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IFComp 2021: Scoring and review rubrics

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This year I’m participating in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition (“IFComp 2021”). Over the next month or so, I’ll play as many of the entries I can manage and post mini-reviews here and at intfiction.org.

If you want to join in, all are welcome to judge! Go to ifcomp.org/ballot to get started.

Scoring rubric

IFComp suggests judges devise a scoring rubric before starting. Here’s mine, which borrows liberally from their example rubric:

  • Rating of 10: Mind-blowing. A game I wish I had written. Something I’ve never seen before, or done extraordinarily well. A professional-grade effort.
  • Rating of 9, 8, 7: A great game, entertaining and nearly flawless, with each increment a gradation of my enthusiasm. Grabbed my attention and sustained my interest.
  • Rating of 6, 5, 4: A promising game that misses its mark, again, graded by my enthusiasm. Piqued my interest but had trouble holding it.
  • Rating of 3: A fatal miss. Flawed in execution. More time spent in revision, or more beta-testing, is needed.
  • Rating of 2: Shot through with bugs. Disappointing beyond being flawed.
  • Rating of 1: Should not have been submitted to the competition. (Honestly, if a game is this bad, I’m inclined not to score it, since I probably didn’t play it for long. It’s unlikely I’ll post a review of it.)

Reviewing rubric

My reviewing rubric borrows from Updike’s rules for reviewing and a few personal guidelines I’ve developed over the years:

  • Try to understand what the author is attempting, and ask myself if he or she succeeded.
  • Quote one or two representative passages to give the reader a chance to sample the prose.
  • Start with positives, list some negatives, and summarize my overall experience. (This comes from a straighforward process I saw used with success in playwriting workshops.)
  • Negatives should come from a place of constructive criticism. Ask if my expectations are in line with the author’s ambitions.
  • Don’t give away the ending or major turning points.
  • Keep the discussion to what’s on the screen. Avoid peripheral issues like ideology or comparisons to other work, unless they illuminate rather than distract.
  • Don’t review something I’m unlikely to enjoy or unqualified to review.
  • Don’t review work I feel compelled to judge positively or negatively no matter the work’s quality.

Obviously there’s some bleed-over between these rubrics: The latter list will inform my scoring, and vice-versa.

I gravitate toward text-only or text-heavy games, meaning my focus will be on games written in TADS, Inform, and the like.

Also, I won’t list my score in the review. I’ll decide the final numbers when I cast my ballot.

With that out of the way, let’s move on to the games I’ve played so far:


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Updike’s rules for reviewing books

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In John Updike’s Picked-up Pieces, he expounds on his personal rules for reviewing books. I’m quoting them here to remind myself of this hard-won wisdom as well as to share with others:

John Updike
John Updike
  1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
  2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
  3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
  4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.…
  5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. … Review the book, not the reputation.

I write reviews on this blog. Have I followed Updike’s commandments? Most are familiar to me in a hazy internalized way, even if I’ve not formalized book reviewing rules of my own. I confess guilt to giving away the ending of at least one book (a mystery novel, no less). And I could probably do better in my reviews with quoting the source material.

We live in a time of constant media negotiation. We’re not consumeristic readers any longer. With the Internet we’ve all become critics. Film review sites allows moviegoers to pan movies, even pan them before they’re released. We’re saturated with media and we’re saturated with criticism too. Updike’s rules may serve a newfound purpose: A way for us to judge criticism rather than accept it uncritically.


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