My name is Ryan Veeder. Thank you for your interest in my Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction.

My Mission

The Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction is a quadrennial event showcasing interactive fiction written for the specific purpose of pleasing me, Ryan Veeder. It is my heartfelt wish that this Exposition will improve my own quality of life by encouraging the interactive fiction community to entertain me.

The Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction, like the Spring Thing and IFComp, is a judged exhibition of original text-based games. However, mine is the only such event to be judged by a single person (me).

Anyone who wishes to gratify me may participate, and I will generously donate many exquisite prizes that will encourage you to do so. However, in order for me to judge each game fairly, the anonymity of every game's author must be preserved at all costs. This principle is central to many of the Exposition's rules, which will be outlined momentarily.

As a public service, the format of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction has been modified to make certain allowances for persons other than myself to derive satisfaction from the proceedings. Due to these modifications, the rules for the Second Quadrennial Exposition are much more complicated.

If you have any questions about the Exposition, please feel free to contact me, as long as you do so anonymously. Probably the easiest way to send me anonymous questions is via ask.fm.

Exposition Format

There are three main changes to the format of the Second Quadrennial Exposition:

• Entries to the Exposition will be available to the general public during the judging period.
• The Exposition will consist of three separate events.
• Entrants to the Exposition will submit their Entries and engage in any public Exposition-related business under Alter Egos.

Exposition Events

The Exposition will consist of three events: Two constrained short-form events and one unconstrained long-form event.

• An Entrant may not submit more than one Entry to each of the three events.
• Entrants are not required to submit Entries to all three events. Each Entrant is encouraged to enter only those events that Entrant wishes to enter.
• Each of the three events will be scored individually, and prizes will be awarded on that basis.
• Then each Entrant's scores from the three events will be added together, and prizes will be awarded on that basis too.

The exact times of the following announcements and deadlines will be announced at a later date.

Event One

Entries in Event One were written over the course of one weekend. The challenge of Event One was to create a game in Inform 7 with beautiful source code text. Here are the Entries in Event One.

Event Two

Entries in Event Two were written over the course of two weeks. The challenge of Event Two was to create a game with no ending that takes place in a zoo. Here are the Entries in Event Two.

Event Three

Entries in Event Three were written over the course of up to three months. There were no constraints upon the content or format of Entries in Event Three. Here are the Entries in Event Three.

Anonymity

It is absolutely critical that I, Ryan Veeder, the Judge of the Exposition, possess zero information about who submitted each Entry. Any behavior by any person that could possibly lead me to form any hypothesis about any person's intent to participate in the Exposition is grounds for disqualification and/or revenge.

Each Entrant to the Exposition will be assigned an Alter Ego. Assignment of Alter Egos will be facilitated by a Google Form that will appear at the bottom of this webpage, after you have carefully read all the rules. An Entrant who attempts to undermine the Exposition by assuming more than one Alter Ego will earn my undying enmity and come to regret that action for the remainder of the Entrant's life.

• Each Entrant must register an Exposition-specific e-mail address with the name of their Alter Ego.
• Entries to the Exposition should be submitted to the Judge of the Exposition via these Exposition-specific e-mail addresses.
• Direct correspondence between Entrants and the Judge of the Exposition should be conducted via these Exposition-specific e-mail addresses.
• Entrants who wish to discuss their Entries on the Internet during the Exposition must do so under the guises of their Alter Egos.
• Entrants may shed their Alter Egos and reveal their true identities only after the final scores of the Exposition are announced.
• Entrants who do not wish to shed their Alter Egos should feel entitled to maintain their anonymity in perpetuity.

The intfiction.org staff have made various generous allowances for Entrants to register Exposition-specific forum accounts for their Alter Egos. Entrants are not required to register Exposition-specific forum accounts for their Alter Egos, but any Entrant who does register an Exposition-specific forum account for their Alter Ego must abide by the strictures for such accounts laid out by the intfiction.org staff.

Exposition Rules

1. Ryan Veeder is the Judge.
2. No person who is not the Judge shall rate, review, rank, or otherwise evaluate any Entry to the Exposition in the Judge's sight during the Exposition period, on pain of forfeit.
   
   
   It would be profoundly disrespectful of anyone who is not me to presume any qualification to judge an Entry that was written specifically for me, and besides, I don't want my deliberations to be colored by some layman's armchair analysis. So if you can't help forming an opinion of an Entry, just keep it to yourself (or at least put it in spoiler tags), or you will be in so much trouble.
3. No person shall attempt to engage the Judge in any form of non-anonymous communication having anything whatsoever to do with any person's participation in the Exposition, on pain of forfeit.
   
   
   Even communication of the form "I am incredibly sorry, Ryan, but I am unable to participate in your Exposition due to a family emergency" can convey information that might lead the Judge to make unintentional inferences as to the identities of Entrants, compromising the anonymity of the Exposition.
4. No Entrant to the Exposition shall reveal their authorship of any Entry, or reveal the nature of their Alter Ego to any person during the Exposition period, or through sloppiness allow their identity to be deducible from context clues, on pain of forfeit.
5. Public discussion of the Exposition by Entrants shall be conducted only through the guises of their Alter Egos, on pain of forfeit.
   
   
   Rules 4 and 5 may seem to interact in such a way as to yield untenable positions in which an Entrant may risk disqualification for pursuing an action while at the same time risking disqualification for not pursuing that same action. As a general rule of thumb, as long as you behave as though you are terrified of being disqualified, you should be fine.
6. The content of an Entry shall not contain any indication of the identity of any Entrant, on pain of forfeit.
   
   
   If, in the course of evaluating an Entry, the Judge is able to discern the identity of that Entry's author or of the author of another Entry, the anonymity of the Exposition will be compromised. Unlike in the First Quadrennial Exposition, in this Exposition the Judge will not be saddling his Stewards with the chore of checking every Entry to make sure they contain no identifying information, so get it right the first time.
   
   Besides not putting your own name anywhere in your Entry, you should be careful not to credit any of your beta-testers by name.
7. All Entries shall be previously unreleased at the opening of judging, on pain of forfeit.
   
   
   By "unreleased", I mean that a qualifying Entry has never been distributed, sold, or made available for public play or download prior to the Exposition.
   
   This rule does not prevent an Entrant from having an Entry tested by a few beta-testers, as long as the Entrant knows who each of those beta-testers are. If the Entrant has placed a version of an Entry on the web, then the link to to play or download the Entry cannot have been publicly handed out.
   
   This rule has been adapted from IFComp Author Rule #3 without permission.
8. The Judge reserves the right to disqualify from the Exposition any Entrant or Non-Entrant who knowingly or unknowingly violates any of the rules in this list, or who violates any of the rules of the Exposition appearing outside of this list, or who sneakily undermines the spirit of the Exposition without technically violating any written rules.

Prizes

As in the First Quadrennial Exposition, prizes awarded in the Second Quadrennial Exposition will consist of both plush dolls and US dollars. The very complicated mechanics for how the prizes will be awarded appear here along with some pictures of the dolls.

Disclaimer

I am being incredibly serious.