It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure Woods discusses the term in his interview with Jason Scott. (I don’t have time to rewatch it now.)
He definitely saw his work as the same kind of game as Zork, which he definitely does mention in the first few minutes of the interview.
Sounds totally plausible to me. I suspect plenty of people would agree to that term in a friendly look-back, whether a situation like that where there were barely terms at all other than “computar progrum”, or one where it might have been shoved aside for profit-motivated product differentiation.
The history of the term “interactive fiction” is so tangled that it’s silly to rely on it as a constant touchstone from the 1970s through today. It’s hard to even distinguish how the term was understood before and after 1984 (the year Infocom start putting “Interactive Fiction” on the box). (They didn’t invent the term, but they sure put some swing behind it.)
There was a clear domain of “people trying to do a game like Crowther+Woods Adventure” in the 1976-1990 era. (For everyone post-Zork, append “and like Zork too”.) We include that stuff in the IF Archive and IFDB because we agree it’s our legacy, not because of what the label-at-the-time was.
The use of the “IF” label today is a lot more indicative, but I still think it’s a mistake to focus on that alone.
That is: if someone in today’s market (or even fifteen years ago) declares that they’re working on IF, or on an IF tool, that’s a pretty good indicator that they feel a connection to this scene. But if they don’t, I’m not sure it’s a good indicator that they don’t.
Is there actually a procedure for an author to get their game removed from the IFDB?
I’ve been thinking about the curation of IFDB for a while now – ever since the XYZZYs declared that “in IFDB” was the bright-line criterion for XYZZY eligibility.
IFDB is effectively run by community concensus (since Mike Roberts pointedly minimizes his active involvement). What I’m seeing in this thread is that the community – the active editors – aren’t even talking to each other about what they think. That is, until this thread started!
I don’t want to pile on layers of bureaucracy. (Arguably, piling on bureaucracy has been most of my IF activity since we got IFTF off the ground!) But jcompton is saying
So, like, maybe folks should get together and make some? Or at least recognize what precedents you want to run with?
The case law/precedent on crediting the author of the literary source material on the main IFDB author line looks pretty clear to me: historically, the bulk of entries for adapted games have not done this for cases where the author wasn’t directly involved (Hitchhiker’s/Adams, etc.)
Putting the source author on the IFDB author line is a recent development, appears to have one champion (although admittedly I joined the bandwagon without a fuss, until someone else overrode me and I started this discussion) and it has this amusing side effect for a game with otherwise unknown-by-name designers:
But, y’know, precedents are made to be challenged, so here’s a good test case:
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less is as of this writing attributed solely to “Unknown.”
It’s a given that Jeffrey Archer wrote the source novel, but that fact hasn’t mattered to anybody in the 7+ years the entry has been live.
Spectrum Computing credits the game to Robin Waterfield and Adrian Ludley (Adventureland has Waterfield alone), and a quick scan of their backgrounds makes that seem good enough to list.
So, jurors, what makes sense? Waterfield and Ludley, or Waterfield/Ludley/Archer?
Chances are, the source-author’s involvement in the adaptation will only be known by those who actually worked on the adaptation. PR may have spinned this any way they wanted.
But in other mediums, this doesn’t matter. The source author gets credited whether he had anything to do with the TV/Movie/Radio adaptation or not.
I think it’d be an oversight to not credit someone who wrote the base material, but to credit the programmers or puzzle designers who made use of it.
Except that many (most, probably) adaptations are from dead-at-the-time authors. If we are to add Tolkien as author to the dozen-ish Hobbit entries in IFDB, we’ll do it knowing that he definitely did not have a direct hand in any of their creations, he having died in 1973, when the original Star Trek mainframe game was still the hottest thing in computer entertainment. (Ditto Doyle in all the Sherlock Holmes games, Shakespeare in the etc. etc.)
Yet, Tolkien still gets credit for movies made from his works decades after he died.
I’d say, if it’s based on a Doyle story, he should get credit, even though it’s in the public domain now. If it’s a new Sherlock story, then not so much.
I guess we could ask what the purpose of the IFDB author entry is. Possibilities include:
-Giving people credit (assuring no one is left out)
-Letting people search for more games by that author
-Distinguishing between multiple games with the same name but different authors (like Adventure)
-Expressing the credited author’s sanction of the game
Listing source authors satisfies the first criterion but none of the others. Putting the source author in the description but leaving them out of the author field satisfies all four.
Edit: A similar question is, should original authors be listed for fanfiction? Should 50 Shades of Grey (originally a Twilight fan fiction) list Stephanie Meyers as co-author?
Yes.
I think, @Sandsquish, as the chief advocate, the ball is in your court to explain why just saying “Adapted from The Councillors of Slobnovia by M. J. Hardman” in the About the Story section of Councillor Adventure isn’t enough. (That seems to have been the median approach to this problem over the first 12+ years.)
IFDB’s loose search match makes this a difficult bill to fill at best. It’s become a running private joke that apparently everybody ever credited for anything contributed to Cragne Manor, because there are so many juicy first and last names in that game’s monstrous author line to optimistically match.
I think it satisfies all the criteria except for the last, which doesn’t seem to be in the IFDB’s domain to me.
I don’t know why we should use a different criteria for citing authorship than any other medium. Programming is cool and all, but it doesn’t override everyone else’s contributions, whether they were consulting with the programmers or not.
In fact, by most authorship standards, work-for-hire tasks, like programming, frequently aren’t credited. For instance, “Amnesia,” only credits Thomas Disch, though it’s unlikely he really built the game from ground-up using a general-purpose programming language.
Well, Graham Nelson credits ‘Graham Nelson and William Shakespeare’ for The Tempest, so I guess people have been thinking about this for a long time. I’d be happy to follow along with this pattern personally if everyone else agrees; you have some strong points. I implemented two Sherlock Holmes stories by copying and pasting the text and only adding little of my own, so I think I ought to credit Arthur Conan Doyle. But I’ll see what everyone else says.
Sorry for the double post (didn’t edit because it can be hard to see in a quick-moving conversation), but here’s a legitimate question I have from all of this.
I offer a prize in IFComp where I make a game set in the world of the person claiming the prize. So my game “The Origin of Madame Time” is set in the world of The Owl Consults. My upcoming game ‘The Magpie Takes the Train’ is set in the world of Alias: The Magpie, using similar characters and lifting some text word for word. Jason Guest, the author of Magpie, has worked closely in the development, approving different ideas I have and giving suggestions.
Should I list Jason Guest as a co-author? Obviously I would ask him first, but according to the rules we’re setting up, it would seem odd not too. The Owl Consults had 3 co-authors; do I list them? Can someone request not to be a co-author? It just seems odd.
Or do these rules only apply to converting static fiction to interactive fiction? What about games ‘inspired by’ a setting like Winter Break at Hogwarts?
I think it would be nice to be able to search IFDB for “all Tolkien adaptations” or “all Shakespeare adaptations,” etc. So I like the idea of crediting the author of the source material in principle.
I would.
As far as the “set in the same world as” thing, that depends on how specific you get. No one needs to credit Gene Roddenberry for stories set in a similar milieu, but you’d be heading towards plagiarism if your milieu contained James T. Kirk, the Federation, Klingons, and green-blooded, pointy-eared first officers!
Amnesia looks like an open-and-shut case of a missing credit that shouldn’t be controversial to fix. It’s easy enough to see why it was originally listed just to Disch, because his name is atop the banner on the box cover. But it’s also got a very clear programmer credit on the back of that box to Kevin Bentley, so by the usual standards that apply to games from this era, Bentley should be added.
And this, humanoids of the jury, is where I think the strongest case to be made against blanket acceptance of “source material author on the IFDB Author Line” can be found. It’s one thing to acknowledge the source material in the description, but the authorship line can reasonably read as “active participation and/or tacit endorsement by some literary estate” and in the case of fan works, that’s definitely not the case.
IFDB is relatively unusual in its space in that it doesn’t allow different types of credits. You can’t say “art by X, text by Y, programming by Z, adapted by Q.” Imagine if IMDB were in the business of trying to identify the “author” of Avengers: Endgame.
So I think adding credit types to IFDB would be the ideal fix for this.
More broadly, I think IFDB would benefit from a process by which volunteers could improve the platform of IFDB, even if it’s just “Mike manages IFDB as an open-source project with BDFL governance.”
But that’s easy for me to say… the first step in that process would be to convince Mike that this would be worth his time.
I can’t understand listing someone who didn’t make a game as a main author; visible at the top of an entry. That would seem to me to be confusing. Listing Tolkien as the author of a piece of interactive fiction seems like complete and utter nonsense.
To me it would seem much clearer to indicate such links in the main body of the entry. Leave the “author” field for the main people actually involved in designing and programming the game. List any additional ones elsewhere (such as those doing specific ports) or petition that an additional field is added to the entry for inspirations and/or additional credits.
I played the original Star Trek mainframe game on 14" tractor fed paper back in the day. I doubt Roddenberry had anything to do with the game. I don’t recall an attribute at the time. 
We had to play games in the dark hours since using NERDC for games was frowned upon.
I do recall going to Trek conventions at the time where Roddenberry, Shatner, and even Nimoy showed up pitching for a future movie.