IWT 7: Urban Fantasy

[Ryan_DuBois]

But of course, annoying DEP is time well-spent in my opinion.



No way I could have finished that one in a few hours, anyway -- it's still at 8 rooms.

[End Master]

I thought it had more than that, well I suppose you could've done what DEP ended up doing two contest later for his children's story. He posted a bunch of rooms in his unfinished story at the last moment that said "So some shit goes down, yeah crazy shit. Anyway, the end."

[Ryan_DuBois]

Lol, I think I could have actually released it as-is (since there were no length/room requirements during the second IWT), but the writing is bad enough to make me shiver.

Probably should have posted what I had, though, since that one was "Sick Shores", where I posted all those goofy advertisements for it and then Dragavan got upset when I said I wasn't going to put it up.

[End Master]

We actually had the 20 room thing from the beginning, but we did have an exception to the length/room thing for IWT5, since Xnull had a story only 11 rooms long.

I ended up being the bad guy on that one since I was being a rules lawyer about it, saying xnull's story really shouldn't be eligible. Apoth understandably stuck up for his buddy and Ves being in charge said she didn't care about it, I think someone else pointed out the whole quality vs. quantity thing (Using DEP's old children's story, and Apoth's Mudkip story as examples). Ultimately I just said fuck it, I wasn't in charge of the contest and figured if everyone else was fine with it, I wasn't going to bother fighting about it anymore. I just docked a lot of points off his story.

(And then for some reason my story got trashed in the ratings that year. Lol)

Of course since I'm in charge of this particular contest, there will be no such acts of mercy or lax discipline in enforcing the rules and proper order.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

FAILURE IS SHAME.

[Usoki]

I'd forgotten about that. I think we all just pretended he'd attached nine dummy rooms to the story, and then deleted them later. It was pretty linear, anyway. The shock value was all in the content and theme of the work; so much so that the quality wasn't quite there. I guess it did have the potential to get really offensive, really fast... but it never got past the opening.

What did I write that year? Oh... Oh, yeah. Ugh. I had to attach a bunch of summary rooms to make that one hit the limit. I really didn't do well in that theme. It was a good idea, but it didn't pan out when it came time for people to make stories to fit. Ves, End, and Katie were the only ones who had a chance. Wait, I'm thinking of the Halloween one. When was xnull's? Ves wasn't in charge of that one, was she? I thought she controlled 5, and turned the allegory into porn? Is that when xnull's came into play?

...Wait, have I really been around for four of these contests? Dang, now I feel old. And here I keep trying to think of myself as a newbie around these parts.

[End Master]

Yeah, Ves was in charge of IWT5 which was the porn theme that originally started off as the allegory theme. Katie wasn't in that one, it was just you, me, Ves and xnull. You actually came in 2nd place (The Sneeze), which is how you eventually gained control of IWT6 since Ves flaked out on it.

Though IWT6 was sort of a clusterfuck from the beginning since everyone was arguing about the theme. Not really surprising we ultimately ended up with "no theme" on that one.

[Usoki]

Yeah, I remember IWT6. XD Ooogh. Infinite Story really would make for a good theme... it's just that such a story would be very clunky to make. And there's really no way to make it work without using a cheesy cliche.

I guess the 5th one was that small, huh? Id' forgotten about that. I'm still surprised that The Sneeze did that well- I loved the concept of two choices per room, but all of the endings are so, so bad. I wrote myself into a corner and didn't bother trying to find a reasonable out. I went way over the top just to come up with a conflict so the story would be halfway interesting. Yours was so much better, and I'm still not entirely sure how you got third. I mean, sure, it was semi-recycled... but it was super entertaining, and the frame tale was ingenious. I figured that you'd beat Ves, but I suppose hers was hauntingly biographical enough to pull out the win.

It's a good thing you've got all of this stuff stored away in a Word file somewhere, O stalker / historian.

[End Master]

He didn't show it, but I think xnull was probably pissed at me since he gave my story pretty low ratings for that contest which brought my average down quite a bit (A 5 for writing quality? Seriously? But eh, he trashed Death Song in IWT4 too, so I'm not really surprised.)

I still think Ves would've won it since she did put a lot of effort into it and it was well written, but I probably wasn't as wowed by it because I'd actually heard the "real version" of it from her before and quite frankly that was a lot more entertaining than the semi-autobio version she wrote for the contest.

[Crunchyfrog]

That's some history there!

Mine's up and released, although for some reason not showing. There are no endings as of yet, because I procrastinated too much and I don't think I'll have endings for all 3 paths done by Midnight on the 16th. But at least there are 20 or more 'legit' rooms, so I'll hopefully have passed the first hurdle of avoiding SHAME.

I'll keep working on it til the close though.

[ChubbyTeletubby]

Ryan, I have a fantasy map-making program I never use if you want it.

I paid like 35 bucks for it and never use it. It's pretty in depth.

[Usoki]

Mine's up and released, although for some reason not showing.

Nah, it's there- I found it. The front page doesn't update properly anymore; you have to manually search for "newest stories" from the "read" menu. We'll probably also create a thread with hyperlinks to everyone's story, anyway. Oddity occurs when the "story" has been created months or years before any of the rooms were created. Even if you delete all of the rooms, it keeps the initial story creation date.

[Ryan_DuBois]

I might have to take you up on that, Chubby -- God knows I could use it, heh. I'll PM you my college address when I get around to doing the zoom-in stuff.

[Crunchyfrog]

Thanks, Usoki. I've been struggling with structuring and linking the rooms and ended up starting it out from scratch (again!), so the story shows as being 'created' just today. But I've just searched under 'last modified' and it's now showing.

Think I'll concentrate on polishing what I have, rather than adding new rooms now though.

[donteatpoop]

And then we're going to need a list of links to all the stories, I suppose? And I'll need a refresher on the rating method in use since last time I rated I used a completely made up form.

[Ryan_DuBois]

Anyone who entered the tournament is obligated to rate all the stories (except their own). Anyone else who wants to rate the stories just rates them all.

Okay, so basically there's just three categories:

1. Grammar

2. Plot/Creativity

3. Enjoyment

You rate every story on a scale from 1 - 10 in each of these areas and then you "weight" the category you personally think is most important so that it counts for double. EndMaster did some kind of example last year, so I'll just copy him to get rid of any possible ambiguity for the newcomers.

Imagine that I'm rating Story 1 and Story 2. Here are my ratings:

Story 1

Grammar: 10

Plot/Creativity: 3

Enjoyment: 4


Story 2

Grammar: 3

Plot/Creativity: 10

Enjoyment: 10

At this point it looks like Story 2 is going to win, but (surprise!) it turns out that I'm secretly MichaelRayHolt, so I'm going to weight the grammar category (because perfect grammar is of utmost importance to mankind). Thus the total points are:

Story 1: 10 * 2 + 3 + 4 = 27

Story 2: 3 * 2 + 10 + 10 = 26

So Story 1 gets an average of 27 / 4 or 6.75

And Story 2 gets an average of 26 / 4 or 6.5

Story 1 wins!

I'm personally not a fan of this kind of rating system, since it can easily be skewed by one destructive rating and I don't think grammar is all that important at our level of writing, but I do like the weighting thing.