It may seem weird to you, but I would guess that most people would be interested in the games you mention because they involve Bilbo, the Gollum, a trip through the bowels of the Misty Mountain, pony-hungry trolls, and the One Ring, none of which was written by the programmers. So, yes, Tolkien should be listed, front and top, as one of the authors, because he’s the one who wrote those things.
I really don’t want to keep going on about this, because I can find my way around the IFDB no matter how things are being credited, but the IFDB won’t be following standard practice for authorship credits if source authors are relegated to optional mentions in the description field.
Star Trek and Harry Potter are interesting examples and demonstrate quite a contrast.
Roddenberry endorsed derivative works allowing authors to pen 100s+ novels and paperback derivatives.
J. K. Rowling has held her copyright very close even challenging a derivative dictionary/encyclopedia that was published after the end of the original series of novels. (Rowling prevailed in court, even after she tacitly allowed the dictionary to exist online within a fan fiction website for several years.
Then, to let the credits question breathe a bit and loop back to my first point about Sierra AGI titles, as far as case law and precedent go:
Case law. None? So far, nobody has popped up to say what honestly I thought was the most likely explanation, “Oh yeah, we had a huuuuuge fight over that back in 2009 and it was decided at the time to delete them, that’s why they’re not there. By the way, please never mention this again.” And I’ve added enough missing high-profile games from the 1980s over the past several months to conclude that omissions are frequently just that–omissions, with no apparent rhyme, reason, or judgment attached.
Precedent.Façade–a first-person, real-time, click-and-drag-and-also-parse game–is in IFDB. We can debate the merits of branching storylines and multiple endings, but a mainline AGI game with textual room and item descriptions and lots of puzzle-solving parser input seems to have at least as much in common with the muddy average of the past ~45 years of IFDB-listed output as Façade does.
Broader inclusion makes IFDB into Bad Steam. I’m not entirely sure what to do with this one other than to say “I don’t think so!”
Slippery slope. I already hinted at the idea that I think those early ICOM games probably belong. I mostly-seriously said that I could go all the way up the line to “if you have more text than Myst, you’re probably a candidate for inclusion” (and Beyond Zork could be a handy precedent wedge for anybody campaigning for a text-heavy RPG, etc. even though I wouldn’t be inclined to make that case.) I personally would be comfortable keeping Sierra SCI and SCUMM games out… but I would campaign for the proto-SCUMM Labyrinth, which after all has a text adventure prologue even though it is not the “real game.”
I personally think that the author of the source material should not be credited in the author line on IFDB unless they were directly involved in making the game. The author of the source material might not even like the adaption. Putting him/her on the author line makes it look as if the author acknowledge the game, which might not be the case.
I think it is much better to mention in the description that this game is an adaption/inspired by/sequel to etc.
Well, in a side note not necessarily applicable to IFDB – but not totally irrelevant – while IMDB don’t have to narrow down who the “author” is, different countries can apply their own law to a film’s credits to determine who it is for copyright duration assessment purposes. For instance, in Britain, the law recognises the director, writer, composer, and cinematographer as authors. X years after the death of the last of those people to live, copyright will be deemed to have expired – also depending when the film was made (there are brackets of time through which the law varies). Typical disclaimer: While this comes from the legal department where I work, and so is pretty good, don’t use it to finance your house or indeed perform any less significant action without investigating the details yourself, for in that respect what I’ve said can be considered only for entertainment purposes in its depth!
But this isn’t how other mediums work. Film adaptations don’t give screenplay credits to the author of the source work if they weren’t involved in the writing of the screenplay, even if lots of dialogue is the same.
I agree with Dan that it would be best if IFDB could let you describe the roll of an author, similar to how Goodreads works. Then the source material’s creator could be included, as a “based on” role. However even then I’d be hesitant to add anyone that the IF work’s author(s) don’t credit, unless there’s a clear case of plagiarism from them.
They may not get screenwriting credits, but they do get story credits, and not providing that credit is plagiarism.
It’s unlikely that anyone would notice that on a site as obscure as the IFDB, but it would be, at least, polite to provide a database field for the source authors if we’re going to conflate consulting with someone with making use of their work, and then act like they didn’t contribute a great deal to those works.
Traditionally, the “author” line means “company” (no specific credits listed), “author”, “translator” or usually just “programmer”. It is a curation problem because we have to enforce one hard rule to be this extensive: every port and variation gets its own page.
IFDB has to split up pages like the “Adventure” to recognize the port authors, IFIDs, platforms and walkthroughs to different versions. Either you lose all credits to port authors or turns out “Adventure” is a game from 1976 by William Crowther, Donald Woods, Graham Nelson, Anonymous… And the specificity doesn’t help reviews and ratings either.
I don’t think anyone is talking about not giving the author of the source novels or other material credit… It’s just a case of where would be most appropriate to do that without causing confusion or without making games look like authorised productions, especially in cases where they weren’t.
At the moment the best place to give such credit would be in the game description field; at least until a suitable extra field is added for that sort of information.
At the risk of sounding like a slightly broken and not very interesting record, there needs to be a way to remove tags added by other users. This is particularly annoying when a malicious, unfair or just wrong tag, like “incomplete”, has been added to a game by a user that was active for one week in 2002. It also occasionally results in ‘retaliatory’ tags (“not actually a female protagonist, my heterosexual friend”) which are amusing but cumbersome. ISTR that someone contacted the occasionally active maintainer of IFDB about this and they seem to believe there’s a good reason not to allow detagging, but frankly, they’re wrong.
Sure it’s not a big deal, but it’s a fairly relatively big deal in the limited scope of “things that would make IFDB less annoying”, IMO.
I think somebody needs to volunteer to steward IFDB into the land of open source.
That person (“the steward”) would need to agree to work with Mike Roberts, accepting the code as-is, raw, and do whatever is needed to put it up on Github/Gitlab without exposing any of the deployment/DB credentials to the public.
The steward would then furthermore need to work on deploy scripts, so Mike can deploy changes to IFDB based on the current latest version on Github with little or no effort. (Presumably we’d want the steward to be able to deploy changes themselves without waiting on Mike, but that’s between the steward and Mike.)
In so doing, the steward would have to document how to set up a working local developer environment that others can use, and thereby test a local copy of IFDB with modifications.
With all of that in place, community members could volunteer to add features by submitting pull requests. The steward would manage the pull requests and merge them on behalf of Mike (who would presumably still be the BDFL of IFDB).
Assuming any volunteer steward could be found, Mike would then have to agree to any of this, which he might not.
I can’t volunteer to be steward any time this year. Perhaps no one can be found to put a bell on this cat.
But until a steward can be found, there’s no point in litigating what IFDB should do/be, because it’s just not gonna change.
Are you sure MJR has the right to publish the IFDB’s code with an open-source license? He might not be using software that would allow him to do that.
Considering how central the IFDB is to this community, and considering how MJR has shouldered the burden of server costs and maintenance for so long, we might want to start considering the possibility that MJR may not want to keep the IFDB running indefinitely.
Are there any open-source alternatives out there? If not, can we cobble together some open-source projects to provide similar functionality? (Maybe a database with a blogging platform for reviews pasted on?) Can we then find someone to host the server, so MJR doesn’t have to keep paying for this stuff forever?
Maybe we’ve become too dependent on MJR to keep providing the IFDB for us. If I remember correctly, the IFDB was originally an alternative to Baf’s Guide and the IF Carousel. But, both of them are gone now.
No, but it’s in PHP on MySQL; it would surprise me if he had access to source code that he would be unauthorized to publish to Github. (If IFDB has significant closed-source dependencies, he probably doesn’t have/need the source to them.)
Rebuilding IFDB from scratch would be possible in principle, but that sounds like a much bigger volunteer job than open-sourcing IFDB. Not to mention that you’d have to fork IFDB, earning/attracting new users and links. I think the only advantage of trying to rebuild IFDB from scratch is that the new maintainer wouldn’t require Mike’s permission for anything.
FWIW, there are DB backups of IFDB on the IF Archive; the data is available under a Creative Commons license. So it could be done. But I wouldn’t!
I don’t know the details. I only know IFDB is in PHP because it has sometimes displayed PHP errors when it’s down/buggy. I only know it uses MySQL because the IF Archive SQL dump says “MySQL” at the top.
As a newcomer I have wondered about the duplication between IFDB and IFWiki.
There is an extension for MediaWiki called Cargo which would allow the IFDB database to be stored (once imported), edited and queried on a wiki. I use it and have always been happy with it. It is all open source.
That’s an excellent idea. The IFDB has none of the information about designers, development systems, the comps/fairs/jams, or essayists (or links to their essays) that the IFWiki has.
We’d need some way to prevent people from editing other people’s reviews, but combining the IFDB and the IFWiki would create a central repository of information for the IF world.
Creating the IFDB must have been a labour of love, but I don’t imagine changing it all now would be! Similarly for the IFWiki.
I think I read somewhere that the IFTF were considering working on the IF Archive. It would be great if the other two sites could be adopted by the IFTF and all three combined. Or at least if their territory could be marked out more clearly - for example, it might make sense for IFWiki not to have pages on games.
With MediaWiki, the reviews could be on user sub-pages, and user pages can be protected so that only admins and the relevant user can edit them. But there are probably many reasons for MediaWiki not being suitable. It’s just the software I’m most familiar with and it seemed (at first) to be relevant to the thread.
Except from a few details, such as we cannot remove other people’s tags, I think IFDB is close to perfect. For instance, it is very user-friendly. Not sure if you can obtain the same user-friendliness if you implement it as a Wiki-site. I am not an expert, but if you are to write a review on a wiki-site, how do you keep count of the reviews, the ratings, the average rating etc. And as someone mentioned, how do you make sure reviews are not edited by others? How do you implement the advanced search function, polls etc etc.
At least I think it would be a huge work to reach the same functionality and user-friendliness as IFDB so only if IFDB could not be continued, would I regard it as a good idea.
I also think the IFWiki is pretty good as it is. Many games do not have much information, but it is a good place to add information about a game, or to link to relevant information.
Perhaps IFWiki would be used more, if there on IFDB was a direct link to IFWiki for each game, similar to (or instead of) the link to Baf’s Guide.
