bad reviews for foreign language games (like Begegnung am Fluss)
zoltan
I think it's really not right to give a game a low vote just because
you don't speak the language it's written in. I think that's rather
ignorant. There are also quite some german textadventures, and as far
as I know there is no rule that the games in the competition must be
in english. The german textadventure-scene is getting larger nowadays,
and so it's simply natural that there are also german games entered in
the competition. Just to give them low votes because you can't read
them is as if you say a movie is bad because you can't see it
correctly 'cause of your bad eyesight....
regards
Zoltan
Amit Amely
people from China and Saudi Arabia can communicate. Not German, nor Spanish.
Those of us who were born in a non-english speaking countries had a rough
time learning english for this purpose. Posting a foreign language game in
such a competition is like saying - "We don't care that you can't play this
game. It's your problem that you can't speak this language." It's annoying
and offensive. Giving a low score for these games is our way to protest.
"zoltan" <zolta...@yahoo.de> wrote in message
news:4f137832.01111...@posting.google.com...
Aris Katsaris
I'd not vote myself for a German game, but I can understand the
counter-point. If only Swahili-speakers voted for Swahili-games, then
it'd have a much easier time gaining first place than an English game...
Perhaps in such cases there should be an effort to translation. There
may be several individuals interested in helping out - then you could
submit the game in both the original and the English translation.
Aris Katsaris
mattF
> I think it's really not right to give a game a low vote just because
> you don't speak the language it's written in. I think that's rather
> ignorant.
>There are also quite some german textadventures, and as far
> as I know there is no rule that the games in the competition must be
> in english.
No, but the IFcomp is a community event, and one which is relatively new
and, dare I say innocent [1]. The organizers cannot be expected to
anticipate everything which is going to be slung at them. I do think it
good that BaF was allowed into the comp, so that people could make up their
own minds about whether it belonged there or not. Which is what's happening
now. I think we'll be hammering THAT one out for some time still to come.
>The german textadventure-scene is getting larger nowadays,
> and so it's simply natural that there are also german games entered in
> the competition.
>Just to give them low votes because you can't read
> them is as if you say a movie is bad because you can't see it
> correctly 'cause of your bad eyesight....
Or, perhaps more accurately -- since few people can fluently speak every
language on the planet -- because the dialog of the film was in, say,
German? It's a better analogy, if perhaps a redundant one.
There is, IMO, no easy way to resolve this problem. But if more people
start entering the comp in languages other than english, the scoring system
will be shot to hell, the event will become meaningless, and the whole thing
would die. Mulitlingual IF is something that should *definitely* be
encouraged, it gives me a damn good feeling to know that this little sphere
is a global one, and forcing what could be a highly talented author to
forego entering his game simply because his english is lousy... well, it
does seem brutally harsh. But I'm afraid it is probably going to turn out
to be necessary. Seperate comps for languages-other-than-english could be
arranged - again, a very good idea - but we'll have to see about this one, I
guess.
(Sigh). I get the feeling that the author of BaF is in the opening stages
of cringing right now, because he strikes me as being a solid guy who
doesn't enjoy knowing that his baby is kicking up the kind of argument where
people get snarky, call each other ignorant, and take potshots. He didn't
enter the comp to take all the accolades or demand imperiously that his
entry be accepted as just as valid as the others, no matter how much havoc
was wreaked. He didn't do it expecting to get a straight 10. As far as I
can tell, he didn't have any expectations at all. No. He just did it
because he liked IF and wanted to get involved, and, may I say, he has been
very gracious throughout this whole festering controversy. So, Florian, let
me come right out now and say that in this man's eyes, at least, any flaming
ruckus which gets kicked up from here on is not your responsibility, and
certainly not your fault.
Okay. Cool. All together now, OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
-mattF
[1] Although we'll see what Stiffy Makane part 3 has to say about that.
==============================================================
"For generations my family has hunted the living dead! I hunt the living
dead!
My father hunted the living dead! My father's father...well... he raised the
dead....
but HIS father hunted the living dead!"
-Frank West
http://home.iprimus.com.au/tarturus
==============================================================
mattF
"Aris Katsaris" <kats...@otenet.gr> wrote in message
news:9tatkc$341$1...@usenet.otenet.gr...
>
> I'd not vote myself for a German game, but I can understand the
> counter-point. If only Swahili-speakers voted for Swahili-games, then
> it'd have a much easier time gaining first place than an English game...
>
Therein lies the bloody rub, or so it would seem.
> Perhaps in such cases there should be an effort to translation. There
> may be several individuals interested in helping out - then you could
> submit the game in both the original and the English translation.
>
That's an interesting idea... Setting up a website, like the IF-collaborator
list, might be a good way for foreign language authors to find writers
suited to their particular style. It wouldn't be perfect, but it's not
unfeasible. I think.
-mattF
Cedric Knight
Some random thoughts:
I see Zoltan's logic. Hence, what I would suggest if this ever happens
again is to add another switch to compxx.z5 for "English-language games
only".
Although I gave "Begegnung am Fluss" a try and got an impression, I by
no means finished, partly because of the additional time devoted to
looking words up in a dictionary (yes, really), partly because there
wasn't a complete list of verbs given. I suspect other judges would
have appreciated some guidance on whether to score it or leave it.
Another possibility is a World IFComp, with a selected panel of
multilingual judges to review previous winnners in each language. A
WorldComp would certainly select some good candidates for translation,
which I'd like to see. But translations should be done only to the
translator's first language. (Proper translation is an art, and the
translator is almost as skilled as the original author, hence a
translation is unquestionably a new work.) I am certain "Shattered
Memory" would have done much better that way - although personally I
would have regretted that, because I fundamentally disliked the premise
as well as the writing (if it was intended to be humorous that didn't
come across to me).
The Golden Banana of Discord for "The Gostak" must have been caused by
the same thing. I maintain "The Gostak" was interactive (obviously) and
fiction (it had a lot of puzzles, but also a perfectly good story), and
therefore must be IF. A lot of IF makes up special-purpose nouns and
modifiers, so why not special-purpose verbs as well? If I had decided
not to play a piece for whatever reason after merely reading the opening
screen, I would not have voted on it.
CK
Adam Thornton
Aris Katsaris <kats...@otenet.gr> wrote:
>I'd not vote myself for a German game, but I can understand the
>counter-point. If only Swahili-speakers voted for Swahili-games, then
>it'd have a much easier time gaining first place than an English game...
Except that games need a certain minimum number of votes to be counted
at all.
A few years ago, there were not enough OS/2 VX-REXX speakers to force a
countable vote for a game, for instance.
Adam
Adam Thornton
mattF <lust_fo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>No, but the IFcomp is a community event, and one which is relatively new
>and, dare I say innocent [1].
Anyone who is working on--or has worked on--a Classical Latin library
for Inform is entreated to please share your source code with me.
Further, is the Gostak source available? That might help too. I will
of course be grabbing the German and Italian Inform libraries and trying
to digest them. However, anyone with direct experience implementing
Inform libraries in a highly-inflected language, please, please drop me
a line.
Adam
Adam Cadre
> There is, IMO, no easy way to resolve this problem. But if more people
> start entering the comp in languages other than english, the scoring
> system will be shot to hell, the event will become meaningless, and the
> whole thing would die.
Yes, this is a point I've been circling around but you've just nailed.
If 100 people vote Game E a 7.5, and 30 *different* people vote Game G a
7.6, how are we to know whether the difference owes to the differences
between the games or the differences between the groups of judges?
Of course, there's no way of knowing that this won't be the case for two
English games. Perhaps something can be done about that. Watch this
space.
-----
Adam Cadre, Brooklyn, NY
http://adamcadre.ac
Branko Collin
(This is a reply to most messages in this thread, not just to Zoltan's
original posting.)
The judging part of the IF Comp is the simplest opinion poll. People
('judges') are asked to give their opinion of the quality of a game,
expressed in a number, 10 being the highest and meaning the best.
There are people who feel that they should give an opinion on
everything (for whatever reason) and will award a game they cannot
play with the lowest mark they can find, in this case a 1. This has
most likely got nothing to do with language, but with the fact that
they could not play the game. In other words, this will remain a
problem as long as the rules do not state that you have to play a game
to form an opinion. There's probably a good reason that the rules do
not state this, which is that you would then have to define what
constitutes playing.
One of the strong points of the competition, no matter how much people
whine that the contrary is the case, is that the rules are so simple.
Rather than trying to explain to you why, I'd urge you to come up with
a competition of your own (not necessarily IF-related) and try to
think up the necessary rules. You will want to simplify as soon as
possible.
By entering a game that he must have know had a limited audience,
Florian took the risk that his game would get only a few votes, and
that it ran a higher risk of being marked down by People With An
Opinion. I imagine that that is why he seems more interested in
getting reviews rather than commenting on the voting system;
ultimately, he'll learn more from the reviews.
BTW, Frank Borger wrote in "Re: Standard Deviation Maxima (was:
[Comp01] Results)":
>"Begegnung am Fluss" has the smallest number of votes (32) and 13 gave
>it a 1.
If we would assume for a moment (and it is a stupid assumption, but
still a possible scenario) that if the people who have given it a 1
now, had not voted, BaF would have gotten a 6.2 placing it 11th. I
think Florian himself may have drawn that conclusion already.
In the end, though, a game will get the score it deserves, and that
score has nothing to do with how each individual feels about that
game: it is an average.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Frank Borger
> I think it's really not right to give a game a low vote just because
> you don't speak the language it's written in. I think that's rather
> ignorant.
Please keep in mind that at most a dozen voters actually did so. And
at least 184 voters did not - for various reasons. So there is no
cause for complaining.
Florian knew well that entering the comp was an experiment (he wrote
in the game's INFO as one of his motives: "I did want to find out how
many people would play and rate a game in german language, if it took
part in the IF-comp." )
Well, he found out. And I think he recieved a fair result for an
experimental game which could not be played by most of the voters.
cu
--
Frank Borger | Aliloka chielo
fr...@tmt.de | estas sama chielo.
Bayreuth (49°57,566'N 11°34,473'O)
Frank Borger
> Giving a low score for these games is our way to protest.
Ha! You will get what you deserve: Zber tnzrf jevggra va (jung lbh jvyy
or pnyyvat:) onq Ratyvfu. ;-)
"But that is not my doing. I merely foretell."
Branko Collin
-0800:
>Matt Fendahleen wrote:
If I remember the statistics classes I took correctly, you calculate
an error margin in (partly a function of the number of votes?).
So game E could have an error margin of 5 % and game G an error margin
of 10 %. The real score for game E would then be the range 7.1 - 7.9
and that for game G would be 6.8 - 8.4.
But what does that tell you ...?
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Adam Thornton
Branko Collin <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>So game E could have an error margin of 5 % and game G an error margin
>of 10 %. The real score for game E would then be the range 7.1 - 7.9
>and that for game G would be 6.8 - 8.4.
>
>But what does that tell you ...?
That George Dubya shouldn't be president, although I suppose having a
daddy who can buy a Supreme Court decision is one way of measuring
fitness for the job.
Pardon me. I'm going to be excessively grumpy as people mention ways to
tweak the Comp. I have yet to see a system that is clearly less broken
than the one we're using, and the one we're using has, if nothing else,
simplicity going for it.
Adam
Gunther Schmidl
news:9tarot$1cjvp$1...@ID-91881.news.dfncis.de...
> It's annoying
> and offensive. Giving a low score for these games is our way to protest.
Hmm, I guess since my native language isn't English, I'll give every English
comp game an 1 next year because of the effort I need to go through to play
it.
-- Gunther
Andrew Plotkin
If you honestly find it annoying and offensive, then you should.
Reductio ad absurdum arguments are terrible at finding the most
practical approach.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Sean T Barrett
>Gunther Schmidl <gsch...@xxx.gmx.at> wrote:
>> Hmm, I guess since my native language isn't English, I'll give every English
>> comp game an 1 next year because of the effort I need to go through to play
>> it.
>
>If you honestly find it annoying and offensive, then you should.
I find the English-centric voting attitudes annoying and
perhaps even offensive, given the effort made by a lot
of non-native English speakers to participate in this
community, in English.
>Reductio ad absurdum arguments are terrible at finding the most
>practical approach.
If there is a practical concern that a comp with 25 German
games and 25 English games is going to produce meaningless
results unless we start awarding separate winners in each
language, and if that is then equivalent to having two
separate comps, one in German and one in English, then I
think it's in practice far more effective to make it a
comp rule (or perhaps a recommendation) that submitted
games be in English, and leave it to other people to run
their own German IF comp, much as there is already apparently
one for Spanish-language games. Heck, it doesn't even need
to be a rule; just change the name of the comp to include
the word "English".
Otherwise we're just inviting authors to submit foreign-language
games and let these authors fail to learn anything useful
from the results, which are simply always going to be skewed
by some meaningless data (guess what! some judges don't speak
German--I'd never have imagined).
In the end, the comp results are just a popularity contest
within this small community, and as such, saying that BoF
was not popular is not at all wrong. But it seems like it
would be a more productive use of both authors' and judges'
time to make explicit the expectations of language.
Then again, one could argue that people might want to submit
games in foreign languages, knowing their games are going
to get skewed votes, because they don't care about the vote
results, they just want more people to play their games.
But again, I don't think anyone thinks the existence of
a Spanish-language comp is a bad idea, so I'm not clear why
the existence of an English-language comp is a bad idea either.
And don't say "well go run one then"-- we already have one, in
practice. It's just not codified.
Not calling our comp English-language seems offensive either
on the grounds of "our language is the one true language so
we don't need to mention it" or offensive on the grounds of
"ours is not a language-specific comp, it's an international
comp in which 1/3 of the votes for a non-English game will
be a '1' because it's not in the judge's native language".
Of course we didn't know that's how it would turn out until
this year, but now that we know, that's how it looks to me.
SeanB
And, yes, I realize the comp rules and other pages are all
in English. That just misses the point.
Andrea
issue has lead to such a big debate.
First of all, kudos to Florian for daring to enter his game - after all it
was an interesting experience - I liked your game, even if it was a bit
short :-).
I think all of you can see from Florians comments that the game was entered
in good faith and not to offend anyone. Of course we can discuss whether
foreign language games should be allowed in the comp, but if as this year
such a game has been entered and accepted, it deserves to be judged fairly.
Everybody is entitled to his opinion, but it says a lot about the fairness
of the competition if games are marked down only for beeing in a language
other than english. (the other way round is just as bad - yes, I'm guilty
too, even if it was a single point, but if enjoyment is the only measure the
game deserved that point too)
I think the lesson learned from this year is to provide at least a decent
translation or don't enter the comp if the game is not in english. It just
leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, just as if someone slapped you in
the face and said write your game in english or we don't like you here.
Entering this game was a risk, but I think it was not much different than
entering an OS-specific one. Apart from the 1 votes, there were only 19
other votes, which is not a lot, so from this alone everyone would take the
advice that a game not written in english was taking a huge risk. Nobody
knew if it would get enough votes. So there is no need to vote it down, just
based on the language. And I'm not sure if the reaction had been the same if
the game was written in latin or so. Even if far less people understand
latin than german or spanish or whatever.
And for the argument that with lesser votes it would be easier for a game to
gain a good place, I'm not sure. Maybe this year some people gave it a bonus
because it was a first, but I certainly would not do it if it became normal
that the occasional game in german or spanish or italian would enter the
competition. I would try to rate it against the other games, and would
probably be much harsher in judging the writing as it's in my native
language.
I would agree that it wouldn't be a good idea if half the games were in a
language that most judges couln't understand. If this would happen, we all
would see that there is a potential for a german only comp. But till then I
can't see how a few games in a language other than english would ruin the
comp. I mean hardly anyone has the time to play all the games. If we see
that too many games in languages other than english are entered, we can
still alter the comp rules to accomodate for that. I'm the last one not to
agree to a reasonable solution then.
In my view the comp rules have so far been very liberal as to what is
considered appropriate, and this with a good reason. I didn't play Gostak
and didn't vote it, because I thought it would ask more work than I was
willing to put into playing a comp game, but I strongly favour to include
such games too. If you don't like it, then change it to a comp with a board
of people who have to approve the entries. And with this we're back to the
same discussion there was last year, and the year before ... which means I'd
better finish my rant.
Andrea
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin <erky...@eblong.com> wrote:
>>Gunther Schmidl <gsch...@xxx.gmx.at> wrote:
>>> Hmm, I guess since my native language isn't English, I'll give every English
>>> comp game an 1 next year because of the effort I need to go through to play
>>> it.
>>
>>If you honestly find it annoying and offensive, then you should.
> I find the English-centric voting attitudes annoying and
> perhaps even offensive
Then a lot of people are going to get lousy scores in the
VotingMethodsComp. But that's not what we're talking about. There is
no requirement in the IFComp rules that everybody use the most
popularly-agreed-on scoring system. (We go around this every single
year, too.)
>>Reductio ad absurdum arguments are terrible at finding the most
>>practical approach.
> If there is a practical concern that a comp with 25 German
> games and 25 English games is going to produce meaningless
> results unless we start awarding separate winners in each
> language, and if that is then equivalent to having two
> separate comps, one in German and one in English, then I
> think it's in practice far more effective to make it a
> comp rule (or perhaps a recommendation) that submitted
> games be in English, and leave it to other people to run
> their own German IF comp, much as there is already apparently
> one for Spanish-language games.
That's a lot of ifs.
*If* I expected to see 25 German games and 25 English games entered in
next year's IFComp, I would strongly argue for two separate
competitions.
I do not, currently, expect that. It's a hypothetical question, not a
practical one.
As to your proposed rule, or recommendation: _Begegnung am Fluss_ came
in 37th out of 52. Anyone who wants a recommendation can read it
there. Anyone who wants to buck the trend will do so in any event.
> Otherwise we're just inviting authors to submit foreign-language
> games and let these authors fail to learn anything useful
> from the results, which are simply always going to be skewed
> by some meaningless data (guess what! some judges don't speak
> German--I'd never have imagined).
You could make the same argument for games that aren't finished, or
games with severe bugs, or games that run only on Windows, or games
that have graphics or sound.
It's the same argument every year, the case has never been
convincingly made, the IFComp stumbles along. We don't make any effort
to call it the "Short, Non-Buggy, Finished, Portable, Nearly Always
Text Interactive Fiction Competition" either.
Andrea
Francesco Cordella
Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.apc.deletethis.org> wrote in message
3bf910d7$0$237$cc9e...@news.dial.pipex.com...
>(Proper translation is an art,
Yes, of course.
>and the
> translator is almost as skilled as the original author, hence a
> translation is unquestionably a new work.)
Eh? No. I don't agree. What do you wanna say? That the (american or english
or german) translator of "La Divina Commedia" is almost as skilled as Dante
Alighieri? Mmmhhh. Or that the translator Homerus is almost as skilled as
the author?
f.
Oliver B. Warzecha
<9tbrtr$scj$1...@news.panix.com>:
> Sean T Barrett <buz...@world.std.com> wrote:
>> If there is a practical concern that a comp with 25 German
>> games and 25 English games is going to produce meaningless
>> results unless we start awarding separate winners in each
>> language, and if that is then equivalent to having two
>> separate comps, one in German and one in English, then I
>> think it's in practice far more effective to make it a
>> comp rule (or perhaps a recommendation) that submitted
>> games be in English, and leave it to other people to run
>> their own German IF comp, much as there is already apparently
>> one for Spanish-language games.
>
> That's a lot of ifs.
>
> *If* I expected to see 25 German games and 25 English games entered in
> next year's IFComp, I would strongly argue for two separate
> competitions.
Well, what would be wrong with an "academy awards" style approach?
Mention in the rules that any foreign-language game can be submitted
and if somebody doesn't speak this language, he/she should abstain for
this game. You could even have a special category: "best non-english
game".
The compXX-metagame could be expanded in a way that languages can be
chosen additionally to authoring systems. And we all could rejoice and
live in a peaceful world ... or something like that. Uh, I just got
carried away. Move on.
> I do not, currently, expect that. It's a hypothetical question, not a
> practical one.
Of course, but to vote with "1" because you don't speak the language is
a little bit like... being biased against Glulx-games because I only
have a terminal-based interpreter and so I see no graphics. ;-)
> As to your proposed rule, or recommendation: _Begegnung am Fluss_ came
> in 37th out of 52. Anyone who wants a recommendation can read it
> there. Anyone who wants to buck the trend will do so in any event.
Of course. It didn't go last, so at least someone liked it. And given
there are a number of votes who gave the forementioned "1" it is better
than the position suggests.
>> Otherwise we're just inviting authors to submit foreign-language
>> games and let these authors fail to learn anything useful
>> from the results, which are simply always going to be skewed
>> by some meaningless data (guess what! some judges don't speak
>> German--I'd never have imagined).
>
> You could make the same argument for games that aren't finished, or
> games with severe bugs, or games that run only on Windows, or games
> that have graphics or sound.
As I said. :-)
> It's the same argument every year, the case has never been
> convincingly made, the IFComp stumbles along. We don't make any effort
> to call it the "Short, Non-Buggy, Finished, Portable, Nearly Always
> Text Interactive Fiction Competition" either.
Of course it is! The number of long, buggy, unfinished, one-system
graphical games is quite low and falls under standard deviation. ;)
OBW
Mike Duncan
. Just to give them low votes because you can't read
>them is as if you say a movie is bad because you can't see it
>correctly 'cause of your bad eyesight....
>regards
>Zoltan
When I saw Begegnung am Fluss's opening text, my first thought was,
'whoever wrote this one's got some cojones - they wrote an IF game in
anicent Norse! That's wild! No, wait a minute, it's German. That's
still wild!'
When I saw Gostak's opening text, my first thought was, 'are there
going to be any more English-speaking games in the competition?'
I wouldn't have rated on BAF myself, if I'd had the option. I think
the proper way to introduce the game to a predominately English
audience would be to translate it, as the Spanish one apparently was.
Mike Duncan
http://www.boston.quik.com/mduncan/
Cedric Knight
> >No, but the IFcomp is a community event, and one which is relatively
new
> >and, dare I say innocent [1].
> >[1] Although we'll see what Stiffy Makane part 3 has to say about
that.
"Adam Thornton" <ad...@fsf.net> wrote
> Anyone who is working on--or has worked on--a Classical Latin library
> for Inform is entreated to please share your source code with me.
I wonder if such a thing is possible. I did even less school Latin than
German and have given away my dictionaries, but surely the verb usually
comes at the end of the sentence? This feature does not fit into the
Inform model at all well. Having said that, of course, imperatives are
different, as in "ecce homo". Hmm.
Is anyone working on an Esperanto library? I could probably do that,
and doubt there are any other people here with Esperanto as their first
language. Unfortunately, it's not highly infellected - just add an 'n'
for accusative. I can however promise that accents would be highly
problematic (find me a code page which allows @^g to be entered).
>
> Further, is the Gostak source available? That might help too. I will
I believe Carl said he probably would release it. Hope so.
> of course be grabbing the German and Italian Inform libraries and
trying
> to digest them. However, anyone with direct experience implementing
> Inform libraries in a highly-inflected language, please, please drop
me
> a line.
And will the sheep still come into it?
>
> Adam
CK
Adam Thornton
Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.apc.deletethis.org> wrote:
>"Adam Thornton" <ad...@fsf.net> wrote
>> Anyone who is working on--or has worked on--a Classical Latin library
>> for Inform is entreated to please share your source code with me.
>I wonder if such a thing is possible. I did even less school Latin than
>German and have given away my dictionaries, but surely the verb usually
>comes at the end of the sentence? This feature does not fit into the
>Inform model at all well. Having said that, of course, imperatives are
>different, as in "ecce homo". Hmm.
And all the verbs the player will use are imperative. That much should
work fine.
>And will the sheep still come into it?
Sir, you have your nominative and accusative reversed.
Adam
Sean T Barrett
>As to your proposed rule, or recommendation: _Begegnung am Fluss_ came
>in 37th out of 52. Anyone who wants a recommendation can read it
>there. Anyone who wants to buck the trend will do so in any event.
Personally I don't think that's where it SHOULD have
finished; if you think that's an APPROPRIATE place
for a foreign-language game that those who speak
the language would have ranked much higher, then
I refer you to the part of my previous post that
points out that having a de-facto English-language
comp which doesn't admit it is an English-language
comp seems, umm, linguistically arrogant to me.
>It's the same argument every year, the case has never been
>convincingly made, the IFComp stumbles along. We don't make any effort
>to call it the "Short, Non-Buggy, Finished, Portable, Nearly Always
>Text Interactive Fiction Competition" either.
No, but the Spanish-language comp is, I'm assuming,
unashamedly a spanish-language comp.
Of course this just comes back around to the same old
"how do you vote" question; BUT this is the first game
where we've seen serious divisiveness over WHETHER
to vote; the vast majority of judges who didn't read
German chose _not_to_vote_on_it_, leaving the final
score excessively weighted by those who interpreted
their judicial obligations differently. (Few people
fail to vote on long, buggy, or unfinished games.)
We've always had the issue that the meaning of the
scores is up in the air because different voters
base their scors on different metrics; but this seems
like a behavior of a different kind, since some voters
abstain and others vote. Without some kind of clarification,
we're going to continue to see this--those who feel
it's appropriate to vote in this situation will have
a disproportionate affect on SOME games (those in
a non-native language).
I think the more apt comparison is games on platforms
not available to some judges. You even mentioned portability
in your list of things the comp isn't called, but I don't
think you were making a valid assertion there--I think
there would be just as much uproar if many judges said "this
game had no interpreter for my machine; automatic 1".
Although this is not specifically covered in the
rules either, the community seems to have interpreted
this in the obvious way--people who can't play a game
on their platform, despite having some "reaction"
to the title, author, and blurb in comp*.z5, do not
vote on it. This lack of voting is observable in
the vote counts and in the lack of a huge spike at '1'
for such games despite their reduced vote counts.
Indeed, the community takes this for granted; in
discussing less-portable games, people frequently
site the "must get ten votes to be ranked" rule
_as_if_ the only people who will vote on it are
those who can run it.
Indeed, I stand by my claim that the comp rules *imply*
that you should play a game to be able to vote on it,
and I don't think people who don't speak the language
are in any better poisition to claim to have played a
foreign-language game than another person who views
a gamefile through a hexdump because no 'terp is
available on their platform.
Perhaps "play to vote" should be stated outright
instead of implied, but unless it is stated what
"to play" means in the rules in terms of a foreign
language game--or such games are simply outlawed--
it's going to come down an unfortunate, repeated
divisiveness over the issue every year, with some
judges feeling disenfranchised because they're
playing by "rules" that other judges are not, and
the authors in question getting even more pissed-off.
I see only two plausible avenues: make the comp
English-only or make a rule against judging a
game in a language the judge doesn't know. The
latter seems more complex and less likely to get
past the people who voted 1s, so I proposed the former.
Please note that the scenario doesn't really require
25 English games and 25 German games to cause
serious conflict; all that is required is 1 good
German game and a large number of
German-but-not-English-speaking voters to effectively
split the comp results. I don't think that's outside
the realm of possibility, but it was harder to
explain so I went with the simpler one because
I had no idea you were going to be picky about
hypotheticals with what is clearly an actual,
real, practical problem, and one which we can
easily (I think) nip in the bud now rather than
it causing further frustration down the road:
"This competition is primarily for English-language games."
Sean
David Thornley
>-0800:
>>Matt Fendahleen wrote:
>
>>Of course, there's no way of knowing that this won't be the case for two
>>English games. Perhaps something can be done about that. Watch this
>>space.
>
>If I remember the statistics classes I took correctly, you calculate
>an error margin in (partly a function of the number of votes?).
>
of overlap among the voters for the two games. In practice, given
comp??.z5, we assume that there is overlap. If we were to have
several different platform-specific games, we'd have to seriously
question that assumption (for example, some MS Windows and some
Macintosh games.
>So game E could have an error margin of 5 % and game G an error margin
>of 10 %. The real score for game E would then be the range 7.1 - 7.9
>and that for game G would be 6.8 - 8.4.
>
Probably.
>But what does that tell you ...?
>
In that case, that you really don't know what the preference of
a larger population can be. However, you do know what the
actual standing was. This can be presumed to be significant
when using roughly the same set of judges, but having mostly
disjoint subsets of judges pretty well destroys the credibility
of the scores.
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Andrew Plotkin
> Of course, but to vote with "1" because you don't speak the language is
> a little bit like... being biased against Glulx-games because I only
> have a terminal-based interpreter and so I see no graphics. ;-)
People keep posting arguments that assume that, if *I* were the one
slighted in the scores, I would immediately reverse my position and
start flaming whoever gave me a "1".
It's kind of offensive, actually.
Carl Muckenhoupt
> Further, is the Gostak source available? That might help too.
It will be soon. I want to fix some bugs and add comments before
releasing it. I'll probably have it ready before the month is out.
However, don't expect it to be much help for writing libraries for other
languages. Gostak dialect uses English grammar, so gostak.h is mostly
identical to english.h aside from the contents of text strings.
Cedric Knight
"Adam Thornton" <ad...@fsf.net> wrote
> And all the verbs the player will use are imperative. That much
should
> work fine.
IIRC direct objects may come after a present imperative, but adverbial
phrases come before? Dunno.
>
> >And will the sheep still come into it?
>
> Sir, you have your nominative and accusative reversed.
Not necessarily. Each to their own.
(OT: English people often have unjustified stereotypes of the Welsh and
rural people generally. However, Mick Jagger apparently believed Scots
were more into such things, as in the lyric "Hey, MacLeod, get off of my
ewe")
ObIF: Why does "The Undiscovered Country" not recognise "bu*ger" or
"felch"?
"Damn" gets "Real adventurers do not use such language."
CK
Andrea
>Please note that the scenario doesn't really require
>25 English games and 25 German games to cause
>serious conflict; all that is required is 1 good
>German game and a large number of
>German-but-not-English-speaking voters to effectively
>split the comp results.
This might in theory happen, but I hardly think it's realistic. With only
one or two german games in the comp it's just not attractive for non-english
speaking voters. So everybody voting on the german game will in practice
also vote on the english games.
If there'd ever be 25 german games in any year, I'd be very happy, but of
course then it's time to start a separate comp. With one or two games in
german a separate comp is hardly feasible and not very ehemm meaningful.
Andrea
David Welbourn
I am, although not very quickly. I have a crude attempt of an IF Esperanto
game on my homepage, http://webhome.idirect.com/~dswxyz/ . When I'm done
with comp games, I'll definitely get back to it.
-- David Welbourn
Adam Cadre
> Perhaps something can be done about that. Watch this space.
And here's what goes in that space:
http://adamcadre.ac/springcomp.html
It's probably inevitable that people will want to discuss the merits
of these rules, but they've already been exhaustively hashed out and
are the ones we'll be running with. This is an experiment -- we're
gonna give these a go and see what happens, good or bad. It's
entirely possible the result will be a fiasco. In which case we'll
have learned that a spring comp run this way is a fiasco. This is
valuable data.
Some will look at these rules and say, "Gah, I'm not entering THAT."
Good. This is, in large part, the point -- the goal here is a
reasonably-sized batch. You'll notice that the page above basically
pleads with people not to submit an intent to enter unless they're
really excited about a specific idea. If you are, terrific! With
any luck there'll be a dozen of you. If not, also terrific! Forget
this thread ever happened and with any luck we'll have a dozen
excellent games to drop in your lap this coming June.
Florian Edlbauer
> Posting a foreign language game in
> such a competition is like saying - "We don't care that you can't play this
> game. It's your problem that you can't speak this language." It's annoying
> and offensive. Giving a low score for these games is our way to protest.
If you feel that way, you're free to do so.
But -- come on -- "annoying and offensive"? I guess entering BaF was
slightly provocative. Take it easy.
Florian
Amit Amely
"Florian Edlbauer" <florian....@zdnet.de> wrote in message
news:67815c45.01112...@posting.google.com...
> But -- come on -- "annoying and offensive"? I guess entering BaF was
> slightly provocative. Take it easy.
>
> Florian
Accepted.
David A. Cornelson
news:9td73e$hoe$1...@drizzle.com...
> I wrote:
> > Perhaps something can be done about that. Watch this space.
>
> And here's what goes in that space:
>
> http://adamcadre.ac/springcomp.html
>
You asked for it.
Rule #1 is so clearly unlike the fall comp that this could hardly be even
remotely associated to it. Calling this 'The Spring Comp' is misleading and
hardly appropriate. A much broader set of rules should be used.
I would rename this competition, "Adam Cadre's IF Writers Competition".
I think this competition completely voids the 'spirit' of the original
competition which was looking for people to write more games regardless of
talent level and regardless of the contents of the game. By editing both the
'intent' of each author, limiting the size to twenty games, and then
_charging_??? for it, you've very undemocratically usurped a process that
belongs to the community as a whole.
Granted, a spring competition is a good idea and the community has been
reluctant to adopt the idea. But to nearly completely change the entire set
of rules, adopting your own personal preferences in forming a spring
competition goes too far.
Rule #1 must go.
Jarb
Richard Bos
> Oliver B. Warzecha <o...@amarok.ping.de> wrote:
>
> > Of course, but to vote with "1" because you don't speak the language is
> > a little bit like... being biased against Glulx-games because I only
> > have a terminal-based interpreter and so I see no graphics. ;-)
>
> People keep posting arguments that assume that, if *I* were the one
> slighted in the scores, I would immediately reverse my position and
> start flaming whoever gave me a "1".
>
> It's kind of offensive, actually.
Frankly, I think you're taking it too personally. You see, the fact of
the matter is that people _do_ now enter games for not-quite-as-popular-
as-Inform platforms, and nobody mentions giving _them_ a 1 because they
couldn't run them. Yet they do do this for a German game. I agree with
Oliver that there is a discrepancy here; and it has nothing to do with
your own eminent personage, but with the voting as a whole.
Richard
Eytan Zweig
"David A. Cornelson" <dcorn...@placet.com> wrote in message
news:tvkn9c2...@corp.supernews.com...
Why? I'm currently working on my first IF work, and I'm seriously
considering entering it into the spring comp. In fact, rule #1 is part of
what makes it attractive to me - under this rule, I feel that my game will
have a much higher chance of being rated for its merits. The fall comp,
because of its open nature and the size of it, is very problematic to a
newbie. Almost everyone who posted a list of 30+ reviews reached some point
in which he said "I'm too tired to write full reviews/play the games fully".
Now, if game #40 on their list was by Zarf or Emily Short or anyone else
whose past games led them to high expectations, and they felt too tired to
play properly, they'll likely stop playing for the night and return to the
games with a clear head, knowing they're in for a solid work which must be
respected. If game #40 was by Eytan Zweig, they'll just start playing, and
maybe never give my game the chance it deserves.
Rule #1 levels the playing ground, in a way. Sure, I don't have the
experience or the reputation of a more accomplished writer, but then again,
I don't have as much to live up to. But I know I won't be competing against
anyone who'se not even playing on the same playground, which was the case in
this comp's Silicon Castles, and, in a different way, You Were Doomed From
The Start.
Eytan
> Jarb
>
>
>
>
Amit Amely
"Richard Bos" <in...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl> wrote in message
news:3bfa5c5b....@news.worldonline.nl...
> the matter is that people _do_ now enter games for not-quite-as-popular-
> as-Inform platforms, and nobody mentions giving _them_ a 1 because they
> couldn't run them. Yet they do do this for a German game. I agree with
> Oliver that there is a discrepancy here; and it has nothing to do with
> your own eminent personage, but with the voting as a whole.
>
> Richard
We could go to a friend who has the appropriate hw\sw and play the comp
games of unportable platforms. That's a reasonable effort we can make or
not, depends on our motivation to play every game in the comp. But this
doesn't apply to the game's language.
David A. Cornelson
news:9tdn9b$1sfer$1...@ID-101183.news.dfncis.de...
>
> >
> > Rule #1 must go.
> >
>
> Why? I'm currently working on my first IF work, and I'm seriously
> considering entering it into the spring comp. In fact, rule #1 is part of
> what makes it attractive to me - under this rule, I feel that my game will
> have a much higher chance of being rated for its merits. The fall comp,
Right. I'm not arguing that it's a bad rule. It's just inappropriate for
something as widely named as 'the spring competition'. Community wide
competitions should be open to everyone. By limiting the number of games and
accepting intents so early, Adam is telling anyone that wants to write a
quick silly game to go fly a kite. Why? Because he doesn't want to judge it
or review it and he probably thinks they're a waste of his time.
But by dangling the carrot out there for everyone, you acheive something
besides getting games written. You get more people involved in the
community, which was the spirit of the original competition. If someone
writes a poor game or doesn't test well enough, these things will appear in
reviews and scoring. It's highly likely that those two items will inform the
author what types of games are deemed acceptable and which ones are not. The
author then learns to try a bit harder next year.
The one rule change that would take the pressure off judging would be to
open up discussion during the voting period (except for authors, although
I'd argue that this is a marginal issue). The best games would filter to the
top and the worst games would quickly be discarded. This rule change would
have a twofold effect. It would likely deter authors from submitting poorly
constructed or written games for fear they would be the first to be
discarded by the community. The better games would receive a healthy set of
voting from all corners and there would likely be little disparity in voting
numbers. The top 5-10 games would be a tight race for top honors and that
would be very exciting to see.
Everything Adam is trying to does something similar, but at the cost of
being a closed and limiting competition.
Jarb
Georgina Bensley
> Rule #1 is so clearly unlike the fall comp that this could hardly be even
> remotely associated to it. Calling this 'The Spring Comp' is misleading and
> hardly appropriate. A much broader set of rules should be used.
>
> I would rename this competition, "Adam Cadre's IF Writers Competition".
<snip>
> Rule #1 must go.
Hey, make up your mind here, one or the other! :)
I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with the set of rules
that Cadre is proposing. Yes, it's a very different feeling from the fall
Comp, and therefore it would be fair to call it something that made it
clear that it was a different experience. (Not necessarily "Cadre's
Challenge" but, you know, something that set it apart from the annual IF
comp.)
I'm personally interested in seeing what results from this sort of
screening - and what impact it would have on the real Comp. (For example,
if everyone who thinks their game is well tested and polished pushes
their game into this Spring Thing, what would that leave for the fall?
Scary thought. :) There's also the issue that Eytan is bringing up - a
smaller competition where judges must play all games might be ideal for
not-so-well-known authors to get a fair shake. In which case, years in
the future, one might want to bar main-Comp winners from entering
small-Comp. Not that this will necessarily happen, just that these are
developments that would be interesting to watch. Let's experiment!)
And the best bit is, if your game gets bounced from the Spring Thing
because The Organiser declares you have too many bugs, you have a few
months to fix those bugs for the real Comp...
__________________________________________________________________
Duke University Role-playing And Gaming Organization
http://www.duke.edu/web/DRAGO/
Richard Bos
> "Richard Bos" <in...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl> wrote in message
> news:3bfa5c5b....@news.worldonline.nl...
>
> > the matter is that people _do_ now enter games for not-quite-as-popular-
> > as-Inform platforms, and nobody mentions giving _them_ a 1 because they
> > couldn't run them. Yet they do do this for a German game. I agree with
> > Oliver that there is a discrepancy here; and it has nothing to do with
> > your own eminent personage, but with the voting as a whole.
>
> We could go to a friend who has the appropriate hw\sw and play the comp
> games of unportable platforms.
_You_ may be able to. _I_ am not. In my physical neighbourhood there are
no people interested in IF close enough to make this practical. Not
everybody lives in the big city, you know.
Richard
Andrew Plotkin
> http://adamcadre.ac/springcomp.html
> It's probably inevitable that people will want to discuss the merits
> of these rules, but they've already been exhaustively hashed out and
> are the ones we'll be running with. This is an experiment -- we're
> gonna give these a go and see what happens, good or bad.
Looks like an interesting experiment to me. The differences from
IFComp are *why* I like the idea -- if this was too similar, it could
reduce the value of IFComp, but it seems different enough to be its
own thing.
I don't care about the name. (Although I have no desire to rename the
current competition "FallComp" or any such absurdity.)
> It's
> entirely possible the result will be a fiasco. In which case we'll
> have learned that a spring comp run this way is a fiasco. This is
> valuable data.
Yes.
> [from rules]
> Judges can play a game for as long as they want during the first 24
> hours after starting it up, but once that time has elapsed, they can
> play for no more than four additional hours (spread out however they
> like) before scoring the game.
Mmf. I'm somewhat disappointed that this competition still doesn't
provide a venue for longish games. I realize there has to be a
breakpoint somewhere, or judges would wind up playing twenty games for
two weeks each, but one day seems shy of optimal.
> [2] Yep -- you'll have to pay to play.
You might want to rephrase this. Judges *don't* have to pay to play
the entries, or so I assume.
> Basically, the organizer will beat on them a while, mostly following
> the walkthrough but deviating from it from time to time, and if these
> egregious errors crop up, the game will be disqualified
Earlier in the rules you say "if the problem cannot be fixed
immediately." Is there a definition of "immediately"? (Time for
exchange of email, two days, by the end of June 2, by the end of May
31, what?) No matter how much the game is tested, there's always the
risk of a new error appearing when it gets into the hands of the
organizer (who may be using a different interpreter version than the
author).
Magnus Olsson
>English-only
If we were to see significant numbers of entries in non-English
languages (I almost wrote "foreign languages" here, but then I realized
how silly that would be coming from me :-)), I think that would be
necessary, or we'd risk fragmenting the voters into groups like
"Esperantists", "People who know Urdu but not English", "People who
know English but not Urdu" etc.
>or make a rule against judging a
>game in a language the judge doesn't know. The
>latter seems more complex and less likely to get
>past the people who voted 1s, so I proposed the former.
I think we *should* have a rule that forbids anybody from voting
on a game they couldn't play at all. I think this was the intention
from the start, but nobody's thought that it needed to be made
explicit until now.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Magnus Olsson
>In article <9tatkc$341$1...@usenet.otenet.gr>,
>Aris Katsaris <kats...@otenet.gr> wrote:
>>I'd not vote myself for a German game, but I can understand the
>>counter-point. If only Swahili-speakers voted for Swahili-games, then
>>it'd have a much easier time gaining first place than an English game...
>
>Except that games need a certain minimum number of votes to be counted
>at all.
While there may be some difficulty in rounding up 10 IF:ers whose
first language is Swahili, I think the problem could easily arise for
an entry in, say, Spanish. From what I've hear of the Spanish IF
scene, there are many players who don't consider themselves good
enough at English really to appreciate English IF.
Oren Ronen
>
> Right. I'm not arguing that it's a bad rule. It's just inappropriate for
> something as widely named as 'the spring competition'. Community wide
> competitions should be open to everyone. By limiting the number of games
and
> accepting intents so early, Adam is telling anyone that wants to write a
> quick silly game to go fly a kite. Why? Because he doesn't want to judge
it
> or review it and he probably thinks they're a waste of his time.
This competition is still open to everyone. It just has a different set of
goals from the traditional one. It's appropriate to call it 'the spring
competition' because it's still larger in scope and ambition than any
mini-comps we've seen throughout the last couple of years. I assume Adam
wants the competition to be the main object of discussion in the IF
community in June, much like the annual competition is right now.
The regular fall competition will still be there next year. Nothing is taken
away. This experiment may or may not work. If it does - we'll do it again
next year. If it doesn't - we'll try something else, or nothing at all. In
any case, I appreciate Adam for actually starting what has been discussed
many times before - a second big competition with rules vastly different
from 'write anything you want'.
Oren Ronen
or...@isdn.net.il
Rikard Peterson
news:3bf98060$0$141$9b62...@news.freenet.de...
> Addendum:
>
> for your amusement look at
>
> http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/twainawf.htm
>
> Andrea
Fun reading!
Rikard
Gunther Schmidl
news:9tdssc$oe2$1...@news.lth.se...
> I think we *should* have a rule that forbids anybody from voting
> on a game they couldn't play at all.
That is a very good idea, and I second it.
Now, where's the Comp Cheez?
-- Gunther
Jon Ingold
> make sure that your intent is one of the first twenty submitted before
sending money.
and
> that acceptance will not become official until the would-be entrant
submits US$5
So what it someone submits Intent no. 7, then 14 other people submit
intents... how quickly does no. 7 have to pay before he gets kicked from the
list? And then how quickly does no. 21->20 have to pay to get in?
Jon
Robb Sherwin
>It's probably inevitable that people will want to discuss the merits
>of these rules, but they've already been exhaustively hashed out and
>are the ones we'll be running with. This is an experiment -- we're
>gonna give these a go and see what happens, good or bad. It's
>entirely possible the result will be a fiasco. In which case we'll
>have learned that a spring comp run this way is a fiasco. This is
>valuable data.
Cool.
Is there likely to be a size (in megabytes) restriction /
recommendation? I ask only because I was able to weigh in at around
6MB with the last game that I wrote and while I would definitely be
able to make things work with a 5MB cap, having it the limit be (say)
1 MB might be tougher to manage in my case.
Robb
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Robb Sherwin, Fort Collins CO
Fallacy of Dawn: http://www.joltcountry.com/fod/dawn.zip
Reviews From Trotting Krips: http://joltcountry.dreamhost.com/trottingkrips
Branko Collin
03:25:59 GMT:
>Please note that the scenario doesn't really require
>25 English games and 25 German games to cause
>serious conflict; all that is required is 1 good
>German game and a large number of
>German-but-not-English-speaking voters to effectively
>split the comp results. I don't think that's outside
>the realm of possibility, but it was harder to
>explain so I went with the simpler one because
>I had no idea you were going to be picky about
>hypotheticals with what is clearly an actual,
>real, practical problem, and one which we can
>easily (I think) nip in the bud now rather than
>it causing further frustration down the road:
>
>"This competition is primarily for English-language games."
Another possible scenario is that a game author who is not too handy
with computers, but interfaces much easier with people (they do
exist!), rounds up a hundred friends who award his game with a 9 on
average and random other games with a 3 or a 4.
Another possible scenario is ...
How about we cross these bridges when we get there?
So far, I have only seen unsubstantiated allegations that all 13
voters that gave BaF a 1 have done so because they did not speak the
language and that all people (or a majority of them) who did not vote
on BaF, did so because they did not speak the language. I have seen no
proof for this whatsoever, and unless you will interview all the
judges, and assuming they are all willing to reply and speak the
truth, there is no way you are going to find out.
I'll repeat, Florian's problem was not the 13 people who awarded his
game a low mark, but the low number of voters. That's something he
must have expected, so I really see no problem here.
There's another thing that you did not touch upon: the IF Comp is more
or less an event for this community. By making a rule that people
cannot participate in their native language, your basically implying
that some of us are less equal than others.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Eric Mayer
wrote:
I don't think you need be concerned. I played 48 of the games, as I
recall. All I cared about was whether a game grabbed me and made me
want to play -- and then kept my attention. I could care less about
reputation and I think most voters feel the same. I entered my first
game in the 1999 Comp, having not even participated in RAIF (no one
knew me at all) and got competitive scores (beter than warranted IMHO)
and some great reviews.
I don't think fatigue comes into it either. A couple of my highest
rated games -- No Time to Squeal and All Roads were among the last
three games I played. I guess it is true those authors have some
reputation but sometimes reputations come from producing excellent
stuff. Yes, I found myself getting fatigued but that meant I had less
patience with games that didn't interest me. It was amazing how I
perked up when I hit a game I liked.
--
Eric Mayer
Web Site: <http://home.epix.net/~maywrite>
"The map is not the territory." -- Alfred Korzybski
Passenger Pigeon
<dcorn...@placet.com> wrote:
> Rule #1 is so clearly unlike the fall comp that this could hardly be even
> remotely associated to it. Calling this 'The Spring Comp' is misleading
> and
> hardly appropriate. A much broader set of rules should be used.
The qualification process for writing a game for this competition is
very different from the qualification process for the fall competition,
much as the process for getting to play at the Masters is very different
from the process for getting to play at the US Open.
Nonetheless, they're both clearly competitions designed for the same
purpose -- to motivate the writing of more, better IF.
> I think this competition completely voids the 'spirit' of the original
> competition which was looking for people to write more games regardless
> of
> talent level and regardless of the contents of the game. By editing both
> the
> 'intent' of each author, limiting the size to twenty games, and then
> _charging_??? for it, you've very undemocratically usurped a process that
> belongs to the community as a whole.
Really, if he's running the competition, he can do whatever he wants.
There's plenty of room for The Other Spring Comp. And if it's somehow
notably better than Mr. Cadre's proposal, everyone will send their games
to it instead. Which seems democratic to me. (Or anarchic, anyway.)
Also, I got the impression that most of the submitted money would be
used as prize money, though the rules are rather unclear on that point.
If so, though, he's not so much charging as streamlining the prize
donation process.
--
William Burke, passenge...@hotmail.com contrariwise
Before you presume my rationality, I'm a Theatre major, Music minor.
I don't represent UCSC; it represents me. Go Slugs!
http://www.passengerpigeon.net (not com, not org)
David Given
in...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl (Richard Bos) writes:
[...]
> Frankly, I think you're taking it too personally. You see, the fact of
> the matter is that people _do_ now enter games for not-quite-as-popular-
> as-Inform platforms, and nobody mentions giving _them_ a 1 because they
> couldn't run them. Yet they do do this for a German game. I agree with
> Oliver that there is a discrepancy here; and it has nothing to do with
> your own eminent personage, but with the voting as a whole.
Is the information available to correlate the nationality of the voters
with what they voted? For example, did most of the 1-voters come from one
country?
--
+- David Given --------McQ-+
| Work: d...@tao-group.com | "Half the lies our opponents tell about us are
| Play: d...@cowlark.com | untrue." --- Sir Boyle Roche
+- http://www.cowlark.com -+
ti...@eniac.stanford.edu
Branko Collin <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>There's another thing that you did not touch upon: the IF Comp is more
>or less an event for this community. By making a rule that people
>cannot participate in their native language, your basically implying
>that some of us are less equal than others.
If I turned that around and said "By allowing people to enter non-English
games, you're being unfair to people who can't speak more than one
language", I bet you'd find that pretty silly. God knows I find both
statements equally silly.
The people who participate in this newsgroup do so in a common language,
which happens to be English. Yes, occasionally there are some deviations
from it, but as a general rule, this group is conducted in English. So it
does make some sense to expect that the comp also be primarily in English.
(Yes, the comp != the newsgroup, but there's considerable overlap.) But
note that the fact that there is a common language in here is by (implied)
consensus, not by any sort of rule. I think that's the way to do it for
the comp as well.
In short: I don't object to the occasional game being in a language I
don't know, any more than I'd object to a couple threads in this group in
a language I didn't know. If one (or even a few) games out of 50 are
unplayable by me, that's not a big deal, any more than anyone seems
to consider it a big deal that non-Windows users missed -- 9 games
this year?
I don't see any big call defending the Windows challenged[0] from games
not playable by them[1], yet somehow this whole "1 game in the history of
the comp entered in German" thing has become a raving flame-fest! I don't
get it. It's not like this is a trend leading to more and more division
between the monolingual and the multilingual. It was one game, people!
One, out of 52, is a pretty damn small percentage. It's hardly a trend.
As to the assertion that it gives those games an edge to have a smaller
audience -- aside from my going back to asking if that's true for
Windows-only games -- first off: who cares? You would think this was the
Nobel prize being competed for here. One game getting put in a position
people think is unwarranted? Yeah, that's new. And so important!
And if you're going to start going that route ("If more people voted on
it, it might have finished in a different place") than you eventually
get back to the argument that people should have to play every game to be
able to vote, because that's true of /every single game entered/. Did
anyone notice that the 2nd-place game this year only got 69 votes? I mean,
if it had gotten the 136 votes that the first-place game got, maybe it
would've rated a lot lower! Or maybe if the number 10 game had only gotten
70 votes, it would've placed higher! Or maybe if the #1 game had... well,
you get the idea. There's already skew in number of votes per game, so
it's not like this is a new concept.
Lastly, I reiterate my belief that voting on a game you cannot play for
reasons of not having the right, er... interpreter (so to speak) is a
really bad practice. There is no difference between my not being able to
play a game written in French and a Unix user not being able to play a
game written in Adrift.
Now... I am done. Except for the
FOOTNOTES
[0] I realize that non-Windows users don't consider themselves challenged
in the least, but it made such a good phrase as I was typing. :)
[1] I have seen, once or twice, the assertion that people who are not on
Windows boxes /could/ play the game with enough effort. After all,
there are Windows emulators and they surely /must/ have friends
who have Windows boxes. Let me now point out that I could make
that assertion for a German (or any) language game. After all,
there are translation programs, and most people have at /least/
one friend who speaks another language, right? So, er, let's just
eliminate that really silly argument now, okay?
Branko Collin
2001 07:47:14 -0600:
>"Adam Cadre" <gri...@drizzle.com> wrote in message
>news:9td73e$hoe$1...@drizzle.com...
>> I wrote:
>> > Perhaps something can be done about that. Watch this space.
>>
>> And here's what goes in that space:
>>
>> http://adamcadre.ac/springcomp.html
>
>You asked for it.
>
>Rule #1 is so clearly unlike the fall comp that this could hardly be even
>remotely associated to it. Calling this 'The Spring Comp' is misleading and
>hardly appropriate. A much broader set of rules should be used.
There is no such thing as a Fall Comp, so there is nothing wrong with
a Spring Comp.
>I would rename this competition, "Adam Cadre's IF Writers Competition".
>
>I think this competition completely voids the 'spirit' of the original
>competition which was looking for people to write more games regardless of
>talent level and regardless of the contents of the game. By editing both the
>'intent' of each author, limiting the size to twenty games, and then
>_charging_??? for it,
It's fairly common to charge a fee for a competition to make sure all
entries are 'serious'.
>you've very undemocratically usurped a process that
>belongs to the community as a whole.
Usurped?
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Branko Collin
>The one rule change that would take the pressure off judging would be to
>open up discussion during the voting period (except for authors, although
>I'd argue that this is a marginal issue). The best games would filter to the
>top and the worst games would quickly be discarded. This rule change would
>have a twofold effect. It would likely deter authors from submitting poorly
>constructed or written games for fear they would be the first to be
>discarded by the community. The better games would receive a healthy set of
>voting from all corners and there would likely be little disparity in voting
>numbers. The top 5-10 games would be a tight race for top honors and that
>would be very exciting to see.
>
>Everything Adam is trying to does something similar, but at the cost of
>being a closed and limiting competition.
All rule changes to the IF Comp proposed so far have that effect. Adam
does the one right thing for people who want the comp changed, which
is organising his own comp.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Branko Collin
-0800:
>I wrote:
>> Perhaps something can be done about that. Watch this space.
>
>And here's what goes in that space:
>
>http://adamcadre.ac/springcomp.html
Perhaps I read through the rules too quickly, but one thing is not
clear to me: who will do the judging? Will that be set up similar to
the IF Comp?
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Sean T Barrett
>By limiting the number of games and
>accepting intents so early, Adam is telling anyone that wants to write a
>quick silly game to go fly a kite. Why? Because he doesn't want to judge it
>or review it and he probably thinks they're a waste of his time.
He is? I thought he was saying he was limiting the number of games
and accepting intents early because he wants to have a small number
of games so voters can judge them all, and because, given that, accepting
intents early prevents you from having a huge competetive rush to
submit intents on whatever day intents open.
Given that Adam generally plays EVERY game in the annual comp,
and, IIRC, reviews them all, I rather doubt he'd save himself
the work of judging and reviewing games by causing them to be
sent to the annual comp instead of his comp.
SeanB
Sean T Barrett
>buz...@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett), you wrote on Tue, 20 Nov 2001
>>the realm of possibility, but it was harder to
>>explain so I went with the simpler one because
>>I had no idea you were going to be picky about
>>hypotheticals with what is clearly an actual,
>>real, practical problem
>
>with computers, but interfaces much easier with people (they do
>exist!), rounds up a hundred friends who award his game with a 9 on
>average and random other games with a 3 or a 4.
>
>Another possible scenario is ...
>
>How about we cross these bridges when we get there?
Because we have evidence we've hit the foothills, and
we'll have an annoying year some year if we don't grab
some rope to make the bridge with BEFORE we finding
ourselves dangling off a cliff.
>So far, I have only seen unsubstantiated allegations that all 13
>voters that gave BaF a 1 have done so because they did not speak the
>language and that all people (or a majority of them) who did not vote
>on BaF, did so because they did not speak the language.
I thought the statistics speak for themselves relatively
plainly. We have one review which says so explicitly, which
seems roughly proportional to the number of 1s out of the
total voter candidatehood.
>proof for this whatsoever, and unless you will interview all the
>judges, and assuming they are all willing to reply and speak the
>truth, there is no way you are going to find out.
Oh, ok, nevermind. So also, the world is flat, right? [1]
SeanB
[1] We have plenty of scientific knowledge of things we
can't see, especially stuff down in the molecular, atomic,
and sub-atomic ranges. Statisticial knowledge is about all
we have there.
Sean T Barrett
>I don't see any big call defending the Windows challenged[0] from games
>not playable by them[1], yet somehow this whole "1 game in the history of
>the comp entered in German" thing has become a raving flame-fest! I don't
>get it.
We don't have some small fraction of the "windows-challenged"
all voting the windows-only games a 1. If we did, you'd
cerainly be seeing the same reaction from me.
>It's not like this is a trend leading to more and more division
>between the monolingual and the multilingual.
No, it annoys me because it pushes the ambiguity of the
"score games however you want" to an even higher level:
"judge whether you should vote the game however you want,
and then discover that other people aren't applying the
same rules". Somehow, to me, the latter is really
irritating in a way that the former isn't.
Perhaps it's because of one of these two things:
- There's nothing I can do to offset their vote.
I could submit my own vote for the game that's
in a language I don't understand, but what am
I suppose to vote it? I can't collect any data
on its quality. It seems like the only thing
a non-german speaker could ever vote it would
be a 1.
- If the only thing a non-german speaker is ever
going to vote for a non-german game is a '1',
then at that point the comp isn't collecting
data about the *game*, it's collecting
data about the makeup of german speakers in
the audience.
If "you have to play to vote" became more formalized and
solved the problem, that would be plenty for me, but I
don't think it will solve the problem, since Adam
seemed pretty Adam-Ant that he had played it.
SeanB
Joe Mason
Passenger Pigeon <passeng...@email.com> wrote:
>Also, I got the impression that most of the submitted money would be
>used as prize money, though the rules are rather unclear on that point.
>If so, though, he's not so much charging as streamlining the prize
>donation process.
Note that 20 authors at $5.00 per author is $100.00, and the prize money is
capped at $175.00. It's pretty clear that the entrance fee goes straight to
the pot, and up to $75.00 of additional donations will be accepted.
(This threw me for a minute, when I multiplied wrong and thought that the
entry fees came to $200.00. "But where did the other $25.00 go?" Hey, I'm
allowed to make stupid mistakes like that - I won't actually have my Math
degree until next year.)
Joe
Tina
Sean T Barrett <buz...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
><ti...@eniac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>>I don't see any big call defending the Windows challenged[0] from games
>>not playable by them[1], yet somehow this whole "1 game in the history of
>>the comp entered in German" thing has become a raving flame-fest! I don't
>>get it.
>
>We don't have some small fraction of the "windows-challenged"
>all voting the windows-only games a 1. If we did, you'd
>cerainly be seeing the same reaction from me.
I agree there's something wrong with that principle, but I specifically am
talking about the flame-fest regarding whether or not English should be a
requirement for the comp. Just to be clear.
Branko Collin
19:14:39 GMT:
>Branko Collin <col...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>buz...@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett), you wrote on Tue, 20 Nov 2001
>>>I don't think that's outside
>>>the realm of possibility, but it was harder to
>>>explain so I went with the simpler one because
>>>I had no idea you were going to be picky about
>>>hypotheticals with what is clearly an actual,
>>>real, practical problem
>>
>>Another possible scenario is that a game author who is not too handy
>>with computers, but interfaces much easier with people (they do
>>exist!), rounds up a hundred friends who award his game with a 9 on
>>average and random other games with a 3 or a 4.
>>
>>Another possible scenario is ...
>>
>>How about we cross these bridges when we get there?
>
>Because we have evidence we've hit the foothills, and
>we'll have an annoying year some year if we don't grab
>some rope to make the bridge with BEFORE we finding
>ourselves dangling off a cliff.
People have been whining about the rules for years now, and everytime
it turned out OK.
>>So far, I have only seen unsubstantiated allegations that all 13
>>voters that gave BaF a 1 have done so because they did not speak the
>>language and that all people (or a majority of them) who did not vote
>>on BaF, did so because they did not speak the language.
>
>I thought the statistics speak for themselves relatively
>plainly.
No, they do not. Statistics have to be interpreted, and bad
interpretations have caused the saying 'lies, damn lies and
statistics' to come into being.
>We have one review which says so explicitly, which
>seems roughly proportional to the number of 1s out of the
>total voter candidatehood.
Not quite. Adam Cadre's review (I take it that is the review you are
referring to) mentions that in his mind he at least tried playing the
game. I do not agree that he tried, but I can see that in his mind he
was morally justified to give it a one.
>>proof for this whatsoever, and unless you will interview all the
>>judges, and assuming they are all willing to reply and speak the
>>truth, there is no way you are going to find out.
>
>Oh, ok, nevermind. So also, the world is flat, right? [1]
>
>[1] We have plenty of scientific knowledge of things we
>can't see, especially stuff down in the molecular, atomic,
>and sub-atomic ranges. Statisticial knowledge is about all
>we have there.
And that knowledge has been applied well in that realm, or so it
seems. So far, our model of the submicroscopic world has served us
well.
There is too little evidence, though, to find out for what reasons
people did not vote on BaF, or did vote but gave it a 1. Perhaps if
some more people stepped forward and told us how and why they voted on
BaF... That is not something I could ask of people though.
Personally, I had not gotten to BaF the moment I had to hand in my
votes. I barely finished playing five games. I would have loved
playing a German game for a chance.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
David Thornley
Define "play". There are some games I can't play at all, lacking
easy access to a Windows or MS-DOS machine (although I might be
able to play some MS-DOS stuff on my very-low-end Linux box).
That seems fairly clear.
There were games that I couldn't seem to play "right" with the
available interpreters. Silicon Castles spat out some unpleasant
questions, and then appeared to hang the interpreter. One game
(Carma, IIRC) came with a disclaimer that it didn't work well on
the Mac glulxe interpreter, but I supposed I could have played
it anyway. I certainly could have played a German game had it
been on a platform I can run, although I certainly wouldn't do
well at it. Then, of course, there's "Gostak.z5". Does that
count as English? If I can't figure out the language sufficiently
to play, what's the difference between that and a game in German
or Polish?
One problem with adding rules to the comp is that rules usually
have fuzzy areas. This has some real fuzzy ones. How do you
tell if a game is in English, some variant thereof, mixed, or
not at all? Most of the time, it's obvious, but if we make
a rule somebody's going to enter something that bends it. How
fluent do you have to be in a language to score an entry?
(Almost certainly more than I am in German, for any reasonable
interpretation.) What of regional differences? How many people
were stopped in Curses by Graham's requirement of "throw dice"
rather than the more American "roll dice"?
I think that the best response may be to make no rule about it,
but officially note that English is the language games are
expected to be in. Then let the voters use common sense.
--
David H. Thornley | If you want my opinion, ask.
da...@thornley.net | If you don't, flee.
http://www.thornley.net/~thornley/david/ | O-
Adam Cadre
David Cornelson:
> I would rename this competition, "Adam Cadre's IF Writers Competition"
Different names were discussed and the eventual consensus was that
everyone's going to call it the spring comp anyway, so we might as
well just call it that instead of coming up with a clever name. I
certainly don't want to put *my* name on it, since this isn't about
me... and if it goes well and we want to keep doing it, I'll almost
certainly be handing it off eventually just as Kevin Wilson handed
off the original comp after the '97 edition.
> I think this competition completely voids the 'spirit' of the
> original competition which was looking for people to write more
> games regardless of talent level and regardless of the contents
> of the game.
Yes. This is a different thing.
> you've very undemocratically usurped a process that belongs to the
> community as a whole
As has been pointed out, this isn't a democracy -- it's an anarchy,
and one which works because pretty much everyone in the community is
a high-quality individual interested in keeping the community
flourishing. The fact that it's an anarchy means that things don't
happen after they've been discussed to death, votes taken, petitions
submitted, etc.; they happen when someone says, "Okay, this is
happening" and other people say, "Hey, that sounds cool."
> Rule #1 must go.
And it will, if the consensus after we've tried it is that it didn't
work. Whether it'd be eliminated or replaced by an even tighter hoop
would depend on in which direction things went wrong.
> Adam is telling anyone that wants to write a quick silly game to go
> fly a kite
Well, more like I'm telling anyone who wants to write a quick silly
game to write a quick silly game, have fun with it, upload it to the
archive, and if people enjoy it, rock on. But don't submit it to this
comp.
Georgina Bensley:
> And the best bit is, if your game gets bounced from the Spring Thing
> because The Organiser declares you have too many bugs, you have a few
> months to fix those bugs for the real Comp.
Yes, this is deliberate. Games which are too buggy or which just
aren't done in time can still be part of a comp experience, if that's
what the authors want -- they just have to wait four months.
Also, hmm. Spring Thing isn't bad at all. I may just swipe that, if
you don't mind. And hey, maybe that'll alleviate David Cornelson's
concern in the process.
William Burke:
> I got the impression that most of the submitted money would be used
> as prize money, though the rules are rather unclear on that point.
All of it will, yes. In the very unlikely event that there's a
surplus somehow, the money will be donated as a fall comp prize, or
perhaps just returned -- we'll worry about it when it becomes a
problem.
Andrew Plotkin:
> I'm somewhat disappointed that this competition still doesn't
> provide a venue for longish games.
I thought about that. I certainly wanted to have long*er* games, but
not epics that take weeks of regular play. The hope is that these will
be games that have been worked on steadily for several months -- not
significantly less, but also not significantly more. Throwing something
like, say, ONCE AND FUTURE into the mix would tend to make for an
unbalanced load.
> Judges *don't* have to pay to play the entries, or so I assume.
That is correct. I'll clarify this.
> Is there a definition of "immediately"?
There wasn't at the time I wrote that -- I basically figured that games
like FINE-TUNED that clearly needed a *lot* of work would be excluded,
but if the issue was a glitch in one line, the author should have a
chance to snip it out really quickly and resubmit. (PHOTOPIA, you'll
recall, had a bug that made the game unfinishable if the PC went south
from a particular location -- the culprit was that a 4 was written to
an array instead of a 5. Two seconds of work, no more bug.) I guess
if I had to provide a clarification, I'd say that the bug must be
repaired within 24 hours of the email being sent, with no back-and-
forth -- either the game should work the second time, or that's it.
(This is assuming it's already June when this comes up. If it's
earlier, I'd say, "Work on this and get it back to me by the deadline.")
Jon Ingold:
> So what it someone submits Intent no. 7, then 14 other people submit
> intents... how quickly does no. 7 have to pay before he gets kicked
> from the list?
After I send an email saying, "Okay, you've got a slot, so here's where
to send the money for the prize pool," the entrant should get the money
in the mail ASAP -- before the end of the next day that mail is
collected, I'd think. Then I'll make a reasonable allowance for the
money to arrive, depending on where it's coming from. I do have a
Paypal account, which should obviate at least some of the problems with
currency exchange and international mail delay times.
> And then how quickly does no. 21->20 have to pay to get in?
#21 would have to pony up the $5 in order to be #21. That is, if
someone submits an intent, and I reply, "Okay, all the slots are full,
but if you want to submit the $5, you'll have such-and-such a place
on the waiting list," the entrant should not count on having the money
returned even if he or she completes a game which doesn't make it into
the official group. This may seem very unfair, but that's why there's
a warning up front: securing a spot on the waiting list should be taken
no more lightly than securing a spot in the original 20. Those who
don't want to risk the possibility of donating $5 for no reward should
hold off.
Robb Sherwin:
> Is there likely to be a size (in megabytes) restriction /
> recommendation?
Nope, at least nothing more than a reminder that not everyone has a
fast connection (I'm at 28.8 myself, though this should be changing
by June) and so dumping a 50M game on them is asking a hell of a lot.
But no official restriction, no.
Branko Collin:
> Who will do the judging? Will that be set up similar to the IF Comp?
Yes, judging will be by anyone who isn't an entrant (or the organizer)
and submits a complete ballot. No panel of judges or anything like
that. I'll clarify that on the rules page.
-----
Adam Cadre, Brooklyn, NY
http://adamcadre.ac
Adam Thornton
Cedric Knight <ckn...@gn.apc.deletethis.org> wrote:
>ObIF: Why does "The Undiscovered Country" not recognise "bu*ger" or
>"felch"?
>"Damn" gets "Real adventurers do not use such language."
I think you can blame it on lazy implementation.
Sorry.
Adam
scrambled Digby McWiggle
>Responses to those who've had comments or questions:
>
>David Cornelson:
>> I would rename this competition, "Adam Cadre's IF Writers Competition"
>
>Different names were discussed and the eventual consensus was that
>everyone's going to call it the spring comp anyway
Um, aren't we forgetting something here, like, um HALF THE PLANET!!!!!
Call it JuneComp or whatever, but please *please* remember that we don't all
live in the Northern Hemisphere. Some very good IF games have come out of the
Southern Hemisphere and it is a little distressing to be snubbed (albeit
unintentionally) by the IF community assuming that June = Spring and October =
Fall.
Sorry Adam, but you must have temporarily forgotton that we exist Down Under
when you said "everyone's going to call it the spring comp anyway". Why would
I call it spring comp when it's in the autumn?
I really do think it best if we continue to refer to the October competition
as "The Annual IF Comp" or whatever, and rename Adam's new competition "June
Comp" or something along those lines.
Sorry to have to whine about this, but it really does get annoying when we in
the Southern Hemisphere are constantly reminded that we don't count.
Incidentally, apart from the name I think the June comp is mostly a good idea.
I won't be entering though, since the exchange rate means that the US$5
entry fee is roughly $13 for me, not to mention the hassle of getting it to
wherever it needs to go (even PayPal charges US$5 a pop for an international
transaction, which means it would cost me actually $26 to enter). On the other
hand, a possible US$100 first prize is more like $250 in NZ, so maybe I will
enter after all...
Cheers,
Digby McWiggle
Frank Borger
> Define "play". There are some games I can't play at all, lacking
> easy access to a Windows or MS-DOS machine (although I might be
> able to play some MS-DOS stuff on my very-low-end Linux box).
> I certainly could have played a German game had it
> been on a platform I can run, although I certainly wouldn't do
> well at it.
Just FTR, I tried it with linux' XDOSEMU (1.0.2.0) and it did work fine.
cu
--
Frank Borger | Aliloka chielo
fr...@tmt.de | estas sama chielo.
Bayreuth (49°57,566'N 11°34,473'O)
Frank Borger
> So far, I have only seen unsubstantiated allegations that all 13
> voters that gave BaF a 1 have done so because they did not speak the
> language ...
I think I'm supposed to plead guilty here. But I did so trying to
analyse its high ranking in the standard deviation figures. [1]
Examine the histogram and give me a better explanation for the fact
that more than one or two voters gave it a 1.
(And if I have counted correctly, three of those voters have already
more or less confessed their sin :-)
> and that all people (or a majority of them) who did not vote
> on BaF, did so because they did not speak the language.
Of course not. There were other games (single-platform, lame title,
unknown author -- or whatever reason you may think of) which attracted
only 50-60 votes. (#2 got only 69 votes, but the reason is clear: z6.)
But I'm sure there were (and still are) quite a few judges who _would_
have played BaF out of curiosity _because_ it is a non-english game --
and actually _couldn't_ for the very same reason ;-) [2]
cu
--
Frank Borger | Aliloka chielo
fr...@tmt.de | estas sama chielo.
Bayreuth (49°57,566'N 11°34,473'O)
[1] Entering it was an experiment, and thus had to be evaluated.
[2] Yes, I may have no _proof_ for this, but do I need?
Aris Katsaris
"Marco Thorek" <ma...@infocom-if.org> wrote in message
news:3BF9A753...@infocom-if.org...
> What you are telling us is "if we can't have it the American way, we
> have it no way."
Man, if someone submits a game to a competition then he must expect
people to be able to compare it. If he makes it difficult for people to
compare it, then he doesn't have a right to whine.
> And I thought the interactive fiction community benefits from its
> cultural diversity.
I'd love to know that more games are being written in many languages.
But putting them in the same competition is nonsensical if they can't
be judged by the same people.
> Christ, if you can't read it, don't rate it.
If you don't want it rated, then don't put it in the comp... And, btw,
"I can't read it, and am not interested in trying." is exactly my reason
for giving a low grade to The Gostak.
Aris Katsaris
Mike Duncan
>Some will look at these rules and say, "Gah, I'm not entering THAT."
>Good. This is, in large part, the point -- the goal here is a
>reasonably-sized batch. You'll notice that the page above basically
>pleads with people not to submit an intent to enter unless they're
>really excited about a specific idea. If you are, terrific! With
>any luck there'll be a dozen of you. If not, also terrific! Forget
>this thread ever happened and with any luck we'll have a dozen
>excellent games to drop in your lap this coming June.
I was kind of looking around for a place to put a good idea I thought
of over the last month, which won't take a year to finish.
But yeah - gah.
I like the spirit of unbridled creativity that the IF Comp represents.
It certainly produces some strange results - great successes,
spectacular failures, intriguing experiments, exercises in
questionable sanity/taste - but overall, it emits a warm kooky
feeling, and that's precisely what attracted me to it.
This, though, reminds me more of a contest a lit journal might run.
Elite's way too strong a word for what's turning me off, but the
vibe's there. It might be the entry fee, which riles at my joy at
discovering I could write games for essentially nothing.
I can understand the desire to screen for bug-free games - however,
I'm concerned that such a step might eventually descend into even more
stringent standards, ala 'games must demonstrate a certain level of
writing ability' (and by writing I mean setting, plot, character,
themes, not coding).
Mike Duncan
http://www.boston.quik.com/mduncan/
Angela
> And the best bit is, if your game gets bounced from the Spring Thing
> because The Organiser declares you have too many bugs, you have a few
> months to fix those bugs for the real Comp...
Hi, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a rule for the Fall Comp
which disallows previously released games?
[...after a trip to ifcomp.org...]
Actually, the exact wording is that 'all entries must be previously
unreleased at the opening of voting'. But anyway. My question is, does
that (rule) still apply?
~@.@ Angela
Georgina Bensley
> > And the best bit is, if your game gets bounced from the Spring Thing
> > because The Organiser declares you have too many bugs, you have a few
> > months to fix those bugs for the real Comp...
>
>
> Hi, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a rule for the Fall Comp
> which disallows previously released games?
Well, I'm assuming that if you send your game to the pre-screener (not
the judging period of the actual competition) and it doesn't make the cut
to get into the actual competition, then that doesn't count as being
released.
__________________________________________________________________
Duke University Role-playing And Gaming Organization
http://www.duke.edu/web/DRAGO/
Eric Mayer
wrote:
Thanks, Mike, for pretty much voicing my thoughts but better than I
would've. I'll never write an outstanding piece of IF because I lack
the programming skills but I've done a few little things, some reviews
and generally really enjoyed the IF community. But if the Annual Comp
had gone by these rules I would've been scared off. Period.
Adam Cadre
> I like the spirit of unbridled creativity that the IF Comp represents.
> This, though, reminds me more of a contest a lit journal might run.
One of the things the employees like best about working here at Mofocom
is that we have free chocolate chip cookies every Friday afternoon.
Then one Tuesday afternoon someone brought in a plate of peanut butter
cookies. Some employees were concerned. "No, see, the thing we enjoy
about the chocolate chip cookies is that they have chocolate chips in
them."
Others pointed out that the chocolate chip cookies would be arriving
on schedule on Friday. They would still have chocolate chips in them.
This was apparently cold comfort. "See, this cookie here seems like
the sort of cookie that people who like peanut butter would enjoy. If
this had been the sort of cookies Mofocom offered on Fridays I would
never have eaten them."
It was again pointed out that the peanut butter cookies were being
offered in addition to, not in lieu of, the chocolate chip cookies.
Then someone complained that the cookies should be called biscuits
and then the intern set the building on fire.
L. Ross Raszewski
>
>We don't have some small fraction of the "windows-challenged"
>all voting the windows-only games a 1. If we did, you'd
>cerainly be seeing the same reaction from me.
>
I think it's worth noting that there was some discussion over whether
or not to rate one particular game, which was most emphatically not
windows-only, a 1, because no interpreter could be found for the
player's operating system and "the game appears in the list generated
by comp01, so it's got to be rated."
Adam Cadre
> we in the Southern Hemisphere are constantly reminded that we don't count.
Whoops. Well, hrm. I'll try to think of something. (Though there are
ways to rationalize it -- one could point out that it'll be spring for
the computers hosting the games, or some such.)
Sean T Barrett
all voting the windows-only games a 1. We *do* have a small
fraction of "german-challenged" voters voting a German game
a 1. You made the analogy, I was attempting to point out
that not only are the two situations different, but if the
way in which they were different applies to the former
situation, you would be seeing the same flame-fest.
And, hence, one possible approach to this problem is to introduce
English as an explicit requirement for the comp, since some of the
voters are doing so anyway. See any of my other posts
on the subject for more information or alternative
requirements; even I am tired of me posting about this.
But hopefully this makes clear how the part of my post you
quoted relates to both what you said before it and what
you said after it.
SeanB
Sean T Barrett
>I think it's worth noting that there was some discussion over whether
>or not to rate one particular game, which was most emphatically not
>windows-only, a 1, because no interpreter could be found for the
>player's operating system and "the game appears in the list generated
>by comp01, so it's got to be rated."
Indeed, I had a negative reaction to that post, but since
the game in question received only 2 out of 69 '1' votes,
it doesn't seem worth a big discussion about a problem
with the *comp*.
Admittedly, one '1' vote would have, I think, made the difference
between first and second place, so perhaps it is worth worrying
over.
SeanB
Rikard Peterson
news:9tfisq$ooi$1...@drizzle.com...
<actual content snipped>
> and then the intern set the building on fire.
I assume the intern is me, but I don't know why I should set the
newsgroup on fire. <looking for a match> Who wants barbecue?
>LIGHT FIRE
I can't see any such thing.
>LIGHT MATCH
The match is burning with a small but nasty flame.
>PUT MATCH TO HOUSE
I didn't understand that sentence.
>GIVE UP
You can only do that to something animate.
>PUT CUE ON BARBIE
Done.
The match has now burnt all the way down to your fingers. Surprised, you
drop it without thinking. The fire quickly spreads and soon the
newsgroup is on fire.
Will I be flamed now?
Rikard
Stephen Bond
> One of the things the employees like best about working here at Mofocom
> is that we have free chocolate chip cookies every Friday afternoon.
>
> Then one Tuesday afternoon someone brought in a plate of peanut butter
> cookies. Some employees were concerned. "No, see, the thing we enjoy
> about the chocolate chip cookies is that they have chocolate chips in
> them."
>
> Others pointed out that the chocolate chip cookies would be arriving
> on schedule on Friday. They would still have chocolate chips in them.
>
> This was apparently cold comfort. "See, this cookie here seems like
> the sort of cookie that people who like peanut butter would enjoy. If
> this had been the sort of cookies Mofocom offered on Fridays I would
> never have eaten them."
>
> It was again pointed out that the peanut butter cookies were being
> offered in addition to, not in lieu of, the chocolate chip cookies.
>
> Then someone complained that the cookies should be called biscuits
> and then the intern set the building on fire.
One important point missing from this story is that the cookies were
made by the employees of Mofocom themselves. And that one of the nice
things about the Friday cookies was that anyone who wanted to could
make one. Sure, some of the cookies were burnt, some of them were
falling apart, and some of them weren't strictly cookies at all; but
still, there was a nice, warm, fuzzy kind of feeling about Fridays.
And on some Fridays there were really good cookies.
Then someone came up with the idea of the Tuesday Cookie Club, in
which a smaller number of employees paid a subscription and got
together to produce high-quality cookies. On the face of it, this
seemed like a good way to guarantee better cookies. But knowing that
there was a limited amount of cookie dough to go around, some employees
were worried that the best dough would go into Tuesday's cookies,
leaving only scraps for Friday. Other employees, who worked on the
third floor, didn't like the idea of paying subscriptions through the
notoriously slow office delivery system, and felt that the Tuesday
Cookie Club exluded them. Some thought the idea of payment itself was
a bit exclusive. There were even some sentimental people who thought
that cookies just wouldn't taste the same when you got them twice a week.
And employees who worked night shifts objected to the name 'Tuesday
Cookie Club', since for them it would officially be Wednesday.
Stephen.
www.maths.tcd.ie/~bonds/
Richard Bos
> I don't see any big call defending the Windows challenged[0] from games
> not playable by them[1], yet somehow this whole "1 game in the history of
> the comp entered in German" thing has become a raving flame-fest!
One point (I agree with your main point, mostly): if you think _this_ is
a raving flame-fest, you ain't seen nothing yet. I have yet to see one
of the regulars call another regular a "festering eye-sore with a ewe
for a mother and a goblin for a father", so as far as flame-fests go,
this is really rather mild. I'd call it enthousiastic discussion, at
most.
Richard
Branko Collin
22:01:08 +0200:
>> What you are telling us is "if we can't have it the American way, we
>> have it no way."
>
>Man, if someone submits a game to a competition then he must expect
>people to be able to compare it. If he makes it difficult for people to
>compare it, then he doesn't have a right to whine.
In the current set-up, he must expect some people to be able to
compare it.
In this particular case, it would have been nice if people had more of
a clue (besides the title) that the game was in German. It would have
been nice if comp01.zx had had a separate tray for 'German
Windows-only games' last competition. Lesson learned, try again next
time.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Branko Collin
08:21:12 GMT:
>Tina <ti...@eniac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>>Sean T Barrett <buz...@TheWorld.com> wrote:
>>><ti...@eniac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>>>>I don't see any big call defending the Windows challenged[0] from games
>>>>not playable by them[1], yet somehow this whole "1 game in the history of
>>>>the comp entered in German" thing has become a raving flame-fest! I don't
>>>>get it.
>>>
>>>We don't have some small fraction of the "windows-challenged"
>>>all voting the windows-only games a 1. If we did, you'd
>>>cerainly be seeing the same reaction from me.
>>
>>I agree there's something wrong with that principle, but I specifically am
>>talking about the flame-fest regarding whether or not English should be a
>>requirement for the comp. Just to be clear.
>
>We don't have some small fraction of the "windows-challenged"
>all voting the windows-only games a 1. We *do* have a small
>fraction of "german-challenged" voters voting a German game
>a 1.
I am sorry if I keep harping on this but, unless you have some inside
knowledge that I do not possess, you have no way of knowing this. All
the Windows-only games seem to have received a substantial amount of
low votes. Also, Begegnung am Fluss is a Windows-only game.
>You made the analogy, I was attempting to point out
>that not only are the two situations different, but if the
>way in which they were different applies to the former
>situation, you would be seeing the same flame-fest.
>
>And, hence, one possible approach to this problem is to introduce
>English as an explicit requirement for the comp, since some of the
>voters are doing so anyway.
Again, you are proposing to make the wishes of a few perceived
malcontents the rule. And what for? So that people can see that they
have to sabotage the process in order to get their wishes fulfilled?
BTW, you and Frank Borger seem to have access to the exact scores (per
game per mark). Are they on http://www.ifcomp.org somewhere?
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Branko Collin
01:30:40 GMT:
>On 20 Nov 2001 01:17:34 -0800, gri...@drizzle.com (Adam Cadre) wrote:
>
>>Some will look at these rules and say, "Gah, I'm not entering THAT."
>>Good. This is, in large part, the point -- the goal here is a
>>reasonably-sized batch. You'll notice that the page above basically
>>pleads with people not to submit an intent to enter unless they're
>>really excited about a specific idea. If you are, terrific! With
>>any luck there'll be a dozen of you. If not, also terrific! Forget
>>this thread ever happened and with any luck we'll have a dozen
>>excellent games to drop in your lap this coming June.
>
>
>I was kind of looking around for a place to put a good idea I thought
>of over the last month, which won't take a year to finish.
>
>But yeah - gah.
>
>I like the spirit of unbridled creativity that the IF Comp represents.
>It certainly produces some strange results - great successes,
>spectacular failures, intriguing experiments, exercises in
>questionable sanity/taste - but overall, it emits a warm kooky
>feeling, and that's precisely what attracted me to it.
And just so you can have, in that great competition called life,
competing competitions. Some will be "great successes,
spectacular failures, intriguing experiments, exercises in
questionable sanity/taste". :-)
>This, though, reminds me more of a contest a lit journal might run.
>Elite's way too strong a word for what's turning me off, but the
>vibe's there. It might be the entry fee, which riles at my joy at
>discovering I could write games for essentially nothing.
I do not think the entry fee is anything else than a token of intent.
Perhaps Adam should take away any doubts of this by not making the
prize money up out of the entrance fees. Perhaps 'no prizes' would be
better, and the entrance fees could be given to a worthy cause (there
are whales to be saved, or IF Theory books to be produced). Or the
authors of the games placed 1-10 could get their money back.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Branko Collin
-0800:
I remember a story my teacher in the philosophy of science once told:
apparently, there once was a people far in the past, where studying
nature, astrology, mathematics, etc., was seen as A Good Thing.
However, as one researcher found out, these studies were not allowed
to change the peoples' view on nature. So, when he discovered that you
could have floating point numbers next to real numbers, they put the
guy in a boat, rowed him to a point two miles off the coast and showed
him that his number did not float. I believe the teacher's point was
to show that the history of science started when scientists were
allowed to be critical of our model of the world.
But then again, you must have known beforehand that you were to be put
in the boat. Don't let it worry you. As you said: this is an
experiment.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
Magnus Olsson
Eric Mayer <emay...@epix.net> wrote:
>On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 01:30:40 GMT, mdu...@pobox.com (Mike Duncan)
>wrote:
>>I'm concerned that such a step might eventually descend into even more
>>stringent standards, ala 'games must demonstrate a certain level of
>>writing ability' (and by writing I mean setting, plot, character,
>>themes, not coding).
>>
>
>Thanks, Mike, for pretty much voicing my thoughts but better than I
>would've. I'll never write an outstanding piece of IF because I lack
>the programming skills but I've done a few little things, some reviews
>and generally really enjoyed the IF community. But if the Annual Comp
>had gone by these rules I would've been scared off. Period.
But, fortunately, the "big" Comp doesn't go by those rules.
Several people are reacting as if Adam's comp is going to replace
the original, and if that were the case, I could understand your
concerns.
But that's not the case. Adam is running his own competition, with
different rules, different goals, and a different name. If you don't
feel happy with those rules or goals, don't enter. It's as simple as
that.
And I don't see any danger that Adam's comp will in any way reduce
interest in, or (in David Cornelson's words) "usurp" the original
comp. If nothing else, the exclusiveness of the rules should guarantee
that - if Adam only accepts 20 entries, everybody who didn't make
it to his list will still, presumably, submit to the big competition.
--
Magnus Olsson (m...@df.lth.se, m...@pobox.com)
------ http://www.pobox.com/~mol ------
Magnus Olsson
* The Net isn't a democracy, it's an anarchy. With the exception of
newsgroup creation, things don't happen because they've been voted on,
or because a consensus has been reached; they happen because somebody
(or, sometimes, a smallish group of somebodies) decide to do
something.
* The IF Community is a very vaguely defined entity, and one which
(so far) has shown little tendency to act as a whole.
* As a consequence of these two facts, nobody here can presume to
speak for the Community as a collective.
* It should be remembered that the current Comp started, not because
the Community thought it was a good idea, but because one person -
Whizzard - took an initiative and - unilaterally and undemocratically
- decided on holding it.
Marnie Parker
>From: "David A. Cornelson" dcorn...@placet.com
>Date: 11/20/2001 6:36 AM Pacific Standard Time
>Message-id:
>Everything Adam is trying to does something similar, but at the cost of
>being a closed and limiting competition.
>
>Jarb
But everyone is entitled to run a mini-comp. You've done it and I do one every
year.
Maybe I am missing something here, but it looks like just another mini-comp to
me. And each runner of a mini-comp is entitled to set their own rules.
HTH. HAND.
Doe ;-)
doea...@aol.com
IF http://members.aol.com/doepage/intfict.htm
(An Iffy Theory | Glulx/Glk for Duncies | unglklib | Inform Primer)
IF Art Gallery http://members.aol.com/iffyart/
IF Review Conspiracy http://www.plover.net/~textfire/conspiracy/
Branko Collin
2001 10:30:01 GMT:
Ah, but within this kind community it is a raving flame-fest. :-)
I hope that all the gentle souls here never discover alt.flame (any
alt.*, really) or, say, sci.lang or alt.religion.scientology), to name
but a few of the modestly quiet and polite news groups.
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl
S. Kesserich
"Adam Cadre" <gri...@drizzle.com> wrote in message
news:9tecmr$ao2$1...@drizzle.com...
> Responses to those who've had comments or questions:
[snip]
> As has been pointed out, this isn't a democracy -- it's an anarchy,
> and one which works because pretty much everyone in the community is
> a high-quality individual interested in keeping the community
> flourishing. The fact that it's an anarchy means that things don't
> happen after they've been discussed to death, votes taken, petitions
> submitted, etc.; they happen when someone says, "Okay, this is
> happening" and other people say, "Hey, that sounds cool."
Indeed.
I believe Adam has decided that the Comp Rules' topic had been discussed
long enough, and that it was time to take the path of action. For that, I
think he deserves respect, for he is willing to back up his ideas with
personal involvement and an experiment. I invite everybody who thinks "this
is not a good idea because <insert reason here>" to follow Adam's example
and let actions speak for themselves. If you disagree with Adam's Comp,
don't submit a game, don't judge the games. Furthermore, if you are one of
those who thinks that the Annual Comp is bound to suffer from this
initiative, try to submit a good, well tested game to the Annual Comp to
support it.
While I think that there is no problem in people verbalising their
unhappiness with Adam's Comp, I think it is a bit ridiculous to begin a
thread hotly discussing the rules of an event that has never happened and
does not benefit still from some hard-fact results. Adam is entitled to set
all the rules that strike his fancy (and that of his advisors), and -- I may
be terribly wrong, in which case I apologise -- I think he has no intention
to move one iota from his idea, at least until the first Spring Comp has
been done with. If the Comp proves to be a poor thing, he will have the
chance of reconsider what was that made it a failure and I'm sure there will
be no want for suggestions. But if it proves to be a success, well, might as
well get used to it even if you don't participate.
Sonja.
pol...@idecnet.com
J. D. Berry
> is that we have free chocolate chip cookies every Friday afternoon.
>
> Then one Tuesday afternoon someone brought in a plate of peanut butter
> cookies. Some employees were concerned. "No, see, the thing we enjoy
> about the chocolate chip cookies is that they have chocolate chips in
> them."
Mmmmm... allegorical cookies.
Richard Bos
> Also, Begegnung am Fluss is a Windows-only game.
Oh? I must have hallucinated playing it on my MS-DOS-only computer,
then.
Richard
Adam Thornton
Richard Bos <in...@hoekstra-uitgeverij.nl> wrote:
>One point (I agree with your main point, mostly): if you think _this_ is
>a raving flame-fest, you ain't seen nothing yet. I have yet to see one
>of the regulars call another regular a "festering eye-sore with a ewe
>for a mother and a goblin for a father", so as far as flame-fests go,
>this is really rather mild. I'd call it enthousiastic discussion, at
>most.
But of course that's exactly what a festering eye-sore with a ewe for a
mother and a goblin for a father would say.
Adam
Eric Mayer
That's an amusing story but it doesn't really make Mike's brief
observation any less valid.. To me, also, the rules sound like they
could have been lifted from a lit journal contest. Is that good or
bad? I suppose it depends on your point of view.
Eric Mayer
I generally agree. Actually the more competitions the merrier and
anyone who's willing to put in the work to hold one is entitled to do
it their own way. It has just seemed to me that the way the
competition was presented, and the timing of the presentation, and a
lot of the discussion, has made it seem like an antidote for the
perceived ills of the annual comp. I never had that impression from
the various mini comps or the art show.
OKB -- not okblacke
>One of the things the employees like best about working here at Mofocom
>is that we have free chocolate chip cookies every Friday afternoon.
>
>Then one Tuesday afternoon someone brought in a plate of peanut butter
>cookies. Some employees were concerned. "No, see, the thing we enjoy
>about the chocolate chip cookies is that they have chocolate chips in
>them."
The peanut-butter-cookie-bringer then obtained DNA samples from all
employees interested in trying a peanut butter cookie, and required a
non-refundable ante for the privilege of being allowed to partake of the
deliberately small supply of peanut butter cookies. He then retired to his
room with the resumes and money of the would-be peanut-butter-cookie-eaters,
and proceeded to hand-pick his favorite cookie lovers to receive the cookies.
There was nothing wrong with this procedure, but not all employees elected
to solicit a peanut butter cookie.
--OKB (Bren...@aol.com) -- no relation to okblacke
"Do not follow where the path may lead;
go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail."
--Author Unknown
Branko Collin
2001 14:43:54 GMT:
How was it? Have you hallucinated before, or was this your first time?
;-)
Let me rephrase the statement you responded to: "Also, Begegnung am
Fluss is listed among the MSDOS/WINDOWS GAMES (which, for the sake of
argument and consistency in this thread, will be called a Windows-only
game)."
--
branko collin
col...@xs4all.nl