IFDB - Adventure Game database?

General IF Community Resources
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There is an IFDB entry for Maniac Mansion.

I mean, there were the Space Quest fan games entries, which are IF because… they have a parser? Though there are tons of games with no parser which are considered to be IF, so maybe that’s not it. I do remember seeing one other actual point-and-click-graphical-adventure there, years ago, I don’t remember its name, and I remember recently browsing and seeing “huh, it’s still there.”

I mean, it’s a pretty big elephant in the room, “what is IF” - or, possibly, “what belongs in the IF database”. And it’s perfectly ok for the question to have a hazy answer, because it’s really fun when things defy labels and easy cathegorisation.

But if Maniac Mansion is there… there is no reason not to have all of the LucasArts and Sierra adventure catalog, plus, well, regular old adventure games in their many guises.

If IFDB were to become AGDB (Adventure Game DataBase)… I personally wouldn’t mind at all! Adventure games are my thing, and IF is, to me, part of the big Adventure Game family. The one that started it all. The top of the family tree.

I just think it may possibly be worth taking the time to reflect a bit harder on how the database should define its entries. Not for the purposes of exclusion, but for the purposes of clarification - possibly expansion. Or possibly reduction.

I would love AGDB. It would be my new home. Is Maniac Mansion ushering that in?

Defining IF is so tricky. Parser? Point and click? Primarily text-driven? An interactive story? If one wants to debate it, one could argue for the inclusion of almost every game that exists that includes a narrative.

So I would prefer to avoid that specific kind of debate if possible. It’s just that I can’t see it being helpful or leading anywhere.

Still, for the purposes of a database… surely, a database must be inclusive and comprehensive. And a database needs to have criteria for what qualifies to be in that database. This is hopefully not a problematic premise.

Maybe it’s time to really revisit those criteria? Decide what meets it and what doesn’t? And maybe, at the end of the road, expand the scope of IFDB? I certainly prefer expansions to reductions. Although that might be viewed as “diluting”.

This may be the beginning of a huge project.

Or maybe the Maniac Mansion entry will just be deleted.

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LOL, the only tag on that entry is “Not IF” so somebody has already made their opinion known.

(I had a longer response here but my gut feeling is that when moving an avatar around the screen is a primary way of advancing the story, it’s no longer “interactive fiction”. There are both parser-based and choice-based games that have graphics, but the primary mechanism of “real” interactive fiction must be “telling a story, primarily though text, in which player choices/actions can affect the outcome”)

-Dave

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All of this has, of course, been considered a LOT over time: you’ll probably find threads about it if you search. And the general attitude is that The Adventure Game Database and The Visual Novel Database exist, and there’s even CASA that’s focused on cataloguing older text adventures and that there’s no particular reason for IFDB to try to duplicate those.

IFDB generally takes a “big tent” approach to what is interactive fiction. AFAIK they practically never delete stuff unless it’s really blatantly just a graphical shoot-em-up or something. Anyone can add any game, so you could go add games if you think they should be on there.

But it’s also NOT trying to be a “complete” database of games, so it’s pretty hit-or-miss if things more toward the fringe of what, say, the forum community is into are there – only if someone decided to add them. And IIRC it’s frowned upon to add a whole raft of a particular kind of game just because you want to make an argument that “this is IF!” rather than “I like this particular game and I want to review it on IFDB” or something like that. IIRC there was a discussion a while back where someone was wanting to add all the games from CASA to the IFDB and the response was something to the effect of “no, it’s OK that they’re only on CASA, we’d rather you didn’t do that.” So several of Inkle’s games are on there, many but certainly not all of the works published by Choice of Games, but something like Pixelberry’s High School Story doesn’t happen to be.

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So even within its own standards it’s not trying to be strict and comprehensive. It’s just “whatever people feel goes, goes.”

Not my usual approach to a database, but if that’s what it is, that’s what it is. Maybe I’ll add Planescape: Torment one of these days. Or at least Day of the Tentacle for being the MM sequel, or Zak McKracken for being a sibling of MM. Not to mention Loom, so that we could have all of Brian Moriarty’s legendary games in the IFDB.

I’m being facetious, I’m not going to do that. :sweat_smile: If a loose database is what it is, and what people want it to be, I’ll adjust my mindset and my approach towards it.

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My ideal balance between text, graphic and UI lies in the Legend games, Timequest, the Spellcasting trilogy and the Gateway duology.

Personally, I consider what I call “hunt for the hotspot” even more frustrating than “guess the verb/noun”, and I understand the issue of “sidebar spoling”, but I can’t deny the player QoL of a (textual) verb/noun sidebar (astute people who have played The Portrait can now figure where came the rather unusual usage, if not even exploit, of the disambiguation handling…) but I think that the balance between “sidebar spoiling” and “player QoL” should be left to the player (that is, a “sidebar verbosity” (lacking better terms…) metacommand; people who like to vivisect the response for figuring the next move can type a “sidebar brief/superbrief” metacommand, and people with little patience for walls of text (or questionable english… :smiley: ) can have a “verbose” sidebar.

now, this post deserve a split into a major general design discussion topic, so back on track, I consider the Legend IF works as such, because I think that illustrations and interface/layout CAN be part of the narrative (that is, the second letter of IF)
And, what matter is the narrative, not the interface, graphics and layout. Heck, even a JRPG (and modern WRPG) are rightfully interactive fiction, So, actually, isn’t easy to draw a line on what is to be included or excluded from a Interactive Fiction database.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

ps. for the moderators: as noted above, if there’s interest in the general design part of this post, feel free to duly split the debate.

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You’ve nailed the contradiction neatly, there. You can’t have one without the other. So far we have come down on the side of “the debate would not be helpful or lead anywhere.”

There’s an additional twist in that the XYZZY Awards historically, and the IFDB Awards recently, have taken “listed on IFDB” as the eligibility criterion. So there’s some impact to deciding what’s in and what’s out.

And yet this works out pretty well. I don’t think we’ve had a serious social blowup about it.

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Zarf pointed out a while back that there’s a difference between “something people consider IF” and “something that could win an XYZZY award,” and I think that’s really true. So perhaps Maniac Mansion would not be eligible for the latter, but it a case might be made for the former.

Maniac Mansion is an interesting case, of course, because in those days Infocom’s marketing team called their games “Interactive Fiction,” but all the kids at my school would have called both Zork and Maniac Mansion “adventure games.”

There’s probably also an idea that a work might have influenced IF or have been relevant to design discussions regarding IF, so it might be useful for researchers to find them in IFDB. I think this Rosebush article is a good illustration of these relationships.

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Is Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters IF? Half the game consists of choice-based NPC interactions that you have to get right to make the plot happen, including puzzle solving. There are also quite a few places where you have to win an arcade-style ship-to-ship dogfight to progress (including the boss fight at the end), and also a minigame about your lander’s exploits on planetary surfaces, but most of the plot is choice-based.

IF, or not IF?

(The question was easier to answer when “IF” meant “parser-based text-only games, possibly with still graphics mixed in, but only for aesthetics.”)

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Is Hunt the Wumpus IF? Hunter, in Darkness certainly is. If Wumpus isn’t, then where is the dividing line between the two?

Oregon Trail? Hammurabi?

STARTREK?

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Susan, to clarify, my question isn’t so much “is it IF”, and in fact I was hoping to avoid “well, is THIS IF? What about THIS? Because it has so-and-so.”

My question was intended to be (maybe I muddled it) “maybe it’s time to define what is sufficiently recogniseable ‘IF’ to be in an IF database, such as IFDB.”

The distinction, I think, is that you don’t need to say “such-and-such isn’t IF”; you “only” (oh, that word does so much heavy lifting!) need to come up with database criteria. Because, like you illustrate, and like I said, one can debate so much that everything becomes IF. And my issue was with the helpfulness and cohesiveness of the IF database. And, again, I was not against expanding the criteria to include graphical adventures. Josh kindly pointed me towards databases I wasn’t aware of.

As far as I’m concerned, zarf has, as usual, put it succinctly and clearly enough for even me to understand.

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Just saw that the sequel got added as well. Not sure if where this is headed; at this point we could every point and click adventure from the 80s and 90s and have them sit empty in the database without ratings or reviews, but I’m not sure what the point is?

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Seriously? DoTT?

…

…well, nothing to add to what has already been said, but I shall shake my head in disbelief.

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Perhaps the person adding them has his/her reasons?

Of course, if it continues we should perhaps discuss boundaries but there are a lot of games on IFDB I don’t understand, e.g. Disco Elysium etc.

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I never heard of Disco Elysium and, checking it out… I agree… Remember when I joked about Planescape Torment? If DE belongs in IFDB, surely so does PT…

IMHO it has been going on for quite a while, with the inclusion of “less obvious entries” (this seems like a good name) appearing here and there. The two Space Quest fan games, which use the AGI or NAGI engines, have been around for a long time. It is interesting to note, however, that the inclusion of those two games failed to bring about a deluge of other AGI games, like, say, the entire Sierra catalog up to and including KQ4 AGI.

I suspect they are blips, and the blips will continue. And taking care of the blips would require the big conversation about “what fits”. And having the conversation would probably be a headache with lots of fallout (Hey, Fallout might qualify if Disco Elysium does!), and the potential community damage done might not justify the bother.

What I just said is my understanding of the situation as Zarf put it, paraphrased through me. What I will add is that, the longer one puts off an issue, the harder it is to resolve it when it gets to be a problem.

To which I will further add that, on the grand scheme of things, it may not be such a problem, not one that is worth alienating the community about.

…I tell you, trying to see both sides of the issue is fine and laudable but is also a pain. :stuck_out_tongue: It’d be easier to be a little bit more selfish, pick a side and be done with it.

(I’m also removing the marker to Zarf’s post which said “solution”, because otherwise every time I post I get a reminder saying the situation has been resolved, which I’m sure bugs everyone just as much as it bugs me)

EDIT - Selfish me thinks that databases ought to be inclusive and comprehensive and accurate (which also means grouping games by series even if the authors don’t intend to. It’s a database, it’s not their personal website), and they ought to be clear about what is allowed in and what isn’t. The database doesn’t need to dictate what the genre is, but it needs to dictate what, within the genre, sufficiently classifies to be in it. That’s selfish me stating it bluntly and simply, and you won’t see selfish me again in this thread.

Ah, that was liberating. :slight_smile:

EDIT again - I did remember there was one title that at the time seemed to me very clearly to be an adventure game and not IF; I mentioned it before, but didn’t remember the name. Browsing through the Point and Click tag, I think I found it. It was The Book of Living Magic. I think. I can’t easily play it now because it’s a .swf, the format that progress chewed up and spit out into the toilet bowl and flushed down the drain to, according to at least two films, an anthropomorphised city of rats (one of those films may be obvious; the other one, Ernest et Celestine, is a delighful film I reccomend heartily).

…I lost my train of thought now.

Oh yeah. I can’t easily replay it now, but even at the time I thought “this is not IF, why is this here?”. It was a private thought, I think; I don’t think I did anything about it, like report it or anything, I waited to see what the community did. The community let it stay, so that was that.

That was the clearest “jumping of the shark” that I remember. I thought at the time “might as well import games from the AGS database”, which I was also heavily into.

Still. The database currently has 15544 games, and growing. These blips probably number 100 or less. Or 50 or less. I don’t know because it’s hard to tell, the “Point and Click” tag accounts for 30 (but I haven’t checked all 30 games, and it’s not a safe assumption that these are all automatically “blips”, some clearly identifiable IF games allow for pointing and clicking, Zork Zero immediately comes to mind) but Space Quest fan games are not there, because they’re not point and click, natch; neither is Disco Elysium; so I dunno what else isn’t in there that stretches the definition. At any rate… it’s maybe not a number that causes a problem.

(yeah, but if you don’t deal with these things while the number are SMALL, you have a harder time dealing with them when-)

Quiet, you!

>WIELD FLAMETHROWER. POINT IT AT SELFISH SELF

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DE is probably the most influential narrative game of the past few years. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an IF game, but it was nominated for a XYZZY (in one category) so the concensus seems to be in its favor.

I think your analogy is on target. I’ve described DE as “the Planescape: Torment of the 2010s”. But adding DE to IFDB does not retroactively require adding every old graphical narrative game. It’s allowed to be an exception. Or an indicator of a new era in which more games in the mass market are considered “interactive fiction”.

If it helps (it doesn’t!) a couple of the most notable post-Disco graphical RPGs have been added.

But not others: I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, The Thaumaturge, In Stars and Time. (That’s just my personal list, you could name others.)

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Is that the yardstick that ties them all together and makes them valid for inclusion? Being a narrative game?

Yeah, the old thing about “Is it fiction? Is it interactive? How can it not be Interactive Fiction?”. And when I think that Infocom only coined that name for marketing, and that we call adventure games “adventure” because “they are games like that one game called Adventure by these guys Crowther and Woods”… the meaning gets lost and we get stuck on the literal meaning of the labels.

To be fair, though, it’s all a constant evolution, a constant give-and-take. Names and labels which make sense within a certain context but which get convoluted over time as new context appears is nothing new.

The concept of a database that “lists games which are not IF but which the IF crowd may like and are too influential to ignore” (a concept in which, actually, Maniac Mansion and DotT would indeed fit!) seems a bit strange to me, but, as you said before - community-based, and going by what the community feels is appropriate.

>SHOOT FLAMETHROWER AT SELFISH SELF

Sorry, he was about to butt in. Nevermind the smell. Pretend it’s BBQ. I was saying, feels a bit strange still - especially when we consider that graphic adventures, and point and click, made a point of calling themselves that to distance themselves from what was then known as Interactive Fiction, which was synonimous with text adventures; I don’t think Sierra ever called their parser-based games text adventures, though they had a parser.

Anyway, it’s messy. And I can see it’s liable to continue messy. And that… it isn’t such a big deal, really.

>G

EDIT - At any rate, any hardcore implementation of definitions that would exclude well-regarded titles from the IFDB would be met with a lot of resistance, I’m sure. Once it’s in, taking it out will cause a reaction. Checking it before it’s in avoids that, but… we’re way past that point, then.

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To be honest, something that’s a lot more annoying is a recent spammer-like account “Inakanimationstudio” that is constantly adding games which are clearly not IF. The latest one says “Are you ready for a heart warming puzzle challenge? In Save My Pet: Draw & Rescue, you’ll use your brain and creativity to rescue cute dogs and pets! Draw lines to save pets from danger, solve tricky puzzles, and become the hero in this animal rescue saga.” It’s a typical handheld casual game. The entries have been popping up and then disappearing, which means that at least these are clearly not considered to be IF or to belong in the database.

These are far more annoying than having MM, DotT or DE. Far more bothersome.

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IFDB moderators are aware and working to resolve.

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I’ve been noticing. :slight_smile: I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Just putting things in perspective. :+1:

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No.

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