David Whyld wrote:I'm not suggesting kicking CYOA games out of the comp, but merely putting them in their own category. However you stand on the whole "is CYOA proper IF?" debate, they are two different things so they should be judged on their own merits. On one level, TV shows and films are the same thing - a bunch of actors following a script - but they're always judged in separate categories. Why should IF and CYOA games be any different?
On one level, all actors do the same thing. They act. But what makes a good comic actor is categorically different than what makes a good dramatic actor. One can imagine commesurate categories, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare them role-for-role or even actor-for-actor. We can still meaningfully discuss a "best actor" category for the oscars, even though this often involves say Brad Pitt's role in moneyball getting compared to Demián Bichir's role in "a better life" (84th academy awards) or Meryl Streep's role in Florence Foster Jenkins getting compared to Natalie Portman's role in "Jackie" (89th).
As another question: do we propose splitting ALL award categories like this in two, or just the "best game" category. For example, is there a parser "miss congeniality" award and a CYOA one? Is there a parser "golden bandanna of discord" and a CYOA one? Do we split the main prize pool exactly in half if only 10 people make parsers and everyone else makes twine games, and the twine games get 6 times the votes but the parsers receive better average scores? If the categories are utterly incommensurate, it makes since to split them...but that produces absurd results pretty quickly.
You might argue that I'm just splitting hairs by focusing on trivial dissimilarities, but I would consider a lot of the differences between a parser game and a CYOA to be similarly trivial from the perspective of simply picking a "best" one by blind popular vote (which is how IFCOMP picks its winners)
If I'm wrong, you should probably try to educate me on the general topic of my concern: Is Tingalan a Parser or a CYOA?