My Waltz into the IFComp

This essay was made possible through the support of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.

Just a month before I entered it, I had no idea what the IFComp was. 

The year was 2017. I was dealing with a triple-whammy spring season: I broke up with my long-term partner, lost my cat to kidney failure, and was beginning to think that I might be trans. I decided to process my feelings by writing a visual novel. It was ostensibly an assignment for an Interactive Fiction course I was taking as part of my Master’s degree, but when I passed forty-thousand words, ten character portraits, and more than a few all-nighters, I knew I was in it for more than the grade. I’m not sure if my professor read the whole thing – I wouldn’t blame him at all for skipping it – but at the end of the semester, he encouraged me to find a public venue for it. Did I know about the IFComp?

The Interactive Fiction Competition (or IFComp) has been a fixture of the interactive narrative scene for decades. For the unfamiliar, here’s a basic rundown of how it works: 

• Every year, between 50 and 100 games are entered into the competition. 
• On September 1st, all of the entries appear on the IFComp website, where they are rated, reviewed, judged, and discussed. 
• There are no categories – every game is judged in the same pool as all the others. 
• Anyone can be a judge – all you have to do is review five games in one year. 
• At the end of the month, they announce the winners and release the scores of every entry. 

As a twentysomething with the writing bug, I entered the competition with zero knowledge of the community, the overconfidence that I’d place first, and a guttural terror that I’d end up last. By the time I submitted, what began as a solo project had expanded to include two friends: a programmer who rewrote the code to make it playable on the web, and a musician who composed a whole soundtrack. 

Our game is called The Traveller. It’s a science-fiction story loosely inspired by the Odyssey, in which you play a scout separated from your starship, traveling planet to planet in search of your people and your young daughter. It’s miraculously still playable on the web, despite not having been updated in almost seven years. 

I didn’t know this at the time, but prose aside, The Traveller had a few huge points against it going into the competition. It took two hours to complete one playthrough – the maximum allowed by IFComp, and far above average. It was a visual novel – not unheard of for IFComp, but by no means common, either. Worst of all, it centered around an opaque narrative structure with minimal player choice. Instead of choosing what to say or do in response to world events, you only choose the order in which you travel to each planet. Since you’re traveling at faster-than-light speed, you arrive at each planet decades apart – so if you travel to one planet early, you arrive just in time to help solve a conflict, but if you go there later in the game the conflict has escalated into a bloody war. It was wildly ambitious – I spent days writing up graphs, building out each planet’s history, and writing intricate interwoven stories intended to unfold over multiple playthroughs as players hunted for every possible ending. 

The problem is that no one in the IFComp plays any game more than once. Even if they did, they’re only allowed to judge the first two hours of their experience – so all of my intricate planning, all of my multi-playthrough narrative detail, pretty much counted for nothing. As September wore on and the blog reviews began to roll in, it dawned on me with growing embarrassment that everyone thought The Traveller was completely linear. My chances of winning first place were ruined. 

Of course, I should have known – and would have realized, if I had done any research into the IFComp before submitting – that The Traveller was bound to be controversial. The competition has long been a site of tension between parser games (usually made in Inform) and choice-based games (usually written in Twine). Parser games, in which the player acts by typing commands into a textbox, tend to involve more active decision-making than Twine games, in which players act by clicking links. The IFComp was founded with parser games in mind, and has a reputation for favoring them. After the 2017 results were posted, some community members theorized that there was a group of judges giving every non-parser game a 1/10 rating. Visual novels are even less represented. The Traveller was one of only two visual novels in the IFComp in 2017; of the top ten entries that year, seven were parser games created in Inform. This tension began long before I entered: in 2012, IF author Porpentine wrote an essay framing parser games as a dominant, gatekeeping force in the space, and Twine as a revolutionary counterforce. In some ways, it’s heartening to see an online community that has survived for so long with all this discourse. 

And to an extent, the gatekeeping makes sense to me. As AAA and big-budget games have integrated more complex narratives, and as game engines like Unity and Unreal have made 3D game development more accessible to hobbyists, the boundaries of IF have become less clear. Is a game IF if it centers images and art? What if it involves 3D exploration? Combat? Can multiplayer games be IF if they have prewritten narrative content? Is every game IF?? Of course some people would react to this by closing ranks around the narrowest possible definition of interactive fiction. 

But even at the time, I sensed a darker and more reactionary tinge to these boundaries. In 2017, we were living in the immediate wake of Gamergate. My Master's research was right at the nexus of inclusivity and games, and everyone in that space knew someone who had been subjected to targeted harassment. For marginalized creators, everything you put out in the world – a game, a blog entry, an interview with a news outlet – carried the small risk of putting you in their crosshairs. Looking back, it seems IFComp was no exception. In 2025 I can only find fragments and hints about it, but at some point, the tension between parser-based and choice-based games became gendered, and gatekeeping the definition of IF became, in part, about keeping certain themes and ideas out of it, not only certain formats. 

Twine games and visual novels have long been associated with queer and gender-marginalized developers, and when I look at the arguments in favor of parser-based games – that they provide players with more agency and wide-ranging choices – I'm reminded of so many arguments in the 2010s that served to alienate marginalized people and the games they often played. And then I think again about The Traveller, a game about a mother searching for her daughter, with more than one queer alien love interest, in which players have very little active agency. 

I'm not saying my game scored badly because of a sexist cabal. I was a newcomer in the space submitting a game that didn't reflect its values and history. Of course some people were going to bounce off of it. (It was also a poorly-edited first game, written mostly over sleepless nights, in a competition to which professional writers often submit.) But when the scores were made public and I saw so many 0s, 1s and 2s – not only for my game, but for several others that featured women protagonists and limited player agency – it was hard not to wonder. One of the frustrating things about being marginalized is that you rarely know, for certain, that people are reacting to you out of bias or bigotry. Very rarely you'll get a slur or some heinous language, but more often, people just treat you kind of strangely. They'll be a little rude, or awkward, or else overly effusive. They'll complain about things changing but don't want to specify what things. It's hard not to become a little paranoid, and then when people treat you strangely for other reasons – like entering a visual novel in a competition that almost never features them – you can't help but ask yourself if it was just about visual novels, or if visual novels were standing in for something else they didn't like seeing in their scene. That's the problem with gatekeeping in games – even if you're acting purely in defense of the unique art form of parser-based IF, the women and queer folks new to your scene are going to see your boundaries in light of all the other ones they've faced. 

In the end, out of 79 entries in the 2017 IFComp, The Traveller placed 25th. Though disheartened by not achieving first place like I'd dreamed, and frustrated by all the nondescript zeroes and ones on my score chart, I was excited to learn that I came somewhat close to winning the Golden Banana of Discord, the award for the most controversial game; that, I lost to Queer in Public: A Brief Essay, a Twine-based essay about Christianity and queer identity. I won something like $90 USD in prize money (which felt like a lot, until I sent a third each to my programmer and musician) and a one-year subscription to a puzzle magazine (which got me temporarily hooked on logic puzzles). 

And while The Traveller, in retrospect, wasn't the best game for the IF space, some people really liked it. During and after the voting period, I obsessively read and watched every review I could find of the game. One person livestreamed it from start to finish and cried when she got to the end. Another reviewer called the story an emotional gut punch. I still remember those first positive reviews acutely. It was the first time I had written for the public, the first time my art had a real emotional effect on someone. Those reviews still motivate me to make games eight years later.

And even though the critical reviews stung – probably more than they should have, because once again, I was 23 and overconfident – I was struck by how seriously they took my work as a writer. I stumbled naïvely into a community I knew nothing about, threw my grief-fuelled 3 AM writing at them, and they gave it time, consideration, and feedback. Now that I'm older, making more games, and building communities of my own, I have a lot of nostalgia for internet scenes like the IFComp. These days, internet communities are hidden on Discord servers, gated behind paywalls, or distributed across platforms; it's becoming costly and legally prohibitive to run an independent website, let alone a grassroots community space with three decades of history. I miss the days when the internet was full of spaces like the IFComp, these niche, old communities on their own websites, with long memories and the experience of having navigated generational debates and cultural shifts. I miss when you could waltz into them and throw your work at them and be taken seriously. 

Sometimes, in my free time, I run game jams on itch.io. I usually run them for my friends and social circle, but without fail there is always at least one submission from someone I've never met who saw my jam on itch's calendar and decided to waltz on in. I always do my best to welcome them. They might not understand my community or our history, but it's cold outside, and I'm excited to see what they make.