I’ve been thinking about postmortems lately (maybe it’s that time of year). After I play a game, I often enjoy reading about the author’s creative process, but sometimes it’s hard to find where they might have posted their thoughts. Usually I try searching this forum, but sometimes they’re harder to track down, especially after some years have passed.
Is there a place that catalogs postmortems and author retrospectives by other names? Would it be appropriate to add them to the list of external links on IFDB? I don’t think I’ve seen any there, but maybe it would be a convenient place to keep them.
Most of them are tagged with postmortem here, so if people want to create an index on the wiki, that’s a good place to start. (Not that I’m volunteering!)
I’m also keen that postmortems and similar not be lost.
When I find a postmortem for a work that already has an IFWiki page, I will add a link to it there; and I use the {{ac}} template (“author commentary”) to create the link[1], which means any pages for works containing such a link can be found in [[Category:Author commentary]].
So that might be one place to look.
However, I usually won’t go to the trouble of creating an IFWiki page for a work solely for the purpose of recording its postmortem; and since most new works don’t have IFWiki pages, that means the category mostly contains older works. (And since it only has 76 pages, I’m sure it is far from complete even for those.)
I have also sometimes added postmortems to the ‘external links’ section of IFDB pages, but less consistently; and there’s no organised way to find them (I’m not aware that IFDB’s own search tools even allow searching external link text for the word ‘postmortem’).
(although I suspect I may be the only editor still observing this tradition) ↩︎
If a work is entered in a competition, the author commentary link can also be added to the wiki page for that competition (for example, the “IFComp 2026” page), which might be useful if the work doesn’t have its own page.
Edit: Here’s an example–the IFComp 2018 wiki page has a bunch of links under the “Author commentary” heading: IFComp 2018 - IFWiki
Thanks for all the info! I didn’t know about the forum tag or the IFWiki lists, which are both very helpful. The lists are especially satisfying to look at. I’ll try to remember to add postmortem links to IFDB whenever I happen to read one, since it sounds like that might be useful for others too.
Side note, “author commentary” feels like a nicer term for it. Less final-sounding, when creating a game is really more like giving life to something (except maybe around ECTOCOMP time).
So it sounds like the convention for IFDB is adding links to “external links” (pictured). Is that right?
It seems like a corresponding IFDB tag would be a good idea. I don’t care for the term “postmortem” and have titled my own posts differently, but it may the best option in terms of discoverability. I’ll use whatever tag people think would be most helpful.
This seems like a good chance for authors to tag their work! Or to write something about a game they made; I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations.
One option for authors to write or draw attention to a post-mortem in a way that stays attached to its IFDB listing is to write a “From the Author” review on IFDB. (As in, go to review the game, but choose “From the Author” in “Special review type”.)
Oh yeah, that’s a good point! I’ve seen that option before, but I’ve never come across an actual author review, so it almost feels off-limits. Maybe author reviews could become more of a convention if there were just a few more of them.
I just saw there’s a postmortem tag, but only two games currently use it, so maybe it’s not too late to go with something like “author commentary”!
There’s also one for “author’s notes” but I’m not sure if that’s exactly the same thing. Seems like it might be more of an in-game feature?
If we want to include things like a developer’s diary written during the development process, it might make sense to use a tag that could fit that as well, vs. “postmortem,” which sounds like something written after the work is done. Also, I suppose it’s possible a “postmortem” tag could be ambiguous–a game could deal with a literal autopsy.
That’s true, “postmortem” could be ambiguous, and potentially less clear than a more direct term like “author commentary” or “author’s notes.”
“Author commentary” seems pretty solid, but there are some games that have running commentary while you play, so maybe that could be ambiguous as well. Although I feel like the running commentary, developer diary, and postmortem formats are serving similar enough purposes that one tag could encompass all of them.
Yeah, I think “author commentary” is fine as a catch-all, and some games could additionally be tagged, like, “running commentary” or “in-game author commentary”.
And Bez’s game is itself a postmortem for another game, rather than having a postmortem linked on the IFDB page, and the other has fifty-eight tags so…
Of the two tagged with “author’s notes,” Song of the Mockingbird has author notes as an option after you win the game, like Toby’s Nose (IIRC?) or The Moonlit Tower. So that’s another thing to think about.
But yeah, public tagging is going to be imprecise, so as EJ says, I like “author commentary” for most stuff, and we can make up additional tags like “running commentary” or “endnotes” or something to mark the in-game forms if necessary?
For a forum tag, I wonder if “retrospective” would be a good alternative to “postmortem” to accommodate the folks who object to the latter?
