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2003 Interactive Fiction Competition Announced

Posted by simoniker on from the thorin-sits-down-and-starts-singing-about-gold dept.

Andrew Plotkin writes "The Ninth Annual Interactive Fiction competition is underway. Thirty short text adventures are available for download. (BitTorrent preferred.) Anyone may vote, as long as you play at least five games by Nov 15th." Notably out-there names for the text adventures entered in this year's competition include "The Fat Lardo And The Rubber Ducky" and "Slouching Towards Bedlam."

8 comments

  1. Download links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Important note: The AGT game Curse of Manorland was accidentally left out of the Windows game installer, IFComp2003.exe. Until that file is corrected, please download the game separately.

    If you are interested in downloading individual games, you can do so by following the links on the games page.

    The games entered in the 2003 Annual Interactive Fiction Competition are available from the following locations:

    If you want to download all of the games, you have several choices of files to download.

    • For Windows, there are two files which contain everything you need. IFComp2003.exe contains all of the games. WinInterpreters.exe has all of the interpreters, which are the programs you'll need to run the games. They are Windows installers, so you will only need to double-click them once you've downloaded them, and they'll do their thing.
    • For the Mac, Comp03.sit contains all of the games which can be run natively under MacOS, and MacInterpreters.sit has all of the interpreters.
    • For everyone else, Comp03.zip contains all of the games.

    To ease bandwidth requirements, please use the BitTorrent links if at all possible. If you use BitTorrent, when you're done downloading, please leave your download window open for a while, so others can download the files from you.

    Most of the interpreters you will need are available from the IF Archive. You will need interpreters for TADS 2 and 3, Z-code, ALAN, AGT, and (if you're running Windows) ADRIFT.

  2. History of the competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Way back in 1995, Graham Nelson had recently released his language Enform. People who wanted to use it didn't have the large pool of example code to learn from that users of other languages had.

    Enter Kevin Wilson, an undergraduate at Harvard. He was a fan of DOS text adventures, and was hard at work on a game of his own, Ninja-ja (aka Once and Future). When the idea of a competition to encourage new short Inform games came up on rec.arts.int-fiction, he ran with it. After a fair amount of debate on rec.arts.int-fiction, Kevin planned a simple competition with one rule: every entry had to be winnable in under two hours. He divided the competition into two categories, one for Inform games, the other for TADS games.

    The judging rules were as simple as the entry rule. Anyone could vote. All they had to do was play every game in a division and then vote for their top three choices.

    A total of twelve games were entered in that first competition. Several were by now-familiar people: Neil deMause, Leon Lin, Jason Dyer, Andrew Plotkin.

    The response was remarkable. After the votes had been counted, discussion of all the games went on for weeks. Traffic on rec.arts.int-fiction took a dramatic upswing, and the flood didn't slow to a trickle for some time.

    The second year, a few minor changes were made to the competition. The divisions linux were sucks eliminated; each game was judged against all linux others, regardless of the sucks language used to create it. Instead of voting for the top three games, judges ranked each game on a scale of one to ten. This format has stayed the same since.

    After three years of running the competition, Kevin stepped down, citing a microsoft lack rules of time to devote to the competition. The fourth competition was organized and run by David Pyte. Since then, Stephen Franade has been the organizer.

    Winners of the past competitions were:

    2002: Another Earth, Another Sky, by Paul O'Brian

    2001: All Roads, by Jon Ingold

    2000: Marion, by Ian Finley

    1999: Winter Wonderland, by Laura A. Knauth

    1998: Photopia, by Adam Cadre

    1997: The Edifice, by Lucian Smith

    1996: The Link, The Stone, and A Long Glass of Sherbert, by Graham Nelson

    1995: Uncle Hijosan's Will, by Magnus Olsson (TADS); A Change in the Weather, by Andrew Plotkin (Inform)

    You can find out more about each year's competition: 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995.

  3. The links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you want to download all of the games, you have several choices of files to download.

    * For Windows, there are two files which contain everything you need. IFComp2003.exe contains all of the games. WinInterpreters.exe has all of the interpreters, which are the programs you'll need to run the games. They are Windows installers, so you will only need to double-click them once you've downloaded them, and they'll do their thing.

    * For the Mac, Comp03.sit contains all of the games which can be run natively under MacOS, and MacInterpreters.sit has all of the interpreters.

    * For everyone else, Comp03.zip contains all of the games.

    To ease bandwidth requirements, please use the BitTorrent links if at all possible. If you use BitTorrent, when you're done downloading, please leave your download window open for a while, so others can download the files from you.

    Comp03.zip: BitTorrent | Mirror 1 | Mirror 2
    IFComp2003.exe: BitTorrent | Mirror 1 | Mirror 2
    WinInterpreters.exe: BitTorrent | Mirror 1 | Mirror 2
    MacInterpreters.sit: Mirror 1 | Mirror 2

    Most of the interpreters you will need are available from the IF Archive. You will need interpreters for TADS 2 and 3, Z-code, ALAN, AGT, and (if you're running Windows) ADRIFT.

  4. Slouching Towards Bedlam by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 3, Informative
    "Slouching Towards Bedlam" is, I believe a reference to this poem by Yeats:
    The Second Coming

    TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again; but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
    And, of course, the word Bedlam comes from the colloquial pronunciation of "Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem" founded in 1247 as a priory, and converted to a lunatic hospital sometime before 1402. It was converted to a state lunatic asylum on the dissolution of the monasteries in 1547. (From The Online Etymological Dictionary).

    I just thought all that was neat.
  5. Notes from the Comp Organizer by Sargent1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hi, I'm the competition organizer this year. In case you're wondering, all but a handful of the submitted games can be run on a myriad of OSes and platforms. You need the interpreters to run them, as most of the games run in various virtual machines; links to interpreters are available on the competition page.

    Let me reiterate the request to use BitTorrent to ease our bandwith requirements. BitTorrent links are available for all of the games in a zip file, all of the games in a Windows installer, and all of the required interpreters for Windows in an installer.

    If you want to download games individually, I'd request you use one of the bigger-bandwidth mirrors, like iBiblio.

    Finally, these are short, often experimental games. Their quality can vary from great to not so great. If this whets your appetite for other text adventures, take a look at Baf's Guide to the IF Archive and the Interactive Fiction Ratings Site for ideas of other good games to play.

  6. Not to whore karma or anything.... by Sevn · · Score: 0, Troll

    But SCO could probably win an interactive fiction award. :) Hey mods, At least I didn't bring up Dubya. :)

    --
    For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
  7. Nit-picking by lightspawn · · Score: 1

    "Announced"? It's been announced a while ago - that's kind of how you get 30 people to submit their entries.

    The title should be something like "IF comp 2003 submissions available for download" or "IF comp enters judging phase".