I write a lot of reviews on there and have at times been challenged about being too spoilery. I don’t think I’ve ever blown major secrets from way in a game in unhidden text but some people don’t like how much I talk about a game’s setup. And some of my bigger reviews were hard to convert (EG from my IFComp blog.)
The thing is, while IFDB has a strict policy on spoilers and sometimes users police them by challenging you on stuff, it often has naked spoilers bigger than I would ever write revealed in the tags for the game. EG PC is not human, PC is actually a man/woman/robot, whole thing is a dream, etc.
Does anyone else notice this or mind, and if you do, do you think anything can be done about it?
I try to be mostly polite about spoilers, but my attitude is that if I’m reading any reviews whatsoever, I’m accepting a certain degree of spoiler-risk.
Yeah. Sorry if I wasn’t clear, I mean - do you mind that there can be total spoilers in the tags which appear for the game? Though the same things are not allowed in reviews? I agree with the risk assessment thing but the tags are placed so they appear immediately when you click the link for a game.
I agree that in an ideal universe tags would be, by default, hidden, revealed with a deliberate click. They’re far too useful, at least potentially (once more games are tagged more completely), to NOT have all that spoilery goodness in them … but I do think the tags should be presumed spoilery, and be accordingly opt-in.
I try to make a point of not reading reviews of a game before playing it so that I don’t end up letting the review influence my opinion of the game.
Saying that, when I read reviews of games that have spoiler tags I often find them annoying. I like the way Emily Short writes her spoilers at the end of her review – that way, I can read her review without risking reading something spoilery about the game in question; I dislike the way so many other reviewers tend to dot spoiler tags in the text of their review.
When spoiler tags are placed in the text like that, it’s impossible to read the review and get an idea of what the reviewer is saying without clicking on the tags and revealing the spoilers.
Hey, that’s a great idea! I made a quick version: ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=0dbnus … verride=22 (go to http://ifdb.tads.org/styles?gallery to set it as the active style, it’s called “Hidden tags”). You can see individual blacked out tags if you move your mouse over it or all of them if you click the “edit” link next to your tags.