That’s it for IFComp 2019. My sincere thanks to all the authors. Writing an interactive fiction game is a massive undertaking, but it’s often difficult to find an audience, or even feedback, for all of that effort. I’ve played through 82 games this year and 76 last year, and I’ve found something enjoyable or compelling or simply unusual in each one.

For reference, here’s the distribution of scores this year:

The mean score is 5.2317. That’s definitely an encouraging sign if you’re trying to find some games to play from the competition; see the menu at the upper right for a list of games sorted by rating. The fraction of games with score at most a given value (without rounding) is shown below:

The mean and median are thus fairly close. The distribution is definitely different than last year’s; I was trying to smooth out the peaks in the latter, and it looks like I’ve succeeded on that front. Still, the mean and standard deviation of this year’s scores are 5.23 and 1.91 (respectively), which are quite close to last year’s values of 5.17 and 2.11. The precise criteria I’m using to rate games may be ill-defined, but apparently they’re at least fairly consistent.