The Stack

The judging period of the 17th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has been underway for over a week, and I haven’t even started judging yet. Just as well; an awful lot of entries seem to be getting post-last-minute updates. I suppose this means that modifying games during the judging period, if only to fix serious bugs, is tolerated more now than it once was, which must be a tremendous relief for the authors. Last year, Jason McIntosh, author of The Warbler’s Nest, wrote about the frustrations caused by another relatively recent change to the rules, that the judges are allowed to blog about the games. This put authors in the hellish position of watching everybody complain about problems that they could easily fix but weren’t allowed to.

On this basis alone, I had been planning for most of the year to reduce the trauma by sitting out this year’s Comp, instead spending the month of October playing other IF, like I did in 2009. (I was thinking of going through those few of maga’s recommendations that I haven’t got around to yet.) But the Comp this year has been getting an unusual amount of attention, possibly as an indirect result of last year’s documentary and related outreach efforts, and so there are actually a couple of people I know offline, rather than through the IF community, who are waiting to hear my opinions.

There are 38 entries this year, a respectably hefty number compared to last year’s 26, and, as usual, we’re expected to judge each after playing for no more than two hours. So let’s finally get started.