[IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule

Rikard Peterson wrote:
> Maureen Mason <maureencmason.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote in
> news:MPG.21b0e768d703bd759896a2@news.newsguy.com:
>
>> Just curious, how did people like the change this year, i.e., letting
>> players discuss and review the games during the comp? Good for the
>> authors? the players? the comp?
>
> Like Andreas Davour mentioned in his comp notes (
> news:cs9ejeqnmpb.fsf@Psilocybe.Update.UU.SE ), reviews have been spread out
> over blogs and stuff this year, and like him I didn't like it much. Others
> probably do, though, or it wouldn't have happened. The rule change may have
> encouraged this (and from what I understand, the blogging encouranged the
> rule change), but it would probably have happened anyway. So I don't know
> if the rule change changed anything.
>
> Personally, I avoided all reviews without problems until the comp was
> finished, so I don't have much more to say on the subject.
>
> Rikard
>

I thought it was nice because there weren't days and days of nothing but
reviews on the newsgroup. Most of the conversation took place elsewhere
and that has the positive effect of drawing in more people to the
community as web pages are indexed and so forth.

-- Poster

www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (upcoming!)
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

I'm in favour of it. It was nice to see some reviews and read some
discussion of the games while the comp was running and everything was
still fresh in my mind. Hopefully next year they'll relax it even more
and authors will be able to take part as well.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

On 25 ÎÏÑÂ, 01:34, dwh... DeleteThis @gmail.com wrote:
> I'm in favour of it. It was nice to see some reviews and read some
> discussion of the games while the comp was running and everything was
> still fresh in my mind. Hopefully next year they'll relax it even more
> and authors will be able to take part as well.

While I liked it too, and often had to restrain myself from joining
the debate(s) (since I entered a game in the Comp), I can quite well
understand why authors are not allowed to discuss the competition
games, and fully appreciate it. It's a matter that might get out of
control too easily (although, of course, I don't think anything can
prevent an ill-intentioned author to organize a rant using a different
nickname).

It's a bit like not allowing copyrighted stuff in the games. On one
hand, who'd ever care? On the other hand, the Comp organizer needs a
kind of security. Similarly, the author non-discussion rule is sort of
a warranty of the voting being fair and objective enough. Thsi
warranty may be not a panacea, but at least it's there.

Valentine
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

On 28 Nov, 19:00, Andreas Davour <ante... RemoveThis @updateLIKE.uu.HELLse> wrote:

> I must confess I was a bit surprised not to see any postings here with
> reviews as the comp was going on.
>
> Now, since I'm /against/ the new rule /and/ don't have time to browse a
> zillion blogs to find the reviews anyway I guess it might be considered
> a moot point.
>
> /Andreas
>

A good place where links to all (well, or the vast majority of, at
least) the reviews are gathered together is the IF-Wiki:
http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/13th_Annual_Interactive_Fiction_Competition

Valentine
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

Rikard Peterson <trumgottist.DeleteThis@bigfoot.com> writes:

> Maureen Mason <maureencmason.DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote in
> news:MPG.21b0e768d703bd759896a2@news.newsguy.com:
>
>> Just curious, how did people like the change this year, i.e., letting
>> players discuss and review the games during the comp? Good for the
>> authors? the players? the comp?
>
> Like Andreas Davour mentioned in his comp notes (
> news:cs9ejeqnmpb.fsf@Psilocybe.Update.UU.SE ), reviews have been spread out
> over blogs and stuff this year, and like him I didn't like it much. Others
> probably do, though, or it wouldn't have happened. The rule change may have
> encouraged this (and from what I understand, the blogging encouranged the
> rule change), but it would probably have happened anyway. So I don't know
> if the rule change changed anything.
>
> Personally, I avoided all reviews without problems until the comp was
> finished, so I don't have much more to say on the subject.

I must confess I was a bit surprised not to see any postings here with
reviews as the comp was going on.

Now, since I'm /against/ the new rule /and/ don't have time to browse a
zillion blogs to find the reviews anyway I guess it might be considered
a moot point.

/Andreas

--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

Maureen Mason <maureencmason.RemoveThis@gmail.com> writes:

> Just curious, how did people like the change this year, i.e., letting
> players discuss and review the games during the comp? Good for the
> authors? the players? the comp?

As might have been obvious from a few other posts, I didn't like it at
all. I prefer all discussion to take place after the comp and preferably
here. Everyone are on the same level and have the same experiences to
share. Now someone might post a note and nobody discuss it since he/she
hasn't play that game yet!

/Andreas

--
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

> Just curious, how did people like the change this year, i.e., letting
> players discuss and review the games during the comp? Good for the
> authors? the players? the comp?

Well, to answer my own question, I'm torn. I really liked being able to
read reviews of the various comp games as I played them, and it also
sent me to some excellent blogs and websites for the first time. And
people were great about hiding spoilers, whether on the newsgroup or on
their own sites.

On the other hand, the discussion was spread out and seemed more static,
less conversational. It's harder to follow additions to the blogs,
personal sites, intfiction.org, the wiki, whatever, than it is to just
watch a newsgroup, and the newsgroup itself was quieter than usual in
the two weeks after the comp. It gave me that nagging feeling that the
maybe the best discussion was happening somewhere else.

The Spanish-language IFComp this fall allowed discussion by players AND
authors all through the judging period. Unlike our comp, there's no
newsgroup: instead they have a web forum where you can use a spoilers
tag, and also it's a small and tight-knit community so there's little
risk of flame wars. I can't tell if the final results were swayed by
the fact that authors defended against critiques of their games, but I
know I enjoyed how everybody was trading questions and hints as they
played (authors generally don't include walkthroughs with their games).
It definitely created that pleasure of playing IF games together instead
of alone.

Maureen
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

On Dec 2, 3:21 pm, Maureen Mason <maureencma....DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:

> On the other hand, the discussion was spread out and seemed more static,
> less conversational. It's harder to follow additions to the blogs,
> personal sites, intfiction.org, the wiki, whatever, than it is to just
> watch a newsgroup, and the newsgroup itself was quieter than usual in
> the two weeks after the comp. It gave me that nagging feeling that the
> maybe the best discussion was happening somewhere else.

To the best of my knowledge, it just wasn't happening.

I had hoped that more during-comp coverage would encourage people to
play from outside the community or from fringe groups that don't
follow the newsgroup but are interested in IF. I see no evidence that
happened, and we unquestionably did get less post-comp traffic.

From my point of view, this is a net loss, and I don't plan to repeat
the experiment of blogging about the games.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

On Dec 2, 5:23 pm, Emily Short <emsh... RemoveThis @mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> I had hoped that more during-comp coverage would encourage people to
> play from outside the community or from fringe groups that don't
> follow the newsgroup but are interested in IF. I see no evidence that
> happened, and we unquestionably did get less post-comp traffic.

For what it's worth, there were significantly fewer games, and fewer
established authors, this year compared to last year *. That could
have something to do with the volume of discussion on the newsgroups
post-comp as well.

Going off on a tangent for a moment: how numerous and visible is the
active IF web presence? I don't mean the archival sites, but rather
the web mirrors of the IF newsgroups, blogs, forums, and you could
include sites like IFDB here as well, but probably not things like
SPAG or the IF review sites as they update too infrequently to engage
people who don't normally play IF. The point being that even with the
no-discussion rule lifted, if the discussion isn't visible, it's not
going to draw these people in.

For that matter, how many people who do play IF visit active IF sites?

I agree that the newsgroup is the easiest way to put all the
discussion in one place. However -- why didn't anyone put their
discussion during the Comp on the newsgroup? All I saw were blogs and
the forum at Intfiction.



*: If anyone cares: 43 games last year, and 10 by what I at least call
established authors. This year, 27 games, and I counted 5.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

On Dec 3, 2:10 am, George Oliver <georgeolive... DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> For that matter, how many people who do play IF visit active IF sites?

I don't know what the answer is in general, but for what it's worth:
my blog stats showed a substantial rise in visits during the
competition, at one point hitting almost 2500 views in a day (vs. the
more typical 300 or so); looked at in the longer term, I got 25,000
views in October and 14,000 in November, as against a typical baseline
of 8000 or 9000 per month.

On the other hand, that might have been from the same two or three
comp authors hitting refresh over and over.

> I agree that the newsgroup is the easiest way to put all the
> discussion in one place. However -- why didn't anyone put their
> discussion during the Comp on the newsgroup?

For my part: to avoid spoiling people who had said they didn't want to
be spoiled and that they didn't like the prospect of comp discussion
on RGIF. It seemed safer to put stuff on my blog.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

If I'd been allowed to (I was an author so I wasn't), I'd have started
a thread about the games I was playing in the IFComp and updated it as
and when I finished one and felt like commenting on it. Maybe I'd have
been the only one, maybe not. At the very least, I'm sure someone
would have replied to something I said in my thread and that could
have kick-started a bit of discussion right there. I tend to think
that the majority of people most interested in a discussion of the
IFComp games are IFComp authors themselves, eager to discuss the other
entries and garner opinions on their own. But as they're not allowed
to take part in any discussions...

Maybe instead of debating whether it's a good idea or not to have open
discussion during IFComp time, we should put it to the vote and see
what the majority want.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

I am in a unique position to shed a little light on the subject. I
had a game in this years comp, with the open discussion. I also have
a game in the one room comp which can not be discussed at all. This
is my first year to have a game in anything, so I am getting to see
both sides of the coin in a very short amount of time.

I thought when I read that the IF comp was going to be open discussion
that I would like that better. Perhaps I would still feel that way if
I had entered a better game, but I did not so I do not. All it did
was give me a nasty compulsion to check every single blog and forum I
knew about every day to see if somebody posted something or not. It
got to the point that my spouse mentioned something about it. When
negative comments began to surface, it gave me a defeated feeling.
Waiting for the end of the comp felt strangely similar to waiting for
my father to come home back when I was a kid, knowing that a meeting
with his belt was coming for whatever I might have said to Mom. I
kind of dreaded it, but at the same time really wanted it to end so
that I would quit worrying about it.

On a positive note, I placed much higher than I had expected... so I
guess that is better than thinking I would do great only to find out I
was wrong in the end. I do not know how I would have felt if my game
had been universally praised. Perhaps, I would feel much differently
about the open discussion.

Right now, in the one room comp, I have no clue what is going on. I
don't type my game's name into a search engine to see if some poor sap
in New Zealand had anything to say about it or not. In fact, until
today, I have not thought about it very much.

As an author, and a compulsive one at that, I prefer the old approach
of silence.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule 

> Which game did you write for Comp07?
>
> /Andreas
>
> --

Gathered in Darkness.

I had planned on releasing the entire game (it was only the first
three chapters in the comp) right after the comp ended. Instead I
have been fixing as many of the problems as I can before I do so. It
might be a couple of months before it is ready to go now... but I'll
make a post when it is ready.

But hey, it was my first one ever and I learned from it. I learned
quite a bit.
 >> Stay informed about: [IFComp] Relaxing the No-Discussion Rule