The Stack

I think most of the people who read this blog are already aware of this, but: the judging period of the 13th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition is now open, and lasts until November 15. You can be a judge, and if you’ve never judged the comp before, I encourage you to give it a whirl. There are 29 entries this year, expected to vary from brilliant to abysmal. This is the smallest batch since 1998, so if you’ve found previous comps daunting, here’s your chance. 29 may still sound like a lot of games to play, but they tend to be short — judges are asked to judge each game after no more than two hours of play, finished or not, and the competitors know this.

Me, I’ll be devoting a large portion of my gaming hours to this for a while, and not blogging about it until the judging period is over, as that would be against the rules. So I don’t know how much I’ll be posting during that time. Maybe I’ll make another go at Pokémon between comp games or something.

[UPDATE 3 October 2007] Correction to the above: the rule against discussing games in a public forum before the judging period is over has been relaxed somewhat this year. Judges are now allowed to publish discussion of the entries as long as they “[m]ake appropriate allowances to hide spoilers, and don’t put spoilers in titles of posts or blog entries.” Now that I know this, I shall do so.