Speed IF: Why?
Something that’s always bothered and amazed me is the concept of Speed IF. It’s a losing proposition from the get-go: create a game in some small amount of time (usually a day) for the purpose of winning a contest. What this does is litter the IF landscape with spartan, shallow, shoddy works, most of which aren’t even finished. For what purpose? To see who can code the fastest? Wow, that’s a plaque I want on my wall — I coded faster than the other idjits who entered this contest, and look at the pile of steaming turds I created with my ultrafast coding. I can’t think up any other reason why these contests recur like waves of the plague. They sure don’t create quality games. They don’t create interesting puzzles. They don’t even create finished works! Geez! Is this some kind of self-defeating contest, where we shout to the world, “Look at how much we suck?”
The IF “community” never seems to miss a chance to shoot itself in the foot and then brag about it to the world. In this case, Speed IF contests, are like holding a contest in foot-shooting and then not burying such juvenile antics, but preserving them, so that every Web crawler and idle passer by can look at the excesses of prior years.
