2020 Interactive Fiction Competition

[Erebus]

The 2020 IFComp has just begun. There's more than a hundred entries, which is probably a record for the competition.

If you're not familiar with the IFComp (I only discovered it a few years ago), well, it's pretty much what its title says : a competition between works of interactive fiction.

Of course, "interactive fiction" is a rather broad concept. The main distinction, in the competition, is between "parser-based" fiction (you write down what you want your character to do, as in games like Zork) and "choice-based" fiction (you choose between several options offered to you).

There's a lot of variety when it comes to :
- length (from less than 15 minutes to more than 2 hours),
- linearity and freedom of action,
- level of challenge (a few of the interactive fictions aren't really games at all),
- setting, plots, heroes, etc.

Judging from what I've observed in the last two competitions, the quality of writing is seldom truly bad and the plots are seldom very bland. That doesn't mean that most of the entries will prove to be entertaining and/or interesting, but I'd say they're worth trying.


EDIT : Tried about a dozen of them, though I didn't always get very far. So far, the entry I find the most interesting is "Vain Empires", a parser-based set in a world where Hell and Heaven are engaged in a Cold War. You play as an incorporeal demon able to steal intents from people and use them to manipulate other people.

 

[taxalot]

Yeah, good luck building an IF that rivals in anyway with the stuff AI Dungeon allows me to play.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Yeah, good luck building an IF that rivals in anyway with the stuff AI Dungeon allows me to play.

Look at statue

>You look at statue

.......(2 minutes pass)....

>You look at statue
>You look at statue

The AI doesn't know what to say

Yeah, no way an actual person-written game can top that

 

[Ahnx]

The IF gone completely woke/SJW years ago, thanks to persons like ultra-feminist Emily Short and Jimmy Maher.

 

[MRY]

The IF gone completely woke/SJW years ago, thanks to persons like ultra-feminist Emily Short and Jimmy Maher.

Emily Short is one of the all-time greats of interactive fiction, as a game-creator, a tool-creator, and a theoretician. Maher's King of Shreds and Patches is a very solid work. Long before either, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity staked out a left-wing political stance in the genre. As far as I know, the post-Infocom greats (Adam Cadre, Andrew Plotkin, etc.) are all very left-wing politically, and generally quite outspoken. And many of the classic games of the late 1990s/early 2000s that I played were explicitly political (and I don't recall any that were not left-wing). I think you are either being selective in your political prejudices or missing out on a great number of wonderful games.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The IF gone completely woke/SJW years ago, thanks to persons like ultra-feminist Emily Short and Jimmy Maher.

Emily Short is one of the all-time greats of interactive fiction, as a game-creator, a tool-creator, and a theoretician.

https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,162157/
...no?
Am I supposed to be seeing something impressive here?

"Where the Water Tastes Like Wine" is only notable for being a game that was hilariously overhyped by video game journalists and then nobody even played it. It has more critic reviews than user reviews on metacritic, that's something that barely ever happens with new games.

 

[MRY]

I never played that game but have made fun of it.

My favorite of her games is Metamorphoses. Her core works from what I consider the golden age of post-Infocom IF are Galatea, Metamorphoses, City of Secrets, and Savoir-Faire. (Floatpoint was after my time.) Counterfeit Monkey, which is one of her recent games, is very impressive as well. I never played Bronze. Alabaster is more a proof of concept. I found her non-Inform work less engaging. She was also critical in the development of Inform 7.

Some of her works are basically experiments in conversation/NPC interaction (Galatea, City of Secrets, Alabaster), and I would not necessarily recommend those, though many people like them. Metamorphoses, Savoir-Faire, and Counterfeit Monkey, by contrast, are driven by puzzles in which you have some set of magical abilities that behave in consistent ways (e.g., in Metamorphoses, you can change the size and substance of items, so you can taken a disc, turn it to cloth, poke a hole in it with a needle, turn it to metal, and expand it, and have a large ring; in Counterfeit Monkey, you can add, remove, and change letters from objects, so you can change a "brush" to a "bush" or a "lock" to a "clock," etc.). The inventiveness and consistency of the puzzles, and the way she integrates them into narrative, is second to none.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Gotta say, I played Galatea once upon a time and didn't really find the NPC that interesting to interact with. It was cool that Galatea noticed when I changed the subject, but the game felt like the "natural" conversation had a lot of dead ends and I ended up throwing out any Greek figures I could until she recognized something. So I don't exactly see the high opinion of her. Still better than Where the Water Tastes Like Wine though.
Also, the way you're describing Counterfeit Monkey makes it sound like one of the bits in the Infocom wordplay game, forgot the name, Nord and Bert?

 

[MRY]

I couldn’t connect with Galatea. It’s my least favorite of her well regarded games.

 

[Ahnx]

Emily Short is one of the all-time greats of interactive fiction

No. She is the feminist who effectively ruined the IF genre as a whole, turning it into SJW fest. With the help of the others, of course.

 

[Neuromancer]

The IF gone completely woke/SJW years ago, thanks to persons like ultra-feminist Emily Short and Jimmy Maher.

Emily Short is one of the all-time greats of interactive fiction, as a game-creator, a tool-creator, and a theoretician. Maher's King of Shreds and Patches is a very solid work. Long before either, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity staked out a left-wing political stance in the genre. As far as I know, the post-Infocom greats (Adam Cadre, Andrew Plotkin, etc.) are all very left-wing politically, and generally quite outspoken. And many of the classic games of the late 1990s/early 2000s that I played were explicitly political (and I don't recall any that were not left-wing). I think you are either being selective in your political prejudices or missing out on a great number of wonderful games.

I haven't played any of the games you mention, so I can't comment on them directly.
But keep in mind, that being left wing 35 years ago was a completely different thing than the crazy woke mob of today.


I have been reading the same argument during discussions about Star Trek, when people complain about the current craziness of Discovery and people answer: "But it has always been left wing."

That is technically true, but misleading.
Star Trek was always leaning slightly to the left, yes, but that was relative to the general population of its SPECIFIC TIME ERA.

So, when The Original Series aired, the American society at that time was pretty conservative. Therefore, Star Trek brought indeed some fresh new ideas into the rigid structures, when it aired the first time.

Nowadays however, when almost all the Western nations bank pretty far to left bordering sometimes even on extremist ideas - being left of THAT, is just something unthinkable crazy and even dangerous.
From today's point of view, The Original Star Trek Series, which was left wing at its time, would be considered pretty conservative by most people. Some of the woke mob might even call it racist, right wing, etc. etc.


So, everything depends just on your point of view.

 

[MRY]

A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity are more overtly left-wing than any game of Emily Short's that I've played.

Anyway, this is a silly debate to continue. I certainly don't dispute that a game's politics can be off-putting to players depending on the game and the player. There are people who say they hate Primordia because it was too right-wing and people who say they hate Primordia because it was too left-wing. One amazing Steam reviewer initially gave the game a positive review for being progressive and then, eight years later, edited it to make it a negative review on the ground he found it too conservative "based on current events." Those players are 100% right in so far as they are describing their reaction to the work. God knows there are works where the politics have been off-putting to me. The criticism seems objectively silly to me as applied to Emily Short's works, but de gustibus.

 

[Neuromancer]

One amazing Steam reviewer initially gave the game a positive review for being progressive and then, eight years later, edited it to make it a negative review on the ground he found it too conservative "based on current events."

See, you just proved my point!

 

[MRY]

Yes, I agree that whether politics get in the way of the audience's enjoyment of the work depends on the audience's politics and how the audience receives politics, the work's politics and how the work expresses politics. The work doesn't change but the audience does.

 

[Keyboard Vomit]

Yes, I agree that whether politics get in the way of the audience's enjoyment of the work depends on the audience's politics and how the audience receives politics, the work's politics and how the work expresses politics. The work doesn't change but the audience does.

I play interactive fiction to read about Karl Marx as a leather daddy whipping black transsexual sex workers into forming unions but all the games I've found so far are extreme far-right trash and white/asian supremacist and dehumanizing to trans women. Emily Short is a literal nazi and a fascist and should kill herself to make room for intersectional voices and representation.

 

[Ahnx]

They've introduced the html-based (twine) stories to widen their audience. Many of these 'stories' are written by lefties, fags and transgenders.

The IF genre, as we knew it, is now dead. As I said before, thanks to Short, Maher and a few others.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

How are Short and Maher responsible for all the shitty Twine games? Genuinely asking, because while I don't like them, they don't seem the types to advocate for the kind of "games" that are usually made in that language. The closest they've come, AFAIK, is being a bit responsible for Inform 7, which I'm sure was used by many hacks who can't be bothered to learn game engine scripting.