As in previous years, volunteers keep the 2015 IFComp’s IFWiki page up to date with an ever-growing list of links to reviews by (eventually) dozens of thoughtful players.
Judges who write public reviews for as many of the entries as they can (a daunting prospect, in bumper-crop years like this one!) have played a critical role in the IFComp since its earliest, pre-web years. The community’s reviews often come from writers themselves active in creating interactive fiction, able to pull from years of introspection and study when examining a new work. I know that I have often enjoyed reading these reviews at least as much as playing the games they describe.
The IFComp’s reviews-tradition has long gone rather unsung, with little to no “official” recognition from the competition’s central materials. In the first years, of course, this was simply unnecessary, with both competition and discussion all bottled up in the `rec.*.int-fiction` Usenet groups, everything in level and plain sight. When the comp’s core migrated to the web, though, and the reviews to individual blogs, the connections from the former to the latter became faint. Since redesigning the competition website in 2014, I have meant to provide some sort of more obvious recognition of reviewers’ efforts within ifcomp.org, and I don’t feel I’ve achieved that yet. For now, I hope that blog posts such as this one will suffice.
from Planet Interactive Fiction
http://ift.tt/1P8D7pf
via
IFTTT
