By John Walker on October 4th, 2007 at 1:00 pm.
It’s time to get judgmental. The 13th Annual IF Competition is underway, and awaiting your vote.
The internet is so much older than you’d think. For 13 years the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction has been voting on Interactive Fiction games, to decide upon the best that year. And yes, sure, games may now have something called “graphics”, but it’s a passing fad. Get over it.
There’s a lot of responsibility here. There’s a huge 29 entrants, and to make any sensible vote, you’ll surely have to play all of them. And no, you’re not allowed to vote based on their names, because otherwise Slap That Fish and Lord Bellwater’s Secret would walk it.
Everything’s neatly packaged, with two easy zip files to download or torrent, which will install all the interpreters in one go, and give you all the games. And then quit your job, play them all through before the 15th November, and vote.
Actually, the rules are far more complicated. You’ve got to play at least five games to vote, play each game for two hours AND NO MORE before voting, and goodness knows what else. Follow this to see them in full. If you can still muster the energy to take part, you are a winner yourself.
“Interactive fiction”? Is that some pompous name used by pretentious oiks so they can pretend they’re not playing games? After all, games are for kids, right?
Pffft.
No points for any of them until they start calling them ‘adventure games’, mmmkay?
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Nah, it’s just what’s it’s called. Problem with interactive fiction is that some of the stuff is getting increasingly ungamelike, to the point of almost total linerarity. There’s some interesting stuff out there.
This reminds me, reposting my Wordplay article from Edge from a few years ago may not be a bad ideas. Deals with some IF stuff, as well as – hey! – Planescape.
KG
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“And then quit your job, play them all through before the 15th November, and vote.”
Pshaw. I managed quite successfully to plough through the entire 2004 competition whilst “working”. Of course, I haven’t managed to do the two competitions since, so that might say more about the lack of things to do in my job circa 2004 than my ability to skive convincingly at work.
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OK, that’s where the other site got the error: you don’t have to play for a full 2 hours. First game I tried was done-fully explored-in 45 minutes. Others I find I’m comfortable rating after an hour. So you can make some contribution to the contest in 5 hours over the next month-and-a-half. Or just play some for fun.
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