lol “this is just the beginning…” cancel culture’s coming for ifdb, baybeeeee
First of all, people here seem to repeatedly confuse databases with archives. They’re not the same thing.
Secondly, this conversation was predicated on the default experience of IFDB. If your argument is that making the default experience safe for all users (regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, etc) is “insane,” you are REALLY showing your colours. Once again, not a great look.
Perhaps the issue is the word “safe” and the whole memed idea of “protecting the children” rubs people the wrong way. Maybe “customized experience” is a better way to think about it? It’s not just children who want to browse according to their tastes.
Customized searching is the entire point of a database isn’t it?
For some people that will mean “Please don’t show me anything I can’t play along with my kids.” Others will be like “Give me all the furry pr0n…” A user who has PTSD may not want to even deal with specific types of games. ?
I’m a little confused by how heated this discussion is becoming. All we’re talking about is the default experience for non-logged-in users, right? We could keep it at the status quo, which seems to be “anything goes,” and it wouldn’t keep the IF community from flourishing. Or we could change it to exclude certain kinds of adult material, and even if that was non-optimal it wouldn’t destroy anything. This isn’t a war of censorship-mad tiger moms vs. horny guys in trenchcoats.
In other words, while I would be more or less in favor of changes along the lines @dfabulich describes, I don’t see much reason to worry about a censorship slippery slope or about one side not showing a “good look.” Am I overlooking something?
This just proved my point more than anything else could have, thank you. There’s a clear bias here–not against pornographic material, that’s just the excuse–but anything that involves any sort of mature themes or intensity of emotion.
You’re seriously suggesting that a separate database that would allow you to remove those unworthy games which are not light comedic puzzlers and thus not “fun” off to somewhere out of sight of the main one for real IF, isn’t something you’d see as a bad thing?
I’ve seen so many arguments in the past for inclusivity and acceptance and against splitting the community, and things have just changed so quickly the instant that the tools were there to ostracize and drive authors out.
Nobody is saying “remove”. This is about content warnings, not censorship. Providing more user tools and knowledge to search for and potentially find or omit content they do not want to search for sounds like more power to the user, not less as you’d get with any form of censorship.
I think this is a sensible approach. That said, it is an absurd (and depressing) state of affairs when people are riled up by the idea of the word “safe”, as you suggest.
There is never going to be a 100% safe space for a user; no such thing exists. Similarly, there’s never going to be a method by which IFDB moderators or curators can provide that safe space. However, if we’re talking about default experience (as we were earlier, who knows if we’ve shifted away from that point now), I think the onus is on the mods/curators to make the default page as safe as possible, to cover as many bases as possible.
I was replying to Mathbrush’s post and his idea that people making “fun games” (which he clarified to mean games with no profanity or mature content) and a separate database for those works would be a desirable outcome.
Isn’t Mathbrush involved in the moderation of the IFDB now? His opinions on this subject seem relevant, and telling.
My apologies, I thought we were having a civil discussion. I’m an opinionated woman, if I’m just going to be openly mocked for expressing thoughts here I’ll show myself the door.
I think a lot of adults are […] who should learn not to be so easily offended (I’m not describing anyone here).* Having said that, there’s probably something, even within the law, to turn everyone’s stomach, so I can see why a guaranteed “pleasant” home page and customised search results are being discussed.
I’m more interested in how to make adventure games more accessible to children, which is why the kids.ifdb.org idea appealed to me. I think the original concern here was children viewing unsuitable material when that might be avoided. In all honesty I’d still be more likely to pick suitable games rather than let a child browse a wiki-type database, but approaches will vary for each age, child and parent.
* Edit: Funnily enough, my post was flagged and I was asked to remove some words from this sentence 
I didn’t intend to offend anyone so was happy to comply!
Just to clarify a small misapprehension here: my original issue wasn’t with this particular game per se, more that is was right there in plain view on the landing page and when I flagged it to the admin, no response was received. The fact the game has received more exposure as a result isn’t really relevant (other than that subsequent reviews of the game have then appeared on the landing page, reemphasizing my point).
Anyway, the content controls suggested by Dan Fabulich above seem quite sensible and proportionate to me and I’m really not convinced by slippery slope or thin end of the wedge arguments that suggest this is the start of a path to draconian censorship. Evidently people have strong views on this, but we should try to keep things in proportion.
The people that have made the most ‘high-quality’ games with mature themes in the last few years are probably @HanonO (whose games I include in my top 10 of all time) and CMG, whose games I’m writing a tribute to now. I’m not interested in any policy that removes Robotpartysexymurder or Midnight. Swordfight or Taghairm from IFDB.
I was referring to the fact that a lot of people when they are confronted with some kind of content warning or restriction try to make their own ‘no-holds barred, anything goes’ site, like http://rpcauthority.wikidot.com/ breaking off from SCP wiki or intfic.com breaking off from here. It usually ends up being pretty tame.
So, these are my exact thoughts on the topic (not to be confused with demands on how it should be). Wall of text incoming:
Focusing on children environments, kids.ifdb.org is the only way to (mostly) guarantee a child friendly site. I like the idea that good ones will be curated for the site, as opposed to bad ones filtered out.
Age-gates are a joke. Steam thinks I’m 92 years old and YouTube only prompts you with “Are you 18 or older?” Any 6 year old with the ability to click a mouse can get past it. It might as well just be a “Click here to not sue us.” prompt.
You really can’t go wrong with tagging the crap out of every game and letting you filter results. All it leads to is a better user experience. The default setting should list everything, but I think “never show these tags” is a very important option to have for people that don’t want to see certain games or topics (choice games, horror games, lewd games, puzzle games, etc).
I’m not sure the above filter settings have to require an account. It could just be a cookie. Although having an account would be useful for favoriting games, even if you never plan on reviewing or posting games.
I’m hesitant on saying the landing page should hide adult content. I think I may have said I was against showing it earlier, but that was before the kids subdomain idea. I think it’s unfair to authors have their their stuff hidden because they decided to write a horny game. Some horny games are really good and deserving of spotlight. Steam also lists all of their sexy games right alongside others on the front page. They only require an age check to view it if the thumbnails have nudity.
If the default does become hiding adult games by default, I’m going to login to disable that feature immediately because I too want to see the entire database. All of my comments have been advocating for a better experience for others since I’m perfectly fine with the current situation and I’m pretty difficult to trigger when it comes to violence and sex. But I’m not the only one using the site.
I really am concerned about the state of IF. I’ve been doing a bit of googling and things look horrible for anything involving reading in any format. I know it seems like we have an influx of games lately, but I think they’re mostly by older people that have stumbled upon Inform 7 and Twine. Frankly, those players will die and the younger generation only cares about battle royals and mobile gacha games. It’s not looking that great to me. That’s why I want to do whatever we can to toss these games at kids while they’re young enough to not immediately shrug off new experiences.
I am a retired secondary school teacher. I still teach STEM based electives from time to time.
I have to be VERY careful with the websites I send my students too. If there is any inappropriate content on those sites, I can easily be terminated, as can any other teacher.
In addition, all sites available through a school system network are typically content filtered based upon the websites rating and the content it makes available.
A very good resource I once used to use started to include some pretty militant resources. I was called out and given the opportunity not to use that site again and the administrators reported the site to the filtering service.
I would hate to see that happen to this site. IF is such an incredible teaching and learning tool.
The default front page to IFDB should be curated. For newcomers, that page is their first impression of what the site is. As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” The front page should be considered marketing, nothing more or less, because that’s what it is.
If the user creates an account and wants to customize their front page experience, that’s fine and they can get all the NSFW content that they can handle. This is so much the norm for other websites that I have trouble understanding the controversy here.
I don’t mind clicking through content warnings. They give me an opportunity to consider whether I’m in the appropriate venue to view such content and give me a heads up as to whether I want to engage with the content. That’s a default experience I appreciate.
Spicy! Ow. Ow ow ow. If you heard a pained roar earlier today it was thousands of Deans of Adult Continuing Education crying out in anguish.
I have already used up >50% of my life expectancy so I’d better take the hint and wrap things up here so I can focus on enjoying what few years I have left!
(Wink. I get what you’re saying, although not all of the conclusions you reach, but I’m trying!)
First, take heart! Have you seen how many younger people out there have been, like, making artisanal soaps over the past decade? I’m quite sure that in the late 90s, rec.arts.soap-making was full of “holy cow, where are we going to find the next generation of soapmakers?! Kids these days are too obsessed with Tamagotchi to appreciate the finer points of making soap or even buying a really good handcrafted soap. It’s pretty clear that this is a dying community, you guys” posts and then fast-forward a dozen years and suddenly there were artisanal soaps everywhere. You never can tell when something’s going to come back into fashion with the youth!
But, okay, you don’t want to sit passively by and hope for the kind of lightning strike that hit the soap world. Trouble is, there’s not a singular standard for what is and is not “acceptable in a classroom” and what keeps our active and semi-retired teacher pals from being sanctioned. School District A might sanction a teacher for exposing students to something that district’s board considers sacrilegious, for example. District B might sanction a teacher for different material that District A would consider perfectly reverent because District B is publicly funded and its board would rather avoid overtly religious content.
(No, this is not a straw-man argument, and I reject the need to prove the existence of the slippery slope in this matter when
has entered the conversation. The call for scope creep is coming from inside the house!)
You need to scrub way more than SSA and friends from the home page if you want to protect every instructor of youth worldwide. (I get it that some people here are saying “Yeah, so?”)
Kids-Dot (if I may call it that, we keep making links that don’t go anywhere right now when we talk about this concept) sounds keen, but it doesn’t seem to satisfy Team Never’s requirements, because they don’t want a naïve visitor to ever see Badness, and a naïve visitor is much more likely to arrive at IFDB Prime (#2 Google hit for “interactive fiction” right here right now!) than Kids-Dot.
First of all, I love the idea of having a Kids Interactive Fiction DataBase!
Second, one thing keeps going through my head when I’m reading this discussion:
We are talking about text games, are we not? Text doesn’t jump out at you with its sexual or violent content like images do. Any reader can recognize sex or violent text when reading it. More than enough time to hit the little x in the top right of the screen.
I’ve never called the library in anger because I unintentionally loaned a book that was a bit more explicit in the erotic department then what I had in mind. (Yes, the erotic books are in the main library collection in any library I have visited in Belgium.)
I’m not sure what team I’m on (when did we make teams and give them fancy names?) but I think that’s incorrect: this isn’t about removing “bad” soaps from the artisanal soap catalog - rather it’s a matter of just not featuring them on the cover.
I also don’t agree that it’s impossible to make a subset of the soap catalog that’s appropriate for classroom-use or “family friendly” if people should want that.
Censorship of text genres has and still is taking place. Evil books are banned! Text is rich and stimulates the imagination much more than images. A picture may be worth a thousand words but a “text” author can generate a 1000 images in your mind with just a handful of words.
When I was teaching, students of all ages (and adults) across the community spectrum were reading Harry Potter. In all of my classes, several students would be reading one of the 700+ page books. These were students that had only read books reluctantly before that series. Hundreds of people were lining up in the local Walmart at midnight to purchase the newest edition.
There was a significant community push in some sectors to have the Potter series banned, at the schools and in our local library! Work of the devil!
Don’t underestimate the power of text.
BTW, I’m 70. I guess Tayruh expects me to fall into the grave any day now. Oouch! 
Living on borrowed time as I am*, I genuinely lament that I wasn’t aware of issue #17 before wading into this conversation, and I encourage anybody else thinking of making a similar mistake to spend some time reading through what new keyholders are saying and doing on the issue tracker so you get a clear sense of the prevailing winds pushing IFDB on its new course.
In true “you only appreciate what you had when it’s gone” (or in this case “about to go away”) manner, this thread makes clear that one of the things that made my accidental discovery of IFDB a couple years ago make me sit up and take notice and actually start paying attention to this scene again for the first time in ~two decades was the fact that it was somewhat gaudy and unclean. It didn’t sand off all the edges of the experience. It had a foot in the world of “here’s some info, off you go, what you make of it is up to you!”
Has anybody seriously said that it’s impossible? It’s certainly possible! In my very post you’re quoting I even highlighted that you’ve been earnestly provided with a path for doing so: identify every conceivable form of offense and suppress its display on the default page. “You need to scrub way more than SSA and friends,” I said. Not that it was impossible.
But wait, we’re losing track of the original proposal:
Let’s recap Dan’s thumbnail sketch, emphasis added:
This scope goes way beyond “should an earnest glowing review of SSA appear to a naïve visitor to the home page?” This is game listings, lists… the entire default user experience unless overridden.
So I see where this is going. As I said before, I get it, and So Shall It Be.
* - tayruh, come back! I'm kidding!
Today is literally my 50th birthday. Age is just a number. Some of us have been around longer and seen more. I’ve been that guy who’s said stuff without considering it first and offended people and not understood why they had to be “sensitive snowflakes” who “couldn’t take a joke.” I’ve adjusted my own attitude because I prefer to get along with more people than fewer, and my life is enriched because I’ve learned It doesn’t always have to be my personal quest to change people’s minds about their own sensibilities and preferences and it’s exhausting to always think that way. If your personal worldview cannot yield and evolve, it will eventually break.
So I guess what I’ve learned is while change might cause anxiety and often may not be exactly what I personally want, things have to change and evolve or they cannot improve. The world is a different place than it was even 10-20 years ago and the appeal of “rough around the edges” is not always the most desirable state of things. Part of being an adult is recognizing that not everyone wants the same things.
If that means that I, as a healthy 50 year old who also isn’t really offended by much, needs to do a slightly more specific search and click through a warning to read a review of Sexual Service Acts on IFDB, I understand because I personally hope to welcome more people into the tent then exclude them as might have been acceptable in the past.