My personal opinion is that categorising the games is the best solution. if someone wants AIF, he can search for category:aif or whatever else.
But my main issue is ancient and synthesized by Cicero: “Qui custodet custodem ?” (who checks the checkers ?") so, I’m not against categorising, but the issue is in who do the categorisation, and his/her/its criteria. I’m sure that in our IF community we can agree on who will get the trouble of categorising the games.
my 2 €¢, and
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
The easy answer is not to let young children browse websites designed for adults.
Whether Holocaust denial and racist/homophobic language (both stated above as things that shouldn’t be on IFDB) are any worse than rape fantasies is another question. If you are going to draw the line somewhere then the argument that “anything goes” is lost.
I totally agree with the original post of this discussion.
Also, it feels like a good idea that a user could select what kind of category or tags are offensive for her, and that those are automatically hidden.
But maybe that could be prone to vandalizing, with users giving unfair tags to undeserved games. Or just… sometimes points of view differ.
Another kind of solution is to use the Steam approach. Some games are tagged for “adults” or with “sentisitive content”, so the system ask for your permission to access those tagged like R-rated games.
Maybe a harcoded in the system R-rated tag could do the work.
There are many things that could be considered just as bad as Nazi propaganda. It all depends on your perspective. For some people (like me) the adventure game under discussion would be equally disgusting. The answer is probably to hold your nose and allow anything that’s legal, but categorise and display it appropriately. One difficulty with that is that different things are legal in different countries. Because of its Nazi past, I understand that Germany has criminalised much that is Nazi-related.
I hope I don’t really need to add that I find Nazi propaganda or praise for Nazi Germany despicable. My point is that it’s difficult to single out this one area. Even Mein Kampf is sold in bookshops, with critical forewards to contextualise it.
I also have an eight-year-old child who is interested in interactive fiction, and it would be great to be able to log in to the IFDB and “self-censor” so that she could browse the games there. You may have done us a great service here.
That can be solved with proper tags, reviews, and, ultimately, with a new feature of IFDB where you are warned about the tags that are improper for you.
Yes, that’s the sort of thing I had in mind in the next sentence: “The answer is probably to hold your nose and allow anything that’s legal, but categorise and display it appropriately.” Everybody has different tastes, and this proposal would allow us more easily to find what we want and ignore what we don’t.
Yeah, we are in agreement. I was just answering to the case where some content has to be banned or deleted (like the case of nazi propaganda, just to state an extremely clear case).
I think that eventually IFDB will be improved, but in the meanwhile, you know… you’ll have to curate the games for your small ones! And that sounds totally like a good family plan!
I still don’t see how Nazi propaganda is worse than rape fantasies, though I’ve not read either so maybe am not qualified to discriminate between the two.
So far we haven’t got beyond Zork 1 and Lost Pig, and her own little Inform 7 creations inspired by them and by Jim Aikin’s handbook
Offtopic. The Eaten by a grue Podcast, in the last episodes, has some ongoing discussion about what’s a good first starter from Infocom games. I would totally recommend Wishbringer.
This is a very significant concern. We have had villains in stories since prehistory. They’re villains because they do evil things. Heroes, since prehistory, fought against villains and are held up as role models for doing so. If we remove characters doing and saying evil things from our stories, then the stories lose a lot of their worth – what then is the hero’s business? Why bother telling the story at all?
well, if one write a 1930s/WWII espionage IF, and a scene involves being in the backstage of a nazi rally, and enduring whatever shit spew the nazi orator ? by your “safely ban” is a banned game…
OTOH, indeed during the 80s there was some (rather crude and substandard by the era) nazi-apologetic textual adventure floating around, written with quill or other table-driven language, and I reckon that these things fit your bill.
so, perhaps is best having guidelines instead of rules…
I think framing of the speech should be something to be considered. Nazi propaganda coming from what I’m assuming is the villain leads the player (of average reading comprehension skills) to understand that the propaganda is not something that you should should agree with or take at face value. If the same thing were to be the main characters inner monologue, that’s very much a different thing.
On the other hand, H.P Lovecraft was extremely racist and you can see it in his stories. He named his black cat the N word, even. But could you imagine what we would have lost if we threw the baby out with the bathwater? Literally an entire genre of horror and ripples that carried over to non-horror stories.
The first example is exactly what I mean by a villain doing/saying evil things and why such a game should NOT be banned. The second is rather grey and could be taken as parody if done poorly enough to be funny (see “The Producers”), garbage if not, or something to be kept behind curtains only for people mature enough to deal with them.
Something that could work well for the specific cases (but less so the general) would be to maintain a personal blocklist via localdb. An individual story could be added to the blocklist simply by clicking a delete icon next to its entry (with confirmation), and perhaps something similar for an entire tag. The site would then avoid showing such entries in the future (though they might still appear in an obscured form in search results to let you un-hide the entry later).
Or you could have two levels, with one hidden outright and another merely obscured.
This way, if a particular story or a particular topic offends you, you may instantly banish it from view without affecting anyone else’s experience.
With a suitably AJAX-empowered site this could even all be done client-side, so your personal blocklist is never even revealed to the backend server. (Although there are some things that would be easier if it were sent to the server, such as saving it across different browsers for logged-in users.)
“This offends me and I don’t want to see it” is personal taste, and is entirely valid (if potentially short sighted when taken too far, but that’s offtopic).
“This offends me and I don’t want anyone else to see it” is censorship, and I don’t support that.
