world gone nuts: poets lingering in the shadows while vogons receive all likes on fakebook, cats and dogs living together, so many great games on Android receiving 1 star from complete morons etc
I attribute it to crack addiction. can’t think of anything else.
goodbye, western world. it was good for the past couple centuries…
It is not the fault of Quest that many Quest games have minor quality; Quest is okay as a tool, if you put some efforts in your creations. It is easy to use and great for beginners. I made my first steps with it and even use it these days for creating a game in my native language.
Alex Warren is surely a fine guy too… he probably was just out of arguments and did not know how to continue in this thread.
In my view the problem is mainly the community of Quest users. Yes, the rating is much above average, and the reason is an interaction between the users: one of them gives a low rating to a game, and the author will be upset and give a low rating in return (seen some times), and the result is that no one dares to give honest ratings anymore; then some user who is new to IF enters, thinking “wow, a game can get such a high rating with so little effort put in it, I can do that too” – and there the circle starts again. Most users stick to the CYOA-format as it requires less work and less coding, and they do not care to spend time on further readings about interactive fiction and game design.
A solution could be to offer explicit links on the Quest site. When I started with it, I was not satisfied with what I saw on that page; I preferred to explore other sources. Reading the listing of common tropes on IFwiki was important for me. So new users should be encouraged to take a look.
Another point is the documentation. For instance, Inform7 has an in-built documentation, and users are likely to consult it as soon as they face coding problems. Quest does not have such a feature, but there is support: the Questwiki. It may appear a bit daunting to beginners, but is helpful. So the lecture of it should be explicitly suggested on the Quest site.
These are just general things, I don’t know if they would make any difference; as to me, I started writing with Inform7 some time ago, and will hopefully make advance with it. I don’t have problems with using Quest for one or the other project though, even if I don’t participate in that community a lot.
“An IFDB entry should represent a work which at least one person felt deserved an IFDB entry.”
Couldn’t one argue that Alex was that one person, and he thought that all Quest games were worthy of inclusion in IFDB?
“Seems self-evident enough that nobody gave it much thought, until The Case of the Diligent Robot (who was Not a Person Alas) forced the issue.”
But, one could say, a real live person simply used the robot to facilitate games that he thought should be included.
Neil
You could, and then you would be in disagreement with the majority of the discussion this thread.
Yeaaaaah 'man, you hit the mark, sure 'nuff.
I will say that having lack of argument doesn’t give ‘way for anyone to be an ass, but that’s as far as I’ll go down that road.
There’s enough hate and curses in the earth without me stirrin’ things up.
But yeah, baby, I can dig what you said.
Myself, I’m still workin’ on fiddlin’ 'round with the whole parser gig.
I’ve had a good share of damn good parser-based games, but most others either put me in snoozeville or activate “road-rage-but-with-computers” for me.
Make It Good was a good one…
But ah, I’m sorta gettin’ off-topic here… Well, more off-topic than I’ve been 'til now.
Nothing wrong with that.
What I’m not quite getting from the drift of this conversation is what does qualify works for IFDB. I like jmac’s “An IFDB entry should represent a work which at least one person felt deserved an IFDB entry.” Which sounds fair to me–after all, all Quest users are free to add their work like any other author. And they should be able to choose whether their work is distributed to a wider audience like IFDB.
But from some posts here and that other discussion, it seems like there might be a different kind of consensus. Alex states he feels that getting rid of the bot makes it seem like games that go on IFDB must now “comply with the unstated community standards, and the unwritten policy.”
He’s not alone in this. Pertex replied in the same thread, “No, a checkbox wouldn’t help, because most writer think their game are absolutely great and they would send them to IFDB.”
Just trying to piece together what’s to be gleaned from this 9-page discussion. Is this about the author’s choice of distribution or about limiting what kind of games can be entered on IFDB?
The thing about a checkbox on the Quest site is that people can click it without knowing what IFDB is or ever having visited it. I’d clarify the earlier statement by saying that something should be on IFDB if an IFDB user thinks it deserves an entry.
How many Quest users even know what IFDB is or that their games are automatically added to it via the bot? Not many I guess. It’s rare to see a Quest user post here and I’d imagine the majority aren’t even aware this forum exists, let alone IFDB.
Originally it was because while the IFDB should in theory, as I always upheld myself, be a complete database of all IF games, in practice the bot made a regular deluge of entries which obscured everything else. If the games were of high or average caliber, that wouldn’t be that bad, but they’re not. I mean, a quest user recently took it upon himself to put an “unfinished, pre-alpha” game on the DB, and that is CERTAINLY not what IFDB is for.
It’s a combination of factors. I mean, we don’t add every single Twine game to IFDB, and we theoretically could. In fact, Twine gets a better representation - the experimental/test/really crappy stuff tends to stay closed within the Twine community, or within the author’s cricle of friends. THerefore, it is not released to the wide public. Therefore, it doesn’t HAVE to be in the DB.
Hmmm, I think I found a good definition right here, after all. If it’s only for closed/private/limited consumption, as is the case of Quest because most of it’s meant for the people in that community, it’s not actually RELEASED for the Whole Wide World, and therefore does not go in the database.
A pre-alpha version of a proposal: make discernment variable.
Currently, all raters have the same weight, let’s say 1. Imagine bots were to have a much smaller amount of discernment, some d close to 0, and would automatically rate their entries as 0. That way, once a human rating r came in, the zero would have virtually no effect (r/(1+d) ~= r), but until then the game would be listed as bad.
Games with a rating of 0 wouldn’t get announced on the front page, but games with a rating that changes from zero to positive would.
The default for search actions would likewise exclude games rated 0 (as opposed to unrated games - or maybe adding an entry would require rating it).
The result would be that the games would be in the data base, but quasi-invisible.
If ever some high-quality bot were to appear, it could be given a higher amount of discerment, or a higher rating, or both, of course. Why, an intelligent and reliable bot could even provide a rating for each entry itself (e.g. a bot copying from some other high-quality database into IFDB).
And once the amount of discerment is made variable, why not have user rate each other? I would be glad to see the opinion of (canonical example) Emily Short have more weight, and in rating her highly I’d increase her discernment a little. If many do that, her IF ratings will automatically become weightier.
I would be totally against that. A new game should not be automatically handicapped just because it was input by a bot instead of a person. Plus, it would make it impossible to be aware of new games. And the intelliget bot you mean seems to be a human being.
I don’t much like the idea of certain people’s votes counting for more than others.
Well, it would be less handicapped than it is now that the bot has disappeared. And once a human being would have rated it the 2^-256th of a zero vote would cease to have meaning - after all, 2^-256th of a zero vote literally means “someone who doesn’t have a clue thinks this game is worthless”.
People don’t want these games to intrude, flood and skew the tools they are using, so I propose a way to allow them entrance without having these effects.
Sorry, why would that be? Without the bot, these games cannot be found on IFDB, but in my scheme one could look them up, search for them, play them, rate them, write reviews, you name it.
The complaint is that these games are filling the announcements, so I propose a way to keep them from doing that (by default). That’s all.
No - I gave a theoretical example of such a bot. But my remark was simply to show that the proposal wouldn’t put a straightjacket on bots.
OK, that was merely an extension of the original idea.
Personally I do like it, by the way, as long as the community “elects” these people - but the bot proposal is independent of it.
But I do have a penchant for proposing ideas that are thoroughly disliked by the community, such as having new members play a randomised micro-adventure as part of registering, to show they are serious IF-minded humans as opposed to spambots or spamslaves.
If you haven’t, read: http://ifdb.tads.org/tips
Looks like the problem is that the IFDB portrays itself as both a catalog and recommendation site for interactive fiction.
^ That’s on the front page. http://ifdb.tads.org/
On one hand, this site is a place to store bibliographies of all works of interactive fiction, whether it be the good, bad, or the ugly.
On the other hand, the site is apparently a place to promote and recommend users’ favorite games.
Ehhhh, I don’t know about y’all, but that combination sounds kinda like a recipe for a huge ol’ mess.
Sounds to me that the IFDB needs an actual Wiki-site for general cataloging, but that feels sorta redundant for a site that already promotes itself as a database.
Anyway, in the context of the IFDB’s self-description, Alex’s bot could possibly be seen as fair game.
Yeah, it’s 'prolly annoying to have an update of a great game be overshadowed by the announcement of a crappy game, but hey, IFDB is a database for all works of interactive fiction.
I’d say that I prefer a game’s entry to the IFDB be completed manually by human hands and not by mechanical automation; a bot doesn’t have personalized recommendations after all.
Anyway, my main concern isn’t in the idea that the bot floods the IFDB.
It’s the idea that the bot uploads games to the IFDB without the creators having any knowledge of it.
I mean, hey, inform people what they’re getting into at the very least.
Create a terms of service document and put it in a place where I’ll probably never see it or something…
I could say what I think the policy is (or should be). But instead you should look at the change that was actually made. Does the bot shutdown affect what kind of games can be entered on IFDB? I do not see that it does.
That’s true, but it wasn’t a problem for the first N years. Possibly it will be a problem from now on, and we’ll have to make further changes to keep it functioning in all the ways that everybody wants.
If the games aren’t announced, people don’t know they’ve come out. Basically that’s my point, and by filling in NEWS announcements in lieu of the game authors myself, and by encouraging people whenever I have the chance to announce every change they make to the game, I’ve been trying to share my point of view - I’m not an author so I don’t need authorial modesty, and I don’t need to worry “will I clutter it all up”. I’m a voracious player and I’m saying no, you’re not cluttering it up, you’re giving us what we want! Please tell us of your new games and the updates you make!
If a game wouldn’t show up as announced, on the front page, what’s the point? IFDB is currently a major way of checking new releases. And again, that would be an unfair handicap. Hey, and what if the bot added the game before the author did?
Finally… this is nice as a thought exercise, but if we’re going to go this deeply into this suggestion, we have to remember this particular problem is already solved. The bot isn’t doing anything anymore.
Cheers to that, friend.
I have seen the sentiment expressed here that it might be worthwhile to have one place to be a home for curated IF selection and reviews, and another for comprehensive tabulation of all IF titles. All these years I’ve been trying to figure out “why IFDB /and/ ifwiki?” These might well prove each other’s solutions: pick one to be the comprehensive site and allow bot updates (and let’s not fool ourselves here, influxes of released Adrift, AGS, Twine and Quill IF games would I’m sure be just as great a deluge of dubious material) and choose the other to be the place to present the cream skimmed from that other place.
My major gripe with it was that it was flooding the front page of IFDB during and after IFComp. I knew I had one more update to my game, and was carefully timing the news announcement to what I thought was an opportune time to catch people’s attention. Well, too bad, because there were fifteen barely implemented cyoa’s that needed to be announced and my news item was flushed off the front page within a quarter of a day.
Problem is, the bot has a singular vision, and all the time in the world, and just does its thing. Nobody can keep up with it. If the creator of Quest wanted to curate his own site’s games and methodically put up the best ones or even every single one, that’s fine. Or just limit the bot to one posting a day. Have a daily “Quest Game of the Day” for highest scoring new game that isn’t on IFDB and that’s the one the bot posts.