You know how people enter a race, but they don’t care if they get last place? They enter for the exercise, or to spend quality time with a friend, or to spend quality time away from family? I don’t know how to do that. When I enter into a competition, I want to win, damn it.
This newsletter is about how I want to make games for games’ sake. To enjoy the process of making art. To express myself. But competitions give me an obvious goal to aim for, which – for me, anyway – seems to run counter to making art for fun.
My experience with IFComp is a great example. For the last two years, I competed in IFComp, an online competition for game writers and narrative designers, where devs submit text-based games for a small, but impassioned community of interactive fiction players to judge. One of the great things about the show is the volume of thoughtful critique you get from entering. Players engage with the work!
My primary reason for entering was to promote Adventure Snack, my former newsletter of short interactive fiction. I figured if my IFComp game placed well, I would get more subscribers. In 2022, I entered Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s, a silly, text-based narrative puzzle game which got a respectable 16th place. Respectable because it was my first time entering and the game has an obvious lack of visual polish. (I used a standard, off-the-shelf UI.) Last year, I entered Fix Your Mother’s Printer, a visual novel with a heartfelt family comedy premise. I sunk more time, effort, and myself into FYMP. I think it shows. I got help from an amazing web programmer, Josh Grams, and we created a cartoony Zoom interface for the game. I got personal emails from players saying how much the game meant to them. How much they related to the premise. The British gaming magazine Edge made FYMP their “Web Game of the Month,” which was pretty cool.
And I got 20th place. And no meaningful increase in newsletter subscribers either year. In my head, I have to fight the idea that FYMP was a failure. The game got solid reviews! Players were moved by it! Recently – and this is a spoiler for an upcoming newsletter – I found out FYMP got into two game festivals, including one in the UK. But there’ll always be that voice in the back of my head that says it didn’t work. “Geoffrey, you got a lower score. You lost.”
So, I bowed out of IFComp this year. I’m not sure how to do a competition just for fun and tune out the “comp” in IFComp. But I still enjoy playing interactive fiction games! Anyone can be an IFComp judge, which I’m doing this year. Here are my thoughts on a few of the games I played. I hope the developers of these games have a fun comp. Maybe I can figure out how to join them next year.
A few hours later in the day of The Egocentric is a unique time-based adventure game and interactive comic. You play a cop trying to nab a criminal trucker. The trucker moves from panel to panel, reacting to my choices, which I thought was really cool! Even after playing a few times, I didn’t solve the mystery. After reading the walkthrough, I don’t think I ever would’ve solved it, but I’m not great at cracking these kinds of text adventure or point-and-click game puzzles. Overall, I appreciated the light sense of humor and inventive format.
You Can’t Save Her is an action drama where the player shifts perspective between two former friends who are forced to fight each other in a strange gothic world. The prose is brisk and evocative, and the music adds to the immersion. On the whole, it’s a slick package, but I didn’t feel like my choices had much effect on the story, and I wasn’t sure if the fighting sequences had a strategy to them. The game has a strong “dramatic anime” vibe. If that’s your jam, I recommend giving YCSH a play.
House of Wolves is psychological horror hypertext fiction that explores the terrors of everyday life from the perspective of a college student. It was a memorable and kinda icky experience which makes great use of repetitive prose. The game’s conceit is that the player protagonist has no freedom in their world with purposely blunted choice design. I understood the intent, but I wish there was more branching, even if the structure ultimately merged to the same plot point. The conceit of “the player has no choice” works better, in my opinion, when the players is led to believe they might have a choice, their excitement raised, only to find out they are actually stymied.
Uninteractive Fiction is a funny joke. This game has one choice, which the player will soon regret making. I tried keeping the tab open on the start screen for a while to see if anything would happen, but I didn’t detect easter eggs or hidden plot. I believe what you see is what you get. I wonder if this is the shortest game in IFComp history…
King of Xanadu is a historical fantasy where you play the king of an idyllic community about to experience a sharp turn for the worse. The game combines deep and ornate prose with choices which lead to interesting dialogues, which explore the king’s personality, the systems of government, and the nature of the crisis. The prose describing the kingdom descending into ruin were evocative. One thing I would’ve enjoyed more of is callback dialogue that acknowledges past choices. For example, if I chose to listen to an advisor, then decided to kill him, it would’ve been interesting for the advisor to feel especially betrayed.
Rod McSchlong Gets Punched in the Dong is the sequel to last year’s Dick McButts Gets Kicked in the Nuts. These games are about a protagonist who must escape the fate of having their wang walloped. The original was designed to win the Golden Banana of Discord award for a game that divides the judges. It did so masterfully, with half of players giving it 9s and 10s and the other half giving it 1s and 2s. I liked Dick McButts! The original is surprisingly well designed, fast paced, and contains lots of absurd choices. Comedy sequels are hard, because this time around I knew what to expect, so there wasn’t as much novelty or surprise, but the follow-up is equally “punchy.”
🎲 Your Turn: Are you a competitive person? Any advice for just having fun when a trophy’s on the line? Reply to the email or hit the orange “comment” button below to tell the whole world.
🗓 Deadline: You have until October 15th to judge this year’s IFComp games. I’d love to know which games you played!
📨 Next Week: I’m writing about how I designed the background art for The Phenomenals, something I’d absolutely never done before.
9 responses to “How To Not Compete”
I don’t like competition. In years past, I’ve entered the IFComp for experience and exposure, but I’ve agonized over whether it was ethical to actually try to do better than other people. Of course, I never managed to set aside enough time to create a truly polished entry, so I was worrying over nothing.
I honestly haven’t considered the ethics of competition as a whole. Generally, I think of some competitions being more ethical than others in terms of how they’re set-up or judged. Where do you lean currently on the ethics of competitions?
The most unethical, I daresay outright immoral form of competition that comes to mind is managers who instill competitiveness in their workers to the point a company’s corporate climate is dominated by office politics, backstabbing for every iota of advantage at climbing the corporate ladder, and everyone’s too busy trying to one up each other that nothing ever gets done except the rare solo project.
I also hate the kind of competition that leads to entire industries producing nearly identical products that are hard to tell apart, anyone trying to break out of the mold dies before they can establish their niche, and consumers who don’t like the design that won get screwed over, mostly looking at the smartphone industry where everything is a damn slate and if you want real buttons and to not have to deal with a touchscreen, you’re options boil down to one of a handful of flip phones not much more capable than phones from 20 years ago, paying hundreds of dollars upfront to a tech startup who wants to do something other than a slate who, even if they release their first model probably won’t last long enough to produce a model 2, or import a smart flip phone from one of the regions where the cell phone manufacturers offer some variety with no guarantee it’ll work with your provider or can be hacked to use English.
Also, with how much collaborative game design there is in the TTRPG space(there are dozens, if not hundreds of independant publishers that have made third party content compatible with D&D 5e and other systems, most of which can be mixed and matched by a competent game master, sometimes even across systems) I wish some of that cooperation would bleed over into video/computer gaming.
I really enjoyed FYMP. It definitely had a strong identity and, as someone who won’t be able to do that kind of thing with their mother, it was particularly enjoyable.
I’m still new to IF but it’s great how each writers approach to the format varies!
Thanks for playing, Adam! I’m glad you enjoyed it. And I agree, the sheer variety of text based games out there is astounding.
Yeah, that’s… I feel like that’s tough to change: I got the opposite (don’t get too invested in competition results) reinforced all through my childhood and teenage years. So I can be very competitive, but mostly only if everyone is explicitly not going to be too worried about the results. And it’s more about having an interesting challenge: I’m VERY much the guy who’s like “we’re winning by too much, this is no fun; we need to stop and change the teams or the rules.”
Even for something like IFComp, I feel like I’d be more invested in how accurately I called my placement than in how “good” it was. “Do I know the kind of people that vote well enough to guess?” rather than “can I win?”
I like your attitude toward competition better than mine. “This is no fun if we’re winning by too much” is terrifically wholesome.
(By the way, I don’t get competitive playing games. I think I’m a pretty good sport, but when it comes to a competition wrapped up in my artistry, yeah, I get competitive.)
The only thing I can think to do is “hack” it so I’m creating a game for some other reason, but it just happens to be ready a month ahead of the IFComp intent deadline.
Hey, that was 20 out of like 74! Anyway, IFComp is so full of good games in wildly different genres that I never take it as a straight ranking. (In fact, I don’t think my favorite game of each year ever was #1, and the ones that made the most impact on me are often somewhere in the middle.) And you got at least one subscriber from the comp!
As for this year’s games, I recommend checking the walkthrough for Uninteractive Fiction.
Thank you for the encouragement and for subscribing! I believe the games won over about 20 or so subscribers in total? I’m grateful for y’all. Being part of the IF scene (in a minimal way) has opened me up to a world of great games and narrative designers I wouldn’t know otherwise.
To enter again, I would have to get to a place mentally where it wouldn’t matter whether I got ranked #5 or #50. The ranking would have to be completely meaningless to me, but I’m not sure how to do that in a competition, even if the ranks themselves are sort of fuzzy. It’s a me thing, not an IFComp thing. I have the same issue with game jams where there are winners and losers. Less so when I’m playing games, but definitely when I pour my art and soul into a project.
Hahaha, nice.