Taking a brief break from reviewing Spring Thing games to recommend SpeedIF Jacket 4: perfect if you want something that will take you five minutes or less. SpeedIF games are often more fun to write than to play, and rarely very solidly implemented, but this set contains some above-average entries. I especially enjoyed the weird imagery of Pacian’s Love, Hate and the Mysterious Ocean Tower, and the Violet-meets-Fail-safe concept of Smoochiepoodle and the Bastion of Science. Light of My Stomach gave me a few buggy moments, but ultimately it was rather sweet — and it features a delightfully awful poem, too.
(Yes, something about rapid implementation does seem to lead to unreasonably long titles.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Thanks for boosting this — the overall quality was such that I was going to do so myself, and now I don’t have to.
I should probably point out that this particular SpeedIF had a time limit of a week, rather than the classical two hours; whether this quite counts as speedIF any more rather than a micro-minicomp is debatable, but it did result in better entries.
It’s shameless, but I’d like to point out a couple of things related to this.
First, that ClubFloyd played these, and the transcripts are already up, in case people would rather just read the entries than play them first-hand (I’m hearing from more and more people that they’re experiencing IF through ClubFloyd without playing… interesting):
http://www.allthingsjacq.com/intfic_clubfloyd_20110403.html
Second, that there’s another speed on the heels of that one, this one with a fairly interesting premise: you have to code in a programming language you’ve never tried before. Details at http://is.gd/vBTn9y
I tend to find reading CF transcripts a nice supplement to playing myself, personally — like, I’ll play through the game once, then go see what CF did with the same project. (And in fact I did exactly that with these SpeedIFs.)
I’d be sad to miss out on the interactivity the first time around, though.
I’m glad you find CF useful!
I personally (and completely) agree. If I miss a session on a game I haven’t played, I don’t read the transcript any more than I have to to process it and get it uploaded to the site. But oddly enough, I often find myself as more of a spectator during certain ClubFloyd sessions I attend when the game is not normally something I’d play on my own. It’s a weird middle ground.
That said, I had more than one person come up to me at PAX to say that they read all the transcripts, even though they haven’t played all the games, and that they really enjoy reading them. Seems lots of people enjoy them for different reasons.
I think this is an interesting new phenomenon of the video game age, not specific to IF at all. Often when I’ve completed a game which offers some degree of narrative choice to the player (Mass Effect 2 and Fallout: New Vegas are recent examples that spring to mind) the first thing I’ll do is head over to YouTube and check out the endings found by other people. Sometimes, if my schedule is too busy to play a particular game at all, I might check out the plot via wikis and videos instead.
It’s tempting to think that this reduces any work to a non-interactive form, at which point it may as well have been made as a film instead, but I think this would be missing the point. Even when seeing a game vicariously through other players, there’s something very different about the experience. Just knowing that there are multiple paths through the work, multiple possible states of the game universe, is enough to create something that feels unique to an interactive medium.