The IF Competition

The most important annual event in the world of interactive literature is without a doubt the annual rec.arts.int-fiction IF Contest. For the past five years now, novice interactive writers and already-established luminaries in the field have been lucubrating long and hard in the early fall, trying to beat their IF projects into shape in order that they might be judged against the offerings of their fellows. If you're looking to make a reputation (or even just a few friends) in the IF community, entering the contest is the way to do it - every piece of work that's submitted is read by scores of judges the world over and ranked on a scale of one to ten. These games are then placed on a scale from the most favorably received all the way down to the most widely shunned, and the list is published on the web. Prizes - everything from video games to signed novels to antique software to weird, apparently useless 'found objects' - are generously passed around. And Fervent Public Discourse ensues. This year's contest, which is being run by the ubiquitous and saint-like Stephen Grenade, looks to be bigger, better and more replete with rich gifts for the victors than any one before it. You can get all the basic information about the contest by going to the official site at www.textfire.com. At the time that this article was written, 1999s contest games had just been released for evaluation. and the list of participants includes such well-known IF names as Quentin Thompson, Ryebread Celsius, and Neil K. Guy. It's still not too late to get in on the judging, though neophytes should be warned - each piece of IF takes a minimum of two hours to work through and judge, and this year's contest has a whopping thirty-seven competitors. One needn't necessarily judge all of the works submitted by the contest deadline of November 15th, 1999 - there's a PC executable available on the contest site that will insure that whatever pieces you do judge are chosen at random from the pile. For many IF enthusiasts, the task of judging makes the cold, declining weeks of late autumn a lot more bearable. As IF continues to grow as a new literary genre, the contest will probably start to lose some of its significance over the coming years. One might already have some reasons for wondering whether it provides an unequivocal benefit to the IF community. The contest encourages writers to focus on producing works that can be finished in two hours or less - many of the greatest pieces of IF ever written have been much, much longer than this. Its competitive nature also discourages collaboration. Truly brilliant IF - works that aspire to the complexity and sophistication of the best early INFOCOM games like "A Mind Forever Voyaging" and "Trinity" - will never be produced with regularity until IF writers start to collaborate more than they have been doing over the past half-dozen years or so.

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