I know we already have the IFDB and ifwiki, but for years I’ve been lobbying the folks at Mobygames to open the doors of their database to support the software platforms of interpreted game data, and now they have. So instead of entering your Inform game as having been released for C64, Apple 2, Amiga, MS-DOS, Windows, Mac, etc., (an approach which was frowned upon) you can just select “z-machine”. Ditto for TADS, Hugo and Glulx, and hopefully we’ll have Adrift supported within a few days. The output of more recent systems such as Twine are already supported as “web browser games”, but a big chunk of our history was structurally locked out of their database until now. (I used to document games from each year’s ifcomp, but only the ones distributed as executables, guaranteeing I could only write up the losingest titles.)
Some titles are already in there as a consequence of having been released bundled with interpreter executables or served up via Parchment, but those are just the needles in the haystack.
(If you try to enter a game there and find that we’re missing a relevant tech spec, please let me know and I can get the admins to add it.)
Is there a straightforward way to search for IF on MobyGames? I don’t see Glulx on the list of platforms, and if I type Glulx in the search box, only two titles come up. Is that’s all that’s in the database?
The new categories are drastically drastically underpopulated because for years and years, if an admin would find one of these platform-independent games had snuck into the database, they would be actively purged. A platform populated with under a certain threshold of games doesn’t appear at all in the game browser, but you should see it when adding a new game entry. The big initial work now will be to proudly proclaim the status of those games which did timidly sneak in; they have been grouped at eg. mobygames.com/game-group/glulx-games and now contributions and corrections can be made to assign them new, correct software platforms.
I know that we already have far more complete specialised databases for this kind of concern, but at MG it is neat to have the option of seeing the pieces in the context of a creator’s larger body of work, supposing they also made non-IF games, or even to eavesdrop on which totally unrelated games they were credited as kickstarter patrons of.
Off the top of my head Sam Barlow immediately springs to mind, and our own cvaneseltine. It’s cute that Ben Croshaw also did some IF. And Charles Cecil, though that was in the wayback days.
And it’s always cool to see how Moriarty went from IF to Loom to Tully Bodine, but he was probably there already.
Cute in the hundreds of people naming the names I left out, by ignorace or possibly just naughtiness.
well, yes and know – we get requests all the time to remove credits from early works. And the way our database lists credits is quite a bit different than how an individual might choose to populate their cv – Dan Fabulich gets a “Choicescript design & development” credit for every Choice of Games title, and now that we support Inform games, Graham Nelson’s name is going to be listed attached to quite a number of games he never heard of.
