I HAVE THE BANANAAAAAAAA!!!

November 22, 2023

Okay. So, a while back I announced that I had an entry in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition: Who Iced Mayor McFreeze? Remember that? Remember the noir murder mystery in which everyone is candy? The follow-up to 2022’s Who Shot Gum E. Bear?

That was a decoy.

Or rather, that was a sincere IFComp entry but it was not my main focus this year. No, this year I had other plans. You see, ever since 2001 IFComp has handed out an award to the entry with the highest standard deviation: that is, the entry that most divides opinion. The name of that award? The Golden Banana of Discord. If you know me, you’ll know that bananas are sort of my thing. Naturally I’ve wanted the Golden Banana for some time now, especially having very narrowly missed out with 2020’s Quest for the Sword of Justice. Seriously, that thing would have been a banana-winner in 2021 or 2022 – it got edged out by just one marginally more divisive game (Little Girl in Monsterland) that particular year.

That brings us to the entry I sank most of my effort into this year: DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, entered under the pseudonym “Hubert Janus.”*

^{*Hugh for short.}

The video above was recorded over the course of the competition’s six-week judging period and explains things pretty comprehensively, but if you don’t have 14 minutes and would like a quick summary, here’s what went down:

1. I wrote a fairly ambitious interactive narrative about a man named Dick McButts, who has (a) humungous testicles and (b) fourth-wall-breaking knowledge of his story’s title. It grapples with themes of fate and free will, and features a scene in which a time-travelling Adolf Hitler is kicked in the crotch by a cyborg with a hydraulic leg and a rocket boot.
2. I wrote a much less ambitious interactive narrative in which Dick McButts gets kicked in the nuts. Repeatedly. Sometimes by Adolf Hitler, sometimes by Darth Vader, sometimes by two tiny clones of Darth Vader who live in the regular-size Darth Vader’s boot. It has no plot, takes place upon a background of eye-searing neon that makes the whole thing hard to read, and ends with a broken link.
3. I combined these two narratives with a system that randomly assigns players to one storyline or the other, and (short of some deliberate attempt to circumvent this) permanently locks them into it.
4. Drawing upon four years’ worth of IFComp votes on my previous entries, I came up with a model of what a typical rating distribution looks like for something I submit.
5. I wrote a Python script that allowed me to simulate what would happen if a certain proportion of those IFComp votes were randomly replaced with ratings of 1 (the absolute minimum).
6. Using that Python script – and an analysis of somewhere in the region of 120,000,000 hypothetical votes – I determined that the “Optimal Dickery Percentage” was 38.8475836%.
7. I set the narrative-assigning system to point 388 out of 1,000 players towards the intentionally terrible version.
8. I shuffled all the passages of the Twine flowchart to obsuscate what it did.
9. I rearranged all those passages into a crude drawing of a penis.

My hope was that anyone who got the good version of the game would appreciate it, rate it (perhaps leaving a little review somewhere online), and move on. Anyone who got the bad version, I trusted, would immediately rate it a 1 and forget all about it. It seemed likely that people would eventually work out that something was up, but with any luck the dick-shaped monstrosity they encountered when trying to import it into Twine would prevent detailed analysis.

Here’s what actually happened:

1. The first IFComp review – the absolute literal first review of any game – is of the bad version of this thing.
2. The literal first response to that first review questions whether it’s really that bad.
3. Within four hours, the people in that review thread have sussed out what my game is doing, why, how, and in exactly what proportion.
4. By the end of the first day, DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS has generated the most discussion of any game by far.
5. Reception is generally good, and the fact that people are aware of the good version makes me a little concerned that DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS has caused something of a Springtime for Hitler situation: since loads of people are aware of the good version, fewer people are judging it exclusively the bad one.
6. Over the course of the judging period, Dick McButts becomes a bit of a meme. People periodically work out that Hubert Janus has a double meaning. Fortunately, nobody asks too many questions about who it is behind that pseudonym.**
7. The Short Game Podcast covers DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, describes it (or at least the title) at one point as “Shakespearian,” and speaks highly of the bad version specifically. At this point I am almost positive that I have Producersed myself.
8. Results day draws near. Everyone seems more or less certain that DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS is sure to win the Golden Banana of Discord. I am much less sure!
9. Results day arrives. By this point Jacqueline Ashwell has apparently begun to suspect that the whole thing is a plot to make her say “Dick McButts Gets Kicked in the Nuts” live on a Twitch stream (which is probably my fault for suggesting “MWAHAHAHA” as a message to pass on in the event I win something but can’t catch the results live).
10. I win the Golden Banana of Discord and make banana daiquiris to celebrate.

^{**I understand Andrew Schultz guessed it pretty much immediately, but fortunately that didn’t seem to become common knowledge.}

I’d like to say that this all went exactly according to plan. In one way it did, bit in another (much larger) way things ran away from me almost immediately and I suspect the plan succeeded largely because other people were essentially cheering it on. It seems the main reason that widespread public awareness of the game’s true nature didn’t scupper it was that at least some of the people who went looking for the good version faithfully rated it as if they’d only seen the bad. Also, others gave the game perfect 10s: whether that’s because they genuinely thought it was just that good, or whether that’s because they knew it was deliberately trashing its own average score to divide opinion and figured they could kick it a high rating with no danger of dislodging any of the top games from their well deserved spot, it was awfully nice of them to do.

Ultimately DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS took 45th place in the competition, which is really quite good: anything that places in the top two-thirds of IFComp gets a prize, and this year in particular saw some excellent games place right near the bottom (which is a shame in a way, but inevitable when there’s such a good batch). For comparison, my own Who Iced Mayor McFreeze? came in 40th, and though it was a little rushed because the bulk of my time had been spent writing scenes of dick-kickery and wrestling with Python, that was a sincere effort. (I’m actually quite glad DICK MCBUTTS didn’t overtake it – that would have been embarrassing!)

Anyway. This is just to let you know that I’ve achieved my goal of winning the Golden Banana of Discord. I now move on to my next goal:

Winning a second Golden Banana of Discord.

^{But probably not in quite the same way. I don’t think they’ll let me get away with this a second time.}

Written by Damon L. Wakes Posted in Interactive Fiction, Updates Tagged with banana, comedy, Creative Writing, DICK MCBUTTS GETS KICKED IN THE NUTS, event, funny, Golden Banana, Golden Banana of Discord, humour, IFComp, IFComp 2023, interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction Competition, Springtime for Hitler, stories