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Interactive Fiction Competition 2006 Voting Begins

Posted by Zonk on from the anchorhead-should-win-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Voting for the 12th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp) has begun! Standout entries this year include a new game from acclaimed writer (and previous IF Comp winner) Emily Short, an interactive moebius strip, the requisite bible game(s) and a game about making games. A full list is available on the IF Comp website, and eToychest kicks off their IF Comp coverage with an interview with Stephen Granade, the competition organizer."

21 comments

  1. Thought this was something else by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Read fiction and Voting and thought this would be another artcle about Diebold machines.

  2. I thought fictional voting doesn't start until... by Hamster+Lover · · Score: 1

    November 7th! Oh well, another election down the toilet.

  3. I just submitted my interactive fiction. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    >Turn T-block clockwise.
    The T-block falls one space. Below is a red square, two blue squares, another red square, and a green square. You are directly above the red square on the right hand side.
    >Down.
    You have completed a row! +1 points.
    There is a blue square falling here.

    1. Re:I just submitted my interactive fiction. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about this:

      "You wake up. You have no memory of who you are, or where you are, or what you have been doing. A peculiarly vibrating, tinny music pours from an invisible source. Then you see the tremendous chunk of stone falling towards you..."

      freefall.z5

  4. LOOK by Tackhead · · Score: 2, Funny
    > LOOK

    Nothing to see here. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

    > WAIT
    Time passes...

    > RELOAD
    There is a Diebold thread here. You do not have a sword with which to attack the trolls.

    > DOWNLOAD THE COMPETITION GAMES
    The site serving the software is in the process of being Slashdotted.

    > FUCK!
    Such language in a high-class establishment like this! (What do you think this is, Leather Goddesses of Phobos?)

    > QUIT
    Your score would be 0 (Total of 400 points), in 6 moves.
    This score gives you the rank of CmdrTaco.
    ***END OF SESSION***

    1. Re:LOOK by bcat24 · · Score: 3, Funny

      > enter slashdot
      You enter Slashdot.

      There is an article about interactive fiction here.

      > read article
      An anonymous coward writes to tell about voting for the 12th annual IF Comp beginning.

      > write comment
      What kind of comment would you like to write?

      > a parody of IF
      There is already a comment paroding IF here.

      > damn it
      What a loony!

      > write really crappy comment
      Written.

      The moderatators have come!
      They mod you down!
      They mod you down again!
      They mod you down again!

      *** You have died ***

      Your score is -1 (total of 500 points), in 6 moves.
      This gives you the rank of Average Slashdotter.

    2. Re:LOOK by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

      > mod parent up
      You can't get ye fla...mod parent up!

      --
      Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  5. What's wrong with the IF community? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    In today's ADHD plagued world, most causal web surfers are weary of anything that might take even five minutes of their time. If a piece of IF requires some kind of weird player to run, 99% of all newcomers to it won't ever run it. With the IF subgenre being probably the best suited to implement with hyperlinks, you might guess that this is what they do, or at least that they have a player written in flash or javascript or processing or whatever. Well, you'd be wrong. They actually require you to download some obscure player before you can have any fun at all. That's really amazingly dumb.

    1. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by Lallander · · Score: 1

      http://www.eblong.com/zarf/if.html If you will note several of these provide a java version. Also Zarf is one of the better IF writers IMHO, so this is a good starting point for a lot of people that can't be arsed to download one of the other players.

    2. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What's wrong with the people who watch Nascar or pro football? I've tried both and found them stupefyingly boring. I did enjoy Doom, in God mode so I could mostly ignore the monsters and explore the environment with no pressure.

      I don't in general find IF to be boring. It's more frustrating: I've been doing the computer thing since the late 70's, and I've never enjoyed trying to guess what to do, or try dozens of possibilities until something works. I don't play much IF for the same reason I don't crack websites for fun: for me, it isn't. I'd love to try writing IF games, and maybe someday I'll have the time to think about doing it.

      IF is one of those rare things that has an elite reputation, and makes it work. IF is for the few, the enthusiasts who have the talent, the desire and (in many cases) an independent income. They don't care about being accessible, but anyone who wants to make the effort is welcomed, making it a friendlier and much closer knit culture overall than Linux. And as the IF archive and 2 annual contests demonstrate, the community generates enough material to sustain itself nicely. They'd like to have us, but they don't need us!

    3. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by Peganthyrus · · Score: 1

      Well, a lot of the IF community got into these games back when an 80-column display on a home computer was high tech. The medium has been proclaimed dead as a commercial form, and lives solely due to the efforts of hobbyists, who are (for the most part) writing esoteric, artsy games.

      The process of playing the games requires hard thought, and most modern IF is by and for people who've played all the classics of the field. Comparing a modern IF game of the type found in these yearly competitions to most modern computer toys isn't just like sitting down with a book versus watching a movie; it's like deciding to learn Greek while reading Plato, rather than watching this summer's sure-fire action hit. These are games by and for a relatively small and specialized community.

      That said, dude, the download page for the competition games tells you what to do, it has a package of interpreters for Windows, it has a link to the best Mac interpreter, it has the games. What more do you want? I've had more hassle figuring out how to play emulated console games than this would be.

      --
      egypt urnash minimal art.
    4. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by demallien2 · · Score: 1

      They aren' THAT esoteric! I remember playing a Cthulu mythos based game just recently called Anchorhead. It was absolutely brilliant until about the halfway mark, where there was a conversation that had to be done with a half-insane street bum, and you had to ask just the right questions to get the important answers to advance.

      Now, of course, Google is your friend, but the problem is that once you have cracked on this type of game and gone to the walkthrough, it's extremely difficult to stop reading the walkthrough any time you run into a slightly difficult puzzle.

      But Anchorhead was a very cool game up to that conversation, which was my point :-)

    5. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by Quintin+Stone · · Score: 1

      Actually, you'd be wrong. There are a number of terps available on the web. But seeing as how this is a competition which involves playing quite a few games thoroughly and judging them, maybe they don't want every brain-dead cretin like yourself voting on them.

      --

      "Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."

    6. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by Abcd1234 · · Score: 2, Informative

      With the IF subgenre being probably the best suited to implement with hyperlinks

      WTF are you talking about? IF != choose your own adventure books. They typically have complex user interactions involving manipulation of in-game objects using what is, in many cases, a remarkably complex grammar. To suggest this can be done with simple hyperlinks betrays a deep misunderstanding of the nature of IF.

    7. Re:What's wrong with the IF community? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not all of them do. But just so you know, IF is not suited to hyperlinks at all - being presented with a blank prompt requires you to actually think about what you have to do, rather than just pointing and grunting.
      Believe it or not, some people like games that force them to think. And it's not just old hardened fans - I play a few games and I only discovered IF a year or two ago.

  6. I prefer *this* game by DittoBox · · Score: 1

    http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Game

    --
    Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
  7. Halloween IF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There's also a Halloween-themed interactive fiction contest underway on Saugus.net, the ninth annual one.

  8. How can I not post it? by pNutz · · Score: 2, Funny
    from the Escapist:

    Porch

    This is the weathered front porch of the house. A closed screen door leads westward into the house. You can leave the porch to the east.

    Mr. Martin is standing in the doorway.

    There is a particularly yummy bone here.

    > BARK
    "What! Timmy's fallen down and broken his leg! Where?"

    > BARK
    "In the old Johnson barn! Let's go!"

    - a joke contest example from the Winter 1986 Infocom newsletter, "The New Zork Times"
    --
    Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
  9. Choose? by liak12345 · · Score: 1

    Choose Your Own Adventure is making a comeback? This time I am TOTALLY going to remember to follow the crewman down the hall of the spaceship because that room is going to blow up in a minutes if I stick around.

  10. Irony of Ironies by Nycteris_a · · Score: 1

    I still haven't forgiven them for making the book on Inform obsolete about a month after I got it in the mail. Progress is too fast even in I/F!

  11. Please don't skew the voting.... by Futaba-chan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Standout entries this year include a new game from acclaimed writer (and previous IF Comp winner) Emily Short, an interactive moebius strip, the requisite bible game(s) and a game about making games.
    Um, it's considered bad form to single out specific games for discussion before the end of the voting period. Especially on a widely read site like Slashdot. Please don't do this next year.