The annual <a title="The 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition" href="http://www.ifcomp.org/">Interactive Fiction Competition</a>, edition the 16th, has been underway for nearly a month, but vacation and classes and, well, let's face it, life in general, have delayed my chance to download and start evaluating the 25 (26?) new games to emerge upon the <a title="Interactive Fiction" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction">IF</a> scene. Fortunately, the past week has given me a brief respite, and I've started checking out the entries.

Although I have played and judged the competitors in previous years, I have never written down my thoughts. I'm hoping that by announcing in this very post that <strong>I will, indeed, review the games that I play[1. Some of them? Hopefully all of them?]</strong>, that I will actually take some time and effort to contribute to the <a title="ifwiki.org: 16th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition" href="http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/IF_Comp_2010">game reviews already available</a>, most of them very insightful and informative, and some not-so-much. I will aspire mine to be the former, with one post per review when time permits.

In the meantime, I'll simply say that out of the half-dozen games that I have played, only one has stood out among the others:  <em><a title="The Warbler's Nest" href="http://jmac.org/warbler/">The Warbler's Nest</a></em> by Jason McIntosh[2. Full disclosure. I am a personal acquaintance of the author, but I'm recommending his game because <strong>it is good</strong>, not because I know him]. It's well-written and well-crafted, which--for those interested in how I "rate" a game-- are my two main criteria for what constitutes a good, and therefore fun, piece of IF. In a nutshell, "well-written" refers to the literary aspects of the game, and "well-crafted" refers to the technical implementation. You might wonder if there can be a difference, but trust me, you can have a beautifully written piece of IF that is horribly bug-ridden; and you can have a technically elegant game that is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors. I have seen and played both. And within each year's competition, you can usually find games that span all corners of my particular reviewer's matrix.

Quite honestly, I'm not certain what to attain through this. Certainly not fame or glory. But perhaps by studying the games of others, I will be better prepared when I gather up the courage to submit a game of my own.