IFComp 2016, aka ‘The losers will be taunted and booed until my throat is sore.’

The Interactive Fiction Competition is on now, and you – ‘you’ meaning anyone out there in the world willing to follow a few rules – can now play and judge – judge meaning rating entries with a score from 1 to 10 – the competition games, thus enjoying the fruits of the competition while also helping to rank the fruits of the competition for the purposes of the competition before the competition ends at the end of November 15, 2016.

Here is how the competition is described today on its homepage:

“An annual celebration of new, text-driven digital games and stories from independent creators.”

I plan to review some of the games in this blog. My blog is syndicated on Planet IF, so if you follow Planet IF, you will see any reviews I do pop up in that stream.

For any new onlookers, my name is Wade Clarke. I’ve been involved in the contemporary IF scene since 2010. I’ve released three or four parser-driven games in that time: I entered Leadlight in the 2010 comp, Six in the 2011 comp and Ghosterington Night in 2012’s Ectocomp. I remade Leadlight as Leadlight Gamma and released it for modern platforms last year. I’ve helped test or produce art or music for about a dozen IF games by other authors, and I’ve reviewed 100-something IF games for IFDB or in various blogs. Other things I do or make are at my homepage.

There are too many games in this year’s comp for me to play and review all, so I’ve used the ‘personal shuffle’ feature on the IFComp website to fix their order in a randomised list. I’ll move down this list one entry at a time and consider whether I want to play that entry now, at some other time or never. This adds a little bit of alphabet-defeating fairness to my process that I’ve decided I want.

But right now I’m going to play Toilet World.