LoTechComp II - Start Your Engines!

Well, a couple of reasons. First, last year's contest was (in my unbiased opinion, anywho) a glowing success. Six entries, all well-coded, cleanly written and containing at least three or four really funny jokes apiece.

Second, because some of the worries I had about how tastes and opinions are formed in the IF community continue to plague my gentle soul. When one reads game reviews, the first thing one inevitably notices is how much attention is given to details of the construction of works of IF - the bugginess of their coding, the linearity of their plots, and their innovativeness (or lack thereof) as specimens of cutting-edge multimedia design.

I used to think that this sort of pattern was mostly the result of the insularity of the coding community and their snobbery relative to the rest of us peons - it's not as bad amongst IF-ers as it is on (say) C++ coders' newsgroups, but it is there. Lately, though, I've come to believe that this odd pattern of emphasis might actually be the result of a certain sort of shyness about the whole business of writing-about-writing. Criticizing other people's literary efforts in any genre can be a rather nerve-fraying process. It's just so much more _subjective_ than remarking that some poor sucker's game crashes on turn #104, or that a game suffers from having only one ending in spite of providing the player with the illusion of choice. And this can cut both ways - ranting about a game's literary deficiencies not only has a tendency to hurt peoples' feelings but (as was amply demonstrated, in my opinion, by the many long reviews of last years' infamous IFComp game KALLISTI) can often reveal just as much about the reviewer him/herself as it does about the work being reviewed.

Nonetheless, the bottom line is that it's storytelling that we're all engaged in here, and the ole LTC is just my small way of trying to force peoples' attention back to the basics of good writing, plotting and characterization by forcing them to think about specific works of IF, whether as authors or as critics, without worrying about whether the game in question is a marvel of technical prowess, or a manifestation of the skills that really only have any value within this wonderful, but highly eccentric genre of writing that we have all come to love.

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