only if by all IF titles you also mean WIPs, rough throwaway sketches, etc
the way I see it, a work is not finished just because it is “published” on the internet
also, have in mind that Quest is highly fueled by zippy smartphone teens who’ve never seen text-adventures before. You know how this community developed after years of striving not to repeat same errors of the past? that’s totally lost there just for the fun of a throway sketch to receive some facebook likes or whatsoever…
I’m all in favor of throwing the junk into whatever trashbin is closer.
I really don’t like the community-bashing undercurrent going on here. This conversation was about an annoying bot, not how we’re better than everyone else. I’m fairly confident that 99% of Inform 7 or TADS files saved on our hard drives are worthless unfinished crap, the important distinction is they haven’t been auto-dumped on IFDB.
Another important disctinction, as I’ve mentioned and which I think is the crux here, is that we haven’t “published” it anywhere. Within the Quest community, “publishing” (or “releasing”) is not the same as here. Let me put a positive spin on what has already been commented about that community: by being relatively closed (i.e., less exposure to the outside world) and by encouraging ANYthing and EVERYthing, it becomes a very popular place to be. You release anything you wish, you’re sure to get some feedback and it will hardly ever be hurtful; it’s not like submitting a novel to an editor and getting a rejection slip, it’s sharing a couple of pages with your friends on a night out and getting playfully smacked around the head if it’s a stinker.
So, “releasing” a game in the Quest community (i.e., putting it on the website) isn’t the same as elsewhere. Maybe this is all the disctinction we need. I made this point, worded differently, a few posts back, but no one seems to have picked up on it.
unfinished crap shouldn’t be on IFDB, period. I was surprised when I found one of my own such unfinished crap somewhere, I think ifreviews or so…
but then again, do the teen authors publishing their Quest rough sketches know it is unfinished crap? who is to tell what unfinished crap is anyway? if any one of the long standing IF community members do it, he’s called a snob by people making money on mobile with their CYOA touch and choose paradigm.
I think we should resort to God to judge fairly on the quality of IF submitted.
God could stand for Goddawful Omigod Deterrent, a bot with AI that would keep out goddawful omigod games by inquiring it like this: does this game look unfinished? does it feature many implementation issues? is it chichéd to the extreme – amnesia PCs, dungeon crawling, hunger puzzles etc? is story thin, pretty static and choiceless?
If it checked 2 or more of that, God would dump it to hell and everyone would be happy.
I would personally be fine with an extremely clichéd game being on IFDB, because it would be an easy sort of game for someone to design and implement as they learn a language. So long as it’s reasonably well implemented I would be willing play it and give feedback.
Sorry, but aren’t you contradicting yourself here?
I proposed a way to have these games unobtrusively (for people with the default settings, and until a human being acknowledges them) present, but you seem to object that that would be insufficiently visible. Yet, you seem to consider complete absence (and therefore total invisibility) a solution to the problem.
But that’s irrelevant - the mere fact that there is no enthousiasm is sufficient reason to discard the idea anyway.
I am only contradicting myself if we agree that every single game on TextAdventures.com deserves a mention in IFDB. But the whole point of this thread is, do they? Are they finished games that can be on the database? Or are lots of them only for internal consumption within a certain community? The absence of games that can be argued not to actually consitute a game a game meant to be released to the world in general is… not an absence at all. That was my point. I’m all for announcing actual games meant to be released to a wider audience.
It sounds to me that the database would work better curated. Of course that can be time consuming but there’s no stated guidelines on what content can or cannot be submitted (although that appears to be happening retrospectively in this thread) and the bot exposed a weakness in how the news feed is organised by latest submissions. Maybe the bot spamming the site was the problem, but banning the bot isn’t necessarily the solution as it doesn’t prevent the same occuring by different means.
A system that works is like newgrounds (flash animation site) where things get uploaded week by week and the community either votes things up or down… If things get submitted that are bad enough they rarely swim again where as the better content get lifted into prominence.
That works at newgrounds having a fairly big and active community though but it is open to abuse (friends voting each others bad works up and other people’s down, for instance). Not sure what the traffic is like here or TA with regards to static versus transient users (the former being more helpful in this scenario), but if it leans more towards the former it could be a workable system.
Rather than the two sites going at loggerheads at each other over this the best solution would be to unite and integrate in some way. The best submissions on newgrounds end up on the front page which IFDB could function as where as TA could serve as the community of budding authors. Why the war? You both serve different functions that would compliment each other perfectly with the right coding. It would also promote greater overlap leading to a less us and them mentality.
Furthermore, running it as a bi-monthly thing (I doubt weekly would work, monthly might) would encourage more people to write and those who do write already to up their game.
Then maybe the winner and runner up make it onto IFDB which both solves the problem of flooding and increases the quality of new content.
Hmmm… Wouldn’t that only really work if only the winners were allowed on IFDB? Then we would be stopping Quest authors from choosing to upload their work, which we definitely don’t want to do. This isn’t just about showcasing the best games. I don’t think what you’re proposing is a solution to any issue mentioned here.
So, you don’t want to stop Quest authors from submitting their work but you don’t want a bot to do it. You only want quality submissions on IFDB but you don’t want to discourage terrible submissions either.
Can you join the dots here? The reason why the problem is so difficult to solve is that you’re sitting on both sides of the fence. You have a problem (hence this thread) but are unable to commit to an absolute of what the problem entails. Spamming was an issue (although this was because it was updating a back catalogue so wouldn’t be a future problem) although it was stated it wasn’t a problem when old spectrum games were spammed which leads us to a problem with the content in general or the content from Quest specifically. You say neither of these are a problem so what is the problem? It needs identifying.
I’m genuinely trying to help you here. If all IFDB offers is a snooty database that wants to ruck with the likes of Quest, IFDB will get coded out of the game, im my honest opinion.
It’s like you’re not capable of critical thinking on this. If all the crap games come from Quest(as many here like to keep reminding everyone), what does that mean?
It means that all the new people to IF are going there. And those who try and create also consume.
@Silver - Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be rude. I’m guessing by ‘you’ you mean everyone in the thread rather than me personally. My main problem, as I’ve stated earlier, is that authors were having their work entered into a space without understanding the level of criticism they may be subjected to. I’d be astonished if no one had been upset after reading an IFDB review of an early Quest experiment and were upset enough to stop making text games. For me, that’s reason enough for the bot to either a)be disabled or b)at least have a checkbox!
Anyway, you didn’t actually respond to my issue with your suggestion. It seems to suggest that an Inform author could post any old crap on IFDB, but a Quest user’s work would have to be the cream of the crop. Am I misunderstanding?
Yes. It’s pretty straightforward: a thing that is good when an individual does it, acting upon an individual volition, can become a huge problem when it’s automated. I’m happy for any game to be on IFDB, as long as one person thinks that that particular game ought to be there. With a bot, that’s no longer true.
I’d be quite happy for there to be a tool for Quest that made it easier for authors to submit their work to IFDB, akin to the bookmarklet for Twine that jmac mentioned recently.
I’m going to repeat myself now. I keep saying it, maybe no one picks up on it because it’s wrong, but in that case why won’t anyone say so? Because it feels right to me.
What I keep saying is: a Quest author who submits their work into IFDB acknowledges that his game is finished, ready to be released and played by a wider audience. But the Quest community doesn’t quite work like that, you see “releases” every day (literally) that can’t possibly be meant as releases in the sense we’re talking about. They are designed mostly to be played by members of that community, like a writing club where members write mostly to themselves, and prop themselves up, critique each other… but none of those members considers what he wrote in that club to be publisheable; and if it happens that something publisheable DOES come out of it, then they go ahead and publish it.
The bot was just taking all those drafts, binding them in hardcover, and putting them on our favourite bookstore, obscuring everything else.
We only want FINISHED and PUBLISHED items on IFDB (exception being IntroComp and minicomps). That encompasses a hell of a lot, but not absolutely everything under the sun. Plenty of authors have projects in their hard drives that were useful and fun to make but which were not meant to be the light of day. Well, those sort of projects proliferate in the Quest community because it’s a sort of shared hard drive. Just because it’s there, doesn’t mean it’s ready to see the light of day. And I’m sure they know it and feel the same way about it.
First: re content, see above. Second: those old spectrum games are a part of history, they’ve earned their right to be in the database by sheer age. Third: if you’re going to say that in twenty years’ time, by that logic, every Quest game should be in IFDB, I’ll refer you to “First”. Loop as required.
I had thought about that, but I don’t think age is all that much of an issue, here. All of those Spectrum games were intended as general public releases. If you could magically reach back in time and gank all the half-finished WIPs and abandoned coding exercises from old Speccy disks… well, I’m sure that a bunch of data historians would wet themselves with joy and set up an archive for them, but IFDB wouldn’t be the appropriate place for it. (And I think a lot of authors would be rightly annoyed about it, as certain other data-archaeology projects have revealed.)
And not to say that the Spectrum dump wasn’t a problem, either - it was annoying as hell, while it lasted. But it didn’t continue indefinitely.