfman
ConQuest by Daniel Corkery and Zachary Reese
Grofast Industries by Brook Jensen
The commencement benediction from this year’s README file:
This year marks the first that IFComp operates under the auspices of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), a new, charitable non-profit corporation dedicated to supporting the technologies and services that enable IF creation and play. Assuming stewardship of IFComp was IFTF’s very first active program, and as such the competition now runs on servers paid for by the IF-loving public, and for this I feel sincere gratitude.
IFTF stands poised to do a lot more great work in the coming months and years, and I invite you to visit its website to learn how you can help its ongoing mission: http://ift.tt/29dKkWs
IFComp benefits from new volunteers this year. Line Hollis, IFComp’s first entry-curation volunteer, reviewed all the entries as they arrived for rules adherence and such, a task more involved than ever due to the record-breaking number of games submitted. On the other side of the deadline, Carolyn VanEseltine brings back the role of vote-counter, making sure that the process of casting ballots and computing scores stays smooth and level throughout this year’s judging period.
Joe Johnston contributed the new IFComp code that makes Carolyn’s work possible. I should mention that those of a certain technical bent are welcome to browse IFComp’s code repository on GitHub. We always welcome source-level contributions of every sort, from bug reports to pull requests.
It may not have been his intention when he first released it months ago, but Andrew Plotkin’s new IF intepreter, Lectrote, gives Mac users a way to play downloaded Glulx games and more just as a new macOS update removes support for a swath of older interpeters. This would have been a more painful competition for us Mac people without his accidental assistance!
And, of course, dozens of interactive fiction creators, both familiar friends and newcomers, have worked untold hours to bring us 58 brand new works of IF. Let’s not keep them waiting any longer! Let’s go play some games.
– Jason McIntosh, October 2016
Excited to play and rate the IFComp 2016 entries! Will likely be posting a few thoughts and reactions as we go.
Gamebook blogs
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via Planet Interactive Fiction http://planet-if.com/
October 17, 2016 at 11:32AM
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