IFDB is the Interactive Fiction Database - the community’s answer to IMDB, basically - and ifMUD is the IF Multi-User Dungeon, which is an online text-based environment that folks have mostly used as a hang-out-and-chat in recent years (it’s also where Club Floyd does group playthroughs of IF games most weeks).
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I’m guessing this is about the “When did you become interested in interactive fiction?” one. I don’t want to remove it or edit it outright, but I’ve added a second question with more granularity under the original one.
Sorry if the questions were unclear. I should have added more links and explanations of some of the terms I used, but that’s the benefit of hindsight. Also, the fun questions in the last section are entirely random and arbitrary questions I added on a whim, and entirely unnecessary for the survey.
Mike pre-empted me with some of these, but here are links for some of the terms used, in case it would be useful to anyone. I’ve included a relevant link for each term.
As a caveat, I’m not an expert on these terms and am mostly quoting from sources online, so definitions may vary, but this should hopefully get the gist of things across.
- IF: Interactive fiction.
- LGBTQIA+: a term used to describe lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, a-spec/agender, and other queer identities.
- IFComp: The Interactive Fiction Competition, one of this forum’s biggest IF events. A ranked competition for IF games that runs annually near the end of the year.
- Spring Thing: Another one of this forum’s biggest events. An unranked competition for IF games that runs annually near the start of the year.
- IFDB: Interactive Fiction Database, a site for reviewing interactive fiction (IF) games that is run by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation, which also runs this forum. If you haven’t heard of it, you can answer “Almost never” for that question.
- ifMUD: a MUD (essentially a fancy chatroom in this context) used by fans of IF. According to Wikipedia, ifMUD “is central to the interactive fiction community”, though I feel like a lot of newer people haven’t heard of it.
- Sexual orientation: Who someone is sexually attracted to. Some examples are: attraction to the opposite gender (heterosexuality), attraction to the same gender (homosexuality), attraction to more than one gender (bisexuality or pansexuality), and no attraction to any gender (asexuality). (From Wikipedia.)
- Conlang: Short for “constructed language”, a language that didn’t develop naturally but was designed by humans. Toki Pona is a popular conlang with less than 150 words. “anpa ma”, a parser game written in Toki Pona, was submitted to Spring Thing 2025.
- Trans: Has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. The opposite of transgender is cisgender, which describes persons whose gender identity matches their assigned sex. (From Wikipedia.)
- Neurodivergent: An umbrella term that describes people whose way of processing information is different from what society considers normal. Incorporates autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but also Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and others. (From this NPR article.)
In the “fun” section:
- The prisoner’s dilemma is a popular philosophical problem. I like Nicky Case’s The Evolution of Trust as an interactive example of how it works, and how it’s been used to analyze the world.
- The dress photo in the last section is a famous optical illusion from 2015. It’s a photo someone took of a dress, but different people perceive the dress as different colors. Most people see it as either black and blue, or white and gold.
- The trolley question is a reference to the trolley problem, a famous philosophical question that has spawned numerous variations and spinoff thought experiments. I changed it from the original a little, to give it flair. The grue is a monster from Infocom games that’s appeared in various interactive fiction games throughout the ages.
- The experience machine question references another philosophical question about, well, the experience machine described in the survey. The basic idea is, “If you could live out the rest of your life in a perfect, simulated reality, would you choose to do so or not?” Similar concepts have appeared in various science fiction stories.
- Fanfiction is popular among certain fans of the 2011 video game known as Minecraft.
As for Oceania, I can change “continent” to “global region” in that question, if I do anything like this in the future. I should probably remove “Antarctica” and replace it with “Other”, now that I think about it.
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I liked the “fun” part, because of its throwback to the days of Ultima IV-VI…
This suspiciously sounds like “Do you want to live in the Matrix?”
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Why do you assume I am not interested in Minecraft fanfiction?
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I couldn’t answer some of these questions (because it would (not really, given the number of people that answered) skew results), but honestly I doubt it matters. This was actually kinda fun to answer! It would be interesting to do like a bi-yearly (or whichever one is every 2 year, not twice a year) survey to track the way the IF forum changes over time…
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It’s unsatisfying that “Other” answers don’t offer a free-form field.
I learned about this forum from the r*if newsgroups–the same way, I assume, as the other people who were here from the beginning.
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Me too! I remember when we migrated here, I still think of this as the “new place”. Astonishing to think I’ve been a member of this community for 24 years.
The grue is the invention of Jack Vance, it was mentioned, though I don’t think one ever actually made an appearance, in his Dying Earth novels.
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I’m pretty sure they did appear, but they were nothing like the classic IF grue.
I liked the poll. Suggestion for a future poll: “Do you play interactive fiction in a language other than English? (This includes conlangs such as Toki Pona.)”
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Whoops, forgot to account for that. In fitting with the question’s intent, all Minecraft fanfiction fans should replace “Minecraft fanfiction” with a franchise they’re vaguely familiar with but not really interested in, or even opposed to. Options include “Harry Potter fanfiction”, “Among Us fanfiction”, “Five Nights at Freddy’s fanfiction”, “Pokemon fanfiction”, and so on. Endless possibilities.
If everything goes well, I’d like to do this again at some point in the future, but I don’t know when “some point” would be. At least one year later.
I’ll definitely put in something like this next time. I keep thinking about more questions I should’ve added, but was afraid that too many questions would be overwhelming.
It does, right? But the philosopher who came up with it, Robert Nozick, apparently did so in 1974, while The Matrix came out in 1999. So The Matrix might’ve actually taken inspiration from Nozick.
Yeah, that’s one of the downsides of how the polls here work. I’ll add “r*if newsgroups” as an option the next time. You can tell I’m not an old-school Internet user, because I completely forgot they existed.
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I’m pretty sure I learned about this forum from the r*if newsgroups and was surprised that it wasn’t an option.
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What counts as basic fluency? I can mostly read a newspaper in French and order at the restaurant, but if I turn on the radio I understand nothing and when I try to talk about any topic I’m searching for words all the time. I don’t feel fluent at all, but maybe it counts as ‘basic fluency’? 
(Once, a few years after high school, I was getting into serious literature. And I though: surely the best way to improve my French is to buy a really good book that I really want to read, grab a dictionary, and just read it! I went to the shop, looked around, and came home with Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of Proust. This, dear reader, was very much not a good idea and I did not manage to improve my French.)
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I’d say “can mostly read a newspaper” and “can order at a restaurant” count for basic fluency in my eyes. This is just me, but I don’t consider good conversational skills a requirement for basic fluency, and would focus more on the “can mostly read a newspaper” and “can mostly understand a newspaper when it’s read to you” aspect. If either of those are true, I’d say it qualifies.
Language learning is tricky because it doesn’t all match up. You can have great listening skills and basic speaking skills while being completely illiterate. I’ve known people who have lived in a foreign country for years and still struggle with conversational speaking. They have heavy accents and often err in grammar or verb conjugation. But they can read and listen well, and navigate the foreign financial system with ease.
Radio’s hard, because radio hosts generally talk quickly and use more advanced vocabulary than what a normal conversation features, and there are no subtitles. I started learning one language more than a dozen years ago, and while I have excellent listening comprehension when it comes to ordinary conversations about mundane affairs, listening to the news on the radio means I only catch about half of what’s said, and sometimes the density of unknown vocabulary means I only have a basic gist of what’s going on. I imagine this is still better than trying to work through Proust, though.
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Yeah, I’m also a bit odd there because my job is studying ancient languages—so newspapers certainly aren’t an option, and I certainly can’t hold a spoken conversation! But I figure being able to read Ovid is about as fluent as anyone is in Latin nowadays, and so on.
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That definitely counts, and being able to read Ovid in the original Latin is impressive. We had to do three years of mandatory Latin in middle school, but the classes were infrequent and by now I’ve forgotten almost all of it except for some vague memories of how the declension system works, and the numerous Kahoot quizzes for Latin vocabulary. The teacher was very nice, though. I remember how shocked the whole class was when she said she’d finally married her boyfriend after eight or so years; I think we all assumed dating was a short-term thing.
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Eheu! Post octo annos Magistra mea, Domina familiae facta est.
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after the results are released, would it be publicly available (as in you can see who chose what option)?
nevermind I somehow missed the part about it being anonymous.
Re: trolley question, I think death-by-grue actually makes it easier for me to choose than in the original trolley problem. If it’s 1 person tied to a train track, I can see their face and know who they are, will probably see them get run over, there’s a clear cause and effect between me pulling the lever and their encounter with a train; whereas a random grue attack that I presumably don’t witness feels more abstract and thus more palatable of a decision!
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Yeah, it can be very confusing because the poll says “Results will be shown once closed”, but it just means that we’ll be able to see how many users voted for what, not who. If the poll was a non-anonymous poll that actually showed who voted for what, there would be a little eye icon and text that says “Votes are public” next to the poll. I went through and checked that all the polls were anonymous beforehand.
Fair enough. I figured the chance that the grue targets the lever puller might balance it out. The original trolley problem doesn’t come with a condition like “if you pull the lever, there is a minor but non-zero chance that the trolley will jump off its tracks headed straight for you, instead of the person on the other track”. Though I guess it’s a very small chance, if you consider the number of registered users on this forum. I’ll certainly ask a different variant of the question if I do this again.
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