WackyComp reviews [misc]

[I posted this in April of 1999, and it pretty much explains itself. I will note, though, that I was partly wrong in my conjecture of who wrote the games. Lelah Conrad was indeed one of the authors, submitting Knot To Be Undone as “Jess Kiddon”. The other author was Stephen Griffiths, who wrote Skipping Breakfast as “Dunnin Haste”.]

Last year, Lucian Smith had this idea. He thought it would be cool to have a “mini-comp”, where a bunch of people wrote games based on the same initial premise. There would be no prizes, but there would be voting, and rankings. So he announced his idea (actually, in the announcement, he attributes the idea to “someone on the ifMUD“, but in the absence of that anonymous genius, I’m giving Lucian the credit) on rec.arts.int-fiction, and generated quite a bit of enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, when he announced the premise and the rules around it, they were so amazingly specific, picky, and difficult to achieve, that he only ended up getting four entries, some of those after his deadline. If the voting or the rankings ever happened, I never saw it. He tried to scale back expectations by announcing a “micro-comp” (“Submit one or two scenes from a mini-comp entry!”), but by then it was too late: apparently the contingent of possible entrants wanted their mini-comps to really be mini. The main result of Lucian’s backpedaling was to produce a proliferation of goofy “meta-comp” ideas, each of which seemed to somehow incorporate all the others that preceded it.

Into this morass waded Adam Cadre, who had a simpler idea: write a short game that involves, in some way, a chicken crossing a road. It was dubbed the Chicken Comp, and it was a big success, garnering 19 entries, most of which were good, and many of which were wonderfully, hilariously funny. I still crack up anytime I recall Rob Noyes’ The Lesson of the Chicken, with its memorable piece of monologue, “Ah, Wang Chung. Everybody will have fun tonight.” The chicken-comp games were the highlight of the summer, and set the stage nicely for the established IF comp in the fall. There was still no official competition between the games except, as Cadre put it, the inevitable “discussion of which ones r001 and which suck.”

So along comes spring 99, and suddenly mini-comps are popping up like mushrooms. There was the Xcomp, for paranormal games, the I-Comp, for games without an inventory, and even the execrable Roadkill Comp, for games that involve dead animals. Most of the spring mini-comps garnered responses which made Lucian’s mini-comp look swamped in comparison, and David Glasser’s WackyComp was no exception. The WackyComp stipulated short games, each based on one of a list of quasi-aphorisms. The list’s contents don’t matter, because there were only two games submitted, both ALAN entries that based themselves on the first choice: “No knot unties itself.” I’ve tended mainly to review competition games, not spending much time on mini-comps, but the author of one of the WackyComp games asked me to take a look at the two entrants and provide a little feedback, so here it is:

The shorter of the two entries is by “Jess Kiddon” (another of the WackyComp’s conditions was that its authors don’t use their real names on their submissions), titled Knot to be Undone. The title is one of the game’s many puns on the word “knot.” This is not to suggest that the game is a huge mass of puns — it’s not a huge mass of anything. I’d be shocked if anyone spent more than 10 minutes solving this game. There is virtually nothing to do except for the actions to win the game.

You play Weava Knottersdaughter, professional knotter, though really what this means is that you’re a professional detangler — the “knot shop” where you work offers a knot-untying service. Anyway, in walks “the Body Adventura”, a stock adventurer type whose cryptic name, as far as I can determine, is a really strained pun on the name of Minnesota’s governor. He’s gotten himself stuck in a knot and your job is to untangle him, or better yet keep him entangled and somehow become the Body Adventura yourself. Luckily, this is no trouble, and then the game ends. That’s it. This is about as “mini” as a game can get, and still be considered interactive fiction. For what it is, it’s fine, but rather unsatisfying, kind of like eating just one potato chip.

A rather more substantial entry is Skipping Breakfast, by “Dunnin Haste.” In this game you’re a rabbit (though this is not immediately clear unless you examine yourself), who is tied to a tree and about to become a wolf’s breakfast. The wolf is off gathering more wood for the campfire over which he plans to cook you, so now’s the time to make your escape. Unfortunately, there’s the small matter of the knotted rope which binds you to the tree — you can’t untie it, and it won’t untie itself. Or will it?

This game’s puzzles are fun and rather clever, despite the fact that there’s a bit of “guess-the-noun”, and that the conversation syntax is sometimes too restrictive. The writing is charming, and the nature of the puzzles is quite well-integrated with the game’s fairy-tale atmosphere. Though it’s not quite as bare-bones as Knot, Breakfast is still a very brief game, with three points to be scored, relatively few objects, and only one location. That’s OK, though. It was fun while it lasted.

Both games are written and coded pretty well — I found neither bugs nor spelling/grammar errors in either one, though in both there was a real paucity of synonyms. Moreover, they both adhere faithfully to the concept behind the WackyComp, and work creatively within its confines. Neither succumbs to cliché, and both were fun. My main complaint is that each one (though Knot more than Breakfast) is over almost before it begins, but I suppose that’s the nature of mini-comps. Perhaps these tiny games could become preludes to fuller versions — I wouldn’t mind playing the sequel to either.

It’s also nice to see the ALAN language gaining some devotees, and perhaps one of these authors (whose identities are pretty clear from their choice of language and their postings before the WackyComp — nice job Mikko and Lelah) will be the one to write a major game which really shows off the language’s capabilities. It seems to be the pattern that IF languages only gain a significant following once a really well-done game has been completed in the language, like Inform‘s Curses or TADSUnnkulia series. Now that’s a knot that won’t untie itself, but the nimble fingers of the WackyComp authors may be just the ones to unravel it.

PTBAD 3 by Jonathan Berman as “Xorax” [Comp04]

IFDB page: PTBAD 3
Final placement: 35th place (of 36) in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition

When I saw the title, I thought this game was going to be a sequel to Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. Because the acronym seemed to be missing a number of letters, I thought it was going to be a badly-done, amateurish sequel, but a sequel nonetheless. For those unfamiliar with this long-standing IF in-joke, in 1996 Rob Noyes released a very simple game called Pick Up The Phone Booth And Die. The title is more or less also the walkthrough.

There are other ultra-minimalist joke games, but PUTPBAD attained iconic status because of the humor of its writing and the sheer ludicrousness of its premise. The joke inspired one sequel by Noyes, which fleshed out the simplicity of the original by adding some more funny stuff. It also inspired a much better joke, Pick Up The Phone Booth And Aisle, in which a huge number of IF authors collaborated to combine the original with the “one-move IF” concept pioneered by Sam Barlow in his game Aisle.

Well, if this game was meant to connect to any of those, it fails completely, and consequently, I have no idea what the title is supposed to represent. In fact, representation is a vexed issue for the entire game, which bears more resemblance to gibberish like Comp2000’s Stupid Kittens in that all of it seems like offhand, random, unconnected thoughts that make no sense whatsoever. To borrow a phrase from the game itself: “Rather disgusting dada surealist [sic] foolishness.” PTBAD 3 offers a badly-spelled, creakily-coded trip through what purports to be someone’s mind, perhaps someone who was the victim of a severe closed head injury. It’s got a maze, toilet humor, and a complete lack of proofreading. It’s quite a waste of time, though it’s short enough that it at least doesn’t waste much of it.

I wonder, though: why does PUTPBAD work when this game doesn’t? After all, in Baf’s Guide, Carl Muckenhoupt dismisses the original PUTPBAD in almost the same terms (“Would be a waste of time, were it not so short as to be almost nonexistent.”) They’re both tiny, nonsensical games that discard nearly all IF conventions. The difference, I think, is craft. Even though it only consists of maybe 200 words beyond the standard Inform libraries, PUTPBAD is clever, solidly coded, and impeccably written. PTBAD 3, on the other hand, seems as though it couldn’t care less about its prose or its code. And because of that, neither could I.

Rating: 2.9