IF Derby

I guessed wrong on Hedda Deadline's identity (up there with Ruderbager Doppleganger, pseudonymous author of "Last Minute" in my Pantheon of Best IFComp Pen Names, placement be hanged) and IF Derby's main point at first. But I don't feel particularly dumb. I think it should've been anonymous, not because it was an Alan Smithee sort of production, but because it could be construed as "Hey, vote for me and my positive message about not worrying too much about comp placement," whether or not the author submitted another game.

IF Derby reminded me of very old Pascal programs on the Apple II(!) where you could watch horses racing and they'd go forward a few random pixels each turn. But the horses did not have cool names. Here they do. Gameplay revolves around constant betting on horse races. While I loathe gambling and how it's permeated itself into our culture (prop bets in sports events that cause people to send profane messages to college basketball players who score a "meaningless" basket or, worse, betting if Nicolas Maduro would be removed from power, which seems ripe for manipulation) betting does have a pull to it. I'm smart enough to know I can't beat the House. There's something horrid to me about the House getting a 5% advantage and slowly squeezing its "customers" out. I've seen ways to outsmart the betting syndicates by getting the best odds each way on a sports contest. If I could, I would.

There's nothing much to do except enjoy the names. Each horse pays out for even odds, but there are eight in each race, so I grasped quickly that relying on the RNG was not the way to go. What was, then? Was it a scoldy game about how gambling is bad? Somehow, I doubted this, with the amusing horse names. The horse name "Jugglenauts" particularly made me smile as it's a word I'd thought of but would never use, so I'm glad it has a place. Also included, a riff on a New York Times best-seller with grawlixes in its title, many takeoffs/pastiches of popular text adventures or TV shows or classic books (e.g. The Island of Dr. (redacted–play it yourself!)), what not to do with a sword (I won't spoil it!), some deliberately reductive titles, and a creative main character name in the title. Perhaps the only downside is that the horse names seemed to appear randomly, thus creating a reverse coupon problem for "did I see everything?" (I'd be glad to be wrong.) Perhaps a weighted randomizer, where names you hadn't seen for a while bubble to the top, would be a cool post-comp tweak. Because you only have finite money, so the RNG can sting you, if you bet $20 of your original $500 at a time and don't pick up on what to do. (Fortunately the names are in the source! I enjoyed looking. I forgot Arbelos was a word. It reminded me of long ago math contests. Mysterious word until I found out what it meant! The titles have enough variety, they might do that for you, too.)

I wouldn't have minded losing but I wanted to be able to say I had my thinking cap on and rose to the challenge, and rise I did. I followed a few false trails and enjoyed seeing others'. Some very smart people appeared to have trouble, and that made me feel better about the patterns I thought I saw but didn't.

My main takeaway at first was about how gambling etc. is exciting until you know what to do, then it feels unfair in your favor, which doesn't make up for it being unfair against you. And how much/what sort of success/failure balance do we need to feel accomplished? Once I knew what to do, I got tired quickly. The excitement was gone. I kind of nodded through the end, which felt like fluff. (It was late.) I felt constant worry the game might change the rules on me and leave me broke. Was this some sort of mean massive long con? Would I get arrested for knowing insider secrets, or would the racetrack not pay out because of "suspicious betting irregularities?" (Again, it was late. But I felt like I'd had good luck figuring what to do. And luck doesn't last.) As I piled up dolla bills, I stopped paying attention to the names. Part of this is due to seeing most of them, and part of it was a "just win baby" attitude that overtook me. Even in a game that didn't ultimately matter. A sobering psychological experiment, whether or not it was intended.

Then on replay I read through the dialogue more carefully, and I got what the author was really trying to say.

We don't want to get too far into the weeds at "Look! Metafiction!" here. There's always a chance that metafiction is a pure copout, or it's what you write when the story you really want to write falls through. (It sort of felt like that in my own 2026 entry.) In this case the author nods to having a deadline and wanting to write something good even if it wasn't what they wanted, and I think they put something fun out there, without being all "HEY LOOK I WROTE SOMETHING RANDOM BEFORE THE DEADLINE, IT WAS FUN, IT TOTALLY HAS MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS AND NOT GROSS INCONSISTENCIES OR OVERGENERALIZATION."

So my first time through I felt the game touched on themes of cheating to win, whether or not you'd be happy doing so, how tough a game should be, and whether or not a walkthrough would improve the experience. (Here, it would have taken away.) It's not new to say it's no fun to be told the right answers to an exam or to getting ahead unfairly in life (people still search for them anyway), but this is very cheerily done for a black and white game, and it's always good to have a new perspective on the questions the game brings up.

And the game is under no illusions it is being brilliant and profound. It's not being stupid, but it does address questions we have had before, of the "should I bother" sort. It makes us feel the struggle to do or write or be more is worth it, and if it came too easy, it wouldn't be worth sharing. It touches on the struggle to be creative without wallowing in frustration or begging others to like it, and it leaves us with this question among others: how do we help the player feel like they've won, without making it too hard or too easy? It even gives us a few answers and examples without being one.

I felt a bit silly having missed the author's main point, or what seemed to be the main point based on others' discussion. Its message, or at least what the crowd agreed its message was, boiled down to something cliched if someone said it: (Spoiler - click to show)Do your best, and that is good enough. But, of course, there's no best way to say that, even if there are plenty of good enough ways to, and they add up.

Short entries like IF Derby need a huge a-ha moment to place in the top half, and missing out is not due to lack of competence or effort on the author's part. It has no applause line. The positive message reaches no dramatic heights. The messages I found had that "I've seen/heard this" before. They don't blow you away. You figure you should have known them, and you feel bad half forgetting them, or not focusing on them enough. The long dialogue with an NPC at the end does not move mountains, but it reminds us why we're here. It made me want to go look at other entries that I might not match up well with on paper. The author admits they'd rather have written something longer, but I'm very glad they did what they could. And it reminded me of other entries that did what they could and did well. And just having the random horse names and calculating the likelihood I missed one made me think: what IFComp gems did I miss that would have made me happy? Which entries/horse names would other people find dumb that I loved, and vice versa? I sort of wanted to read more horse names, and yet, there might not be time or money to appreciate them all. (Well, in-game.)

I didn't really act on or live out these thoughts during the judging period, alas. I didn't review nearly as many IFComp entries as I meant. But I appreciate this motivation to see and do and connect more without full-on FOMO. So I think IF Derby gives us something we need, in a different guise than we are used to, and maybe you will find more if you follow sporting events or whatever. The conflict between trying to win and enjoying the horses' names stayed with me. Eventually, trying to win won out, and even when I was piling up money, a part of me didn't want to win too soon because what if there was one more horse, but I felt silly not using the strategy I figured. This is not a great moral dilemma of our time, but I enjoyed reflecting on it. I found it very good value for the time, with the interface and graphics and names, and I can see people recalling it fondly or taking motivation from it after games above it have sunk out of memory.

An IFComp game about gambling on which horse will win the horse derby - er, which game will win IFComp. There are some fun references in there, like "Type Quit", "Fortnight", or "Uninteractive Taco Fiction". If you're lucky, you might even be able to bet on the game "IF Derby". And there are some interesting games I'd check out if they were real, like "Could You Be an AI?", "Sun Staring Simulator" (playtime: >2 hours), or "Hypnotic Brainwashing Tool (Do Not Play)". Someone make "Hypnotic Brainwashing Tool (Do Not Play)" into a real game so I can play it.

IF Derby

An amusing concept. This game simulates IFComp and other competitions by having randomly named horses (with names drawn from a database of mashed-up real IF titles) race against each other.

Text is almost minimal, but occasionally a horse will appear in the lower right corner indicating an option to talk. Those options are infrequent, but interesting.

The winner appears to be truly random each turn. It's a good reminder about how pure skill alone can't win a competition, that even though you can reach near the top, there are always unexpected factors that can sway things one way or another. But supporting each other, even the 'losers', can build meaningful connections.

I do appreciate the author giving us a way to ensure we get a lot of money, but in the end, that, too, doesn't matter quite as much.