Ah. Just got that impression from the reply, where “narrative” seemed to be an important qualifier, as in, “if it had not been narrative it wouldn’t have mattered as much for the current discussion”.. Ok, then.
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I can’t help but be bemused as I watch Broken Age get an entry too.
Are there any games not by Infocom that called themselves “interactive fiction”? ISTR seeing that term on Maniac Mansion boxes, but it wasn’t on box art when I searched for it.
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I think Legend Entertainment borrowed the term, but don’t hold me to that.
As IF was pretty much synonimous with “text adventure” at the time (whether it still is is, essentially, the big question that this thread touches on), graphic adventures started distancing themselves from the term really early on. Hi-Res Adventure, for instance, for what are clearly text adventures with graphics. Then KQ1, IIRC, and I may be wrong, labelled itself as 3d, because you could actually make your character walk in front of, around, and behind trees and stuff.
As far as nomenclature, commercially the term was pretty much Infocom and Legend, if I’m not mistaken. Then, from what I hear, a hypercard community group was pretty much hijacked by, and turned into, the IF community here today. 
So yeah, the term by itself is probably not useful to tie down historically; because if we do, then it’s just a very select number of games that qualify!
EDIT - The term, really, was “adventure game”, itself coming from “Adventure”. IF was a subsection of “adventure games”, the ones made my Infocom. Another subsection was “Electronic Novel”, by Synapse Software. The IF label just kinda got retroactively thrown around to mean text adventures by, I presume, people like us after the fact.
BTW, “Broken Age” is a pretty good game, worth playing.
EDIT - I got curious to see how IFDB defined IF. It doesn’t seem to, but it links to IFTF proeminently, so I checked IFTF out to see how it defined IF. It does so the following way:
The IFTF defines interactive fiction—IF, for short—as a kind of video game where the player’s interactions primarily involve text. Under this broad definition, we can find decades of IF work taking many interesting and innovative forms.
As far as definitions, I’m on board with that. It’s a bit vague, purposefully so in order to be inclusive. It is very easy to argue that under this definition any parser-based game is IF, like early Sierra games; and that argument is sensible. I wonder whether it can be argued that VerbList graphic adventures like Monkey Island 1 and 2, and Maniac Mansion 1 and 2, are as well, since your actions primarily involve selecting a verb which is displayed in text form and then selecting an item from the main screen. That can be a trickier argument, because it excludes, say, Simon the Sorcerer 2. I’m not sure these arguments are useful, but with a definition in place, the arguments are there. It specifically says the interactions primarily involve text; doesn’t really say that the result of those interactions must as well.
I think that Disco Elysium gets covered by this definition, actually. Not sure, never played it.
Broken Age, though… that one I really struggle to fit here.
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IFTF takes the position that it follows the community definition of IF, rather than trying to set a standard definition for the community.
Also, IFDB is explictly allowed to have its own notion of “IF for the purposes of this site”. It’s not meant to cover exactly the same span as IFComp, or NarraScope talks, or forum discussion here, or what have you.
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Ok. I didn’t read the site in-depth because I was actively looking for a definition, so I probably missed that. I was totally biased going in. Makes sense.
Can’t really find where on the IFDB it states that explicitly, and actually looking I instead find that “The IFDB committee of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation maintains IFDB” which would also point me to the IFTF definition if IFDB doesn’t explicitly say one, but ok, I must be missing that in my searches.
Is it like “we have our own notion of IF for the purposes of this site and it’s not public”? Because if it’s not the IFTF definition, and it’s not explicit elsewhere, then it’s not public.
I like the IFTF definition. Broad, inclusive. If it’s meant to be mutable and change with the times, which I think it is, so much the better. If IFDB isn’t using it, it seems a shame… and I’d be curious about what it’s using instead.
I am mostly, though, still quite trying to understand how the IF community - as opposed to an adventure gaming community - is served by such entries as Broken Age (or Maniac Mansion 1 or 2; the thing about “clicking text verbs” is pretty flimsy). As I’ve been understanding, it’s mostly been “if a guy adds it and it’s not obviously erroneous, like SimCity or something, there’s no point to making a fuss, just leave it be”. Not so much “the community actively accepts it as IF”, as, “the individuals of the community passively don’t care much one way or the other as long as there’s no abuse”. Which… is fine. And rolling eyes when another one of these entries that stretch the definition or fail to meet it is added is… also fine.
