Entries in Event One of the Second Quadrennial Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction 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.
What does it mean for code to be beautiful? Beauty is famously difficult to define. It is an entirely subjective quality, and therefore a very appropriate metric for success in the Ryan Veeder Exposition for Good Interactive Fiction.
Code can be lauded for its elegance, and also for its cleverness. But is clever code beautiful? Specifically, is clever code beautiful because it is clever? Maybe. Sometimes. Is elegant code beautiful because it is elegant? That sounds more likely. Possibly elegance is a subset of beauty. Hmm.
Event One is limited to works composed in Inform 7 because Inform 7 code has a unique potential to be beautiful by way of resembling beautiful English sentences (as well as many other vectors of beauty), and also because the Judge possesses basically no qualifications to judge the beauty of code written in other languages.
I am extremely impressed by the Entries in Event One. I know that uncompiled Inform 7 source code text has been considered as a mode of artistic expression before; I think that these Entries demonstrate that the concept has a great deal of untapped potential. It is one thing to write a poem that compiles into a game, but we see here that one can write code that operates as a distinct and complementary artistic component to the game it creates. I hope these Entries will inspire more authors to pursue these extremely clever ideas.
As I begin to pass judgment on these Entries, I reiterate that the purpose of the Exposition is to please me, Ryan Veeder, specifically, and that the scores I award are based almost exclusively on that criterion. In other words, no one should expect my appraisals to be at all fair. In History's grand arc, any of these Entries may merit more praise or more condemnation than I here assign, but to correct this injustice is your duty, by way of adding these Entries to IFDB and giving them the ratings you think they deserve.
Entries in Event One are scored on a 10-point scale. In an American high school, a score of 7 points out of 10 is for whatever reason considered "average," and this is often disappointing. A score of 5 points out of 10 is considered a "failure." The scores I award in this Event must not be interpreted in this way.
I will award a score of 5 points out of 10 to a game I feel totally neutral about. Scores below 5 points out of 10 are reserved for games I actively dislike. Scores above 5 points out of 10 are reserved for games that I like.
I make no guarantee that Events Two and Three will be scored in a similar fashion.