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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: [comp00] The Trip and not quitting
Message-ID: <G48t6I.IDq@world.std.com>
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2000 22:59:06 GMT
References: <8v6nru$118$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Lines: 249
Xref: news.duke.edu rec.games.int-fiction:58678

I am getting very long-winded lately.  Somebody feel
free to tell me to quit following everything up.

In article <8v6nru$118$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,  <camdog571@hotmail.com> wrote:
>    A day or two ago someone posted a thread about quitting games early
>on.  He suggested that if the game doesn't immediately grab you, you
>should stop playing, especially in light of the huge number of entries
>in this year's comp.

Actually, that misrepresents my view.  I gave games plenty
of time to "grab me"; my only explicit "recommendation"
(and it wasn't even phrased that way) is when you discover that
the *only* way to get past a problem is to read the walkthrough,
why would you keep playing?  (I'd argue that a game that can
only be played be reading a walkthrough could just as well be
presented via a transcript of such a playthrough--but a transcript
is clearly not IF.)

That recommendation was followed by a list of 29 games and the reasons
why *I* quit.  None of those were intended as saying "you should quit
too"; I was both inviting discussion of where other people draw the
line, and providing authors feedback about how one particular player
reacts (and I think seeing a cluster of games at once like that is
more helpful than just feedback about the one game, since it reveals
to what degree it was *me* versus to what degree it was the game).

Moreover, I should note, quitting does not mean giving it a low vote.
The games I quit--and not because of time pressure OR getting stuck--
ranged from my second-lowest-ranked game to my seventh-highest.
(I didn't bother indicating it at the time because I didn't think
it was relevant, but some people seem to be assuming those 29 games
were my "list of bad games" so I'll point it out now.)

(It even mentioned that one of them I saw the opening scenario and
immediately quit--and didn't vote on that game since I knew I hadn't
seen enough to judge it.)

>That's perfectly understandable, but the problem
>I have with this is that some people are quitting after a few moves and
>still rating them.
[snip]
>My entry for last year's comp, _Bliss_, began as a
>very cliched fantasy game, but that's the point.  In the end, it turns
>into something completely different, but people who quit early and
>rated it based only on the cliched fantasy part of the game missed that
>entirely.  I think it's unfair to rate a game before the judge gets a
>clear idea of what the author is trying to do with it.  It's like
>watching a movie for 2 minutes and then rating it badly because you
>didn't like the intro music.

You've never heard of a movie critic walking out of a movie because
it was SO BAD, and still reviewing it?

This is a basic rule of making anything creative intended for
an audience: hook them early. Make sure there is NOTHING wrong
with the beginning.

A work might manage to be good and fail to hook people at the
beginning; but it will never be as good as a work that manages
to hook you at the beginning.  (And for me, sitting around smoking
pot did nothing to hook me.)

In movies, you can get away with more, because people have gone
to a theater--they're already invested in being there, so they're
less likely to get up and walk out.  With TV, people could change
channels any time; with books or computer games, people can stop
reading or playing at any time.  In the comp, with 50 other games
waiting to be played, people may feel the urge to go look for
something better a bit more easily.

Ok, that explains why people quit early (or gives one example
reason, anyway).  But what about voting on that basis?

I'm one of the people who never got that far in Bliss, and
who never knew what the point of it is.  But you're writing a
work of IF, not of F.  The Interativity was noticeably enough broken
in the first scene (as I experienced it) that it didn't matter what
a great twist you were going to pull in the F later on, because
of the way I judge works of IF.  I knew that as IF, as the way
I valued IF, it was not going to live up to certain standards,
and judged it on that basis.

>    I'm not saying the judges should feel obligated to play 100% of all
>the games in the comp, I'm just saying they shouldn't rate a game they
>didn't play 100% of.  Thoughts?

It all depends what you think ratings are for, and what ratings
are supposed to mean.  If I get frustrated with game 1 after only
playing the first 15 minutes of it, frustrated enough that I don't
want to play it, and I don't get similarly frustrated at any of
the other games in the comp, it is, for me, a worse game.  It
doesn't matter what else there was to it, I was never going to
see it.  If, for example, a comp rating is a recommendation to other
people about whether they should play the game, then if I assume other
people are *just like me*, it makes sense not to recommend that
game (to vote it low), because they'll get frustrated and quit
too!

Of course, not everyone is just like me, but I can't easily judge
how other people react to it, so that may not be an ideal recommendation
for everyone out there; but we can count on the power of statistics.
If most people are like me, most people will vote such a game low,
and rightly so, since most people who might use the rating as a
recommendation will also be like me and will thus be likely to
be frustrated by it.  If most people aren't like me, it will be
voted high, and the average will be high, and my low vote won't
matter.

Of course, "recommendation" is probably not the primary value by
which people judge comp games.  It might instead be "whatever
game I liked the most".  But if I started playing a game, saw
that I would dislike it, why is it invalid to say "I disliked
this game" and have my dislike enter into the average?  If I
think it is valid for me to have my dislike of a game influence
the final average, why must I play a game all the way through
to validate that I dislike it?  It only takes a few minutes
to judge the quality of Plan 9 from Outer Space.  In my
experience, *nobody* ever manages to achieve the quality of
Plan 9 from Outer Space for the first ten minutes, and then
reach an entirely different level of quality for the rest
of the movie--unless they actively set out to do so.

Another value by which to vote is the popularity contest.  It
is "I am picking which authors I want to receive the most
adulation and/or the best prizes."  An author wins such a
popularity contest by appealing to as many people as possible.
In such a contest, it makes absolute sense for somebody who
couldn't stand profanity to give you a 1 for it.

Is that the right value?  I don't think so personally, but
the comp has no rules about mapping values to votes--although
clearly the votes are supposed to be about the games, not the
particular authors.  So to be clear I should rephrase the above
use of "authors" into "the authors of particular games". (In fact,
personally, I'd almost rather there were no prizes so there'd
be no question of prizes influencing either people's votes [which
is probably unlikely] or people's decision to enter [which I
rather doubt, too, since the low-end prizes seem unlikely to
offset the time invested in even a lousy game].)

Now let me take a different tack.

Here's the front on which I do think there's an argument for
abstaining from voting: abstaining from voting on games whose
genre you don't like--from games which, before even playing them,
you know you wouldn't like them.

Suppose we took 50 gamers who like Myst and 50 gamers who like
Quake--and nobody from either group likes the other game--and
had them rate a bunch of graphic adventures and a bunch of
first-person-shooters.  We'd get some sort of data with some
kind of validity from adding all of them up; but wouldn't it
be so much better if the Mysters abstained from voting on the
shooters, and the Quakers abstained from voting on the adventures?
(I literally see this in some of the cheesy video game magazines,
where reviewers clearly simply don't like the genre they're
reviewing, and give it bad marks, and it's impossible to learn
anything from such a review about the quality of the game if
you DO like the genre.)

The thing is, I think people are pretty good about that in reviews.
"I don't like profanity; if you don't like profanity, you won't
like this game."

So the only question becomes what value you think comp games
should be judged by; and if it's the obvious value--"the best
game should win"--then whether "best game" means "the game
with the most appeal to the broadest number of people" or
it means "the game with the most appeal to the people who
were willing to sit through a fair amount of it".

I personally don't have any problem with either interpretation,
and moreover I think it's fairly clear from the nature and
organization of the comp that nobody is going to be willing
to nail it down more conclusively, and nobody wants to force
judges to *have* to sit through bad games to be able to give
bad games a bad rating.

To be concrete, the two games I played so little of that I
understood them the least (one which I already beat to death
here, and the other one which I, like many people apparently,
got stuck on) were ranked about 1.2 points apart in the results;
I voted them 2 points apart--despite having played very little
of them.  In other words, the evidence to me is that I *can*
make a fairly good judgement early on--see my above analogy
about Plan 9.  In both cases I ranked them lower than the
averages they achieved in the comp, but I think that's only
fair; if *everybody* had gotten stuck early on, the latter
game would not have deserved the score it ended up getting,
so it's only appropriate for those of us who got stuck to
vote it lower.  It would be silly if everybody but one person
got stuck in a game early on, and that one person voted it
a 10, and everybody else abstained.

There is definitely a bias in my approach--if you screw up
your creative work--if parts of it are of lower quality--it's
best for those things to be later in the work rather than
earlier in the work.  But, in my experience, that is true
of EVERY creative work.  Misspelling in the title of a paper
you submit for class is a much more significant problem than
one in the first paragraph, which is itself a much more
significant problem than one somewhere in the middle.
That, to me, justifies my being rather harsh about errors
in introductory texts of IF works, and rating low a game
whose interactive prologue I found excessively dull.  (As
it turns out I actually rated it above the average, anyway;
but perhaps if you had your way the average would have been
higher.)

Finally, I happen to have posted some scatterplots which
suggest a few things: in all but a few cases, my votes
tended to follow the overall competition scoring, and
in most of the cases of deviation the outliers were due
to my having different core values of what makes good IF,
rather than my failure to see most of the game.  The
exceptions: two noticeable games I got stuck on early and
rated quite a bit off the average, one high (Ends) and
one low (Shade); and two games which I didn't play for
very long and rated a bit off the mark, one high (A Crimson
Spring) and one low (Enlistment).  These were not the
only games that I quit or got stuck on, though, so it
suggests that my voting was largely consistent with
the comp as a whole, despite my decision to quit early,
without severe time pressure, on more than half of the
comp games.  The "wrong" votes for the two games I was
stuck on (wrong in the sense that I would probably vote
differently if I got farther) don't bother me, because
the degree to which people get stuck on games SHOULD
affect a game's score (see my comment about playing games
from walkthroughs); the "wrong" votes for the two I
simply stopped on early don't bother me because those
experiences were relatively random and will get filtered
out by having a hundred people vote.

The fact that my scores correlate well, despite having
stopped early, implies that either: (1) my opinion is
similar to that of other judges and other judges were
just as willing to stop early, or (2) my opinion of the
full game is similar to that of other judges, other
judges voted on the full game, and my ability to predict
my opinion of the full game based on an incomplete playthrough
is high, or (3) my opinion of the partial game is similar
to that of other judges' opinions of the full game.

Any of these three states of affairs make me feel pretty
comfortable about my willingness to give up on games
so quickly, and yet to vote on them nonetheless.

SeanB
