Yes, but the reviews on TA are very, very lenient and positive. Probably because they’re comparing newbie Quest games to newbie Quest games, rather than to more polished or substantial works. You must see the difference there if you’ve read reviews on both sites.
True, games get reviewed a lot on the Quest site but to call the reviews lacking would be the understatement of the year. The five most recent reviews on the site are:
“Nice game! I soon realized that there is no way to win, since everything just gets worse and worse the more you play. 4 out of 5”
(4 out of 5 for a game with no way to win and everything just gets worse and worse the more you play?)
“Did anyone spot the easter egg? Type ‘wait’ at any point. 4 out of 5”
“make more like this. 5 out of 5”
“This is one of the best games i played so far. 5 out of 5”
“Amazing game, Please tell me how you made this. 5 out of 5”
That’s 3 ratings of 5 out of 5 and 2 ratings of 4 out of 5, without a proper review among the lot.
You’ve confused yourself Dave, quoting four reviews from the same game (they’re not the most recent ones on the site).
(Not that this is adding much to the discussion anyway)
Well, they’re still a pretty fair indicator of what constitutes a review over on the Quest site.
Hm, let’s say that group #3 includes IFDB’s administrators. The way I see this is that group #1 did something to group #2 (which I’m not sure that group #2 asked for, but that’s not particularly important), which is making a mess on group #3’s lawn. Now at least some members of group #3 have suggested that group #1 ask group #2 a question to try to help clean up the mess, and group #1 has said “Why should I do that? It’s not my problem.”
If the people who are really in charge of group #3 (the administrators of IFDB, I mean, not the users) really do think that there’s a mess on their lawn that they’d like to clean up, I guess the solution is to clean it up using the resources they have. Ban the textadventures bot. At which point it becomes group #1’s problem, and perhaps group #1 has an incentive to try to do something constructive.
Alex, can you tell me what you think about my last post?
OK
Not sure it’s necessarily the case that they’re all lenient and positive:
1* (Appalling) 340
2* (Poor) 187
3* (OK) 317
4* (Good) 520
5* (Fantastic) 872
So average review rating across all 2236 reviews is 3.62, somewhere getween “OK” and “Good”. Yes there’s a peak at 5 so maybe the users are a friendly bunch, who knows? Maybe I should start pissing them off and upsetting them to make them feel more bitter about themselves? Maybe I need to tell them they’ve got their opinions all wrong. “That game which you thought was good - well, here are the reasons why it is in fact shit, you moron”.
Different people visit IFDB so of course there will be a different spread of ratings, and a given game may be reviewed well on one site and poorly on another. Star ratings are often not very helpful in any case - have you seen the App Store recently?
Anyway so there’s some facts and thoughts. Not sure how this affects the discussion one way or the other. I thought people were trying to make a case that Quest games shouldn’t be automatically added to IFDB, and I don’t see how an argument that boils down to “it’s a different site, people may collectively have a different opinion about which games are good” feeds into that.
And still nobody has even offered an opinion about what IFDB is actually for…
You’re not really doing Quest any favours here, you know. It already has a bad reputation without you giving people any more incentive to dislike it.
Thanks for your valuable input Dave, I think I’m done contributing to this discussion now.
Well, I’ll bite. I think IFDB may be a bit more formal than the Quest forum. People provide more in-depth reviews and often manage to poke at details that probably aren’t helpful to beginning writers.
I think it’s important to have encouragement for people who want to try stuff, and I don’t know if there’s anything really like it here at IFDB or intfiction.org. There may be closed google groups/factions, etc.
But all the same, if we don’t know what IFDB is about, I think IFDB can’t be about everything. It is more about criticism than, say, ifarchive.org.
And when a bunch of games are dumped onto IFDB, there’s an implication that these games are looking for criticism. For me, it’s a bit like going to the library and suddenly seeing loose manuscripts and collections of notes for future novels in with published books. These manuscripts are important to the people that are writing them. But they’re just in the wrong place.
For what it’s worth, I think an opt-in is the best idea expressed and seems to get the best of both worlds. Just the mention will probably drive up traffic to IFDB for people who are interested in doing and learning a bit more vs. just wanting to have fun. And that’s a good thing. But right now, deciding what games go to IFDB from TextAdventures seems like a worthwhile task. I don’t know if you’re discussing it in that forum. But I think something like a conglomerated weekly post of new games would be more useful and direct and digestible.
Because I don’t think a lot of people want to be exposed to more formal criticism with their first projects. But all the same I don’t want IFDB do be a Cool/serious kids/writers club only sort of thing.
Well, looks like this conversation is a bust. Anyone up for banning the Quest bot?
What about separating the columns - one for reviews, one for news, and one for “new on IFDB”?
Or put news on the front page and make new reviews and new listings separate pages.
Separating the columns, perhaps with sections you can collapse and expand, seems best if the IFDB admins are up to it. Do they hang around here a lot?
Ideally I’d like to be able to toggle options on what I want to see on the front page, but that is probably a lot of work.
I’m with you, Healies.
I don’t know whether Michael Roberts comes here, but he’s a very accessible and very reasonable guy, and if you e-mail him and point him towards this discussion he’ll surely hear you out.
EDIT - Erm, more of a response to aschultz than MTW or Haley. I’ve never been fond of banning.
Perhaps a way to toggle which types of games you’re able to play (for example, I currently have Frotz and Glulxe installed but no TADS 2 interpreter), and have IFDB only show those ones? I know you can filter like that on the search page.
I like ‘play nice with others’ as a motivation. (That goes for the whole bloody lot of you.)
(I agree that the checkbox thing probably wouldn’t work all that well, though; it’d rely on Quest authors understanding the implications of that choice, and if they did then we wouldn’t have a problem.)
Not sure if I’m being dense here, but the whole bloody lot of who? And I don’t get the ‘if they did we wouldn’t have a problem’ bit.
IFDB is a database for works of Interactive Fiction. The problem with the games from Quest is that many of them are more like doodles in the back of a book. Not everything on IFDB has to be world class literature, and many speed-IF games are about the same quality. But all of those were individually added because someone thought they were worthy of it. A bot can’t make a decision of worth.