Her Story was my thought as well, but I wasn’t certain enough to make the leap. 
Pinkunz has discussed Portopia, an older Japanese game turned into an AI piece this year, on this forum, so I suspect it is not meant to be Photopia.
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Sorry, that’s what I get for compiling my list last minute.
(Also, the Square Enix AI thing using Portopia was a disgrace and a public embarrassment.)
(P.S. If anyone wants to play the original Portopia in English, the above link is my favorite translation of the game.)
(P.P.S. Thank you for the dilligence in accounting for all my votes, even on entries that will almost certainly not make the top 50 cut. Your principle is noticed and appreciated.)
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Oh, I’d forgotten the recent Portopia was a remake/remaster! Looks like it’s playable as a NES rom which is nice.
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I’m afraid neither of those is making the Top 50… but I want my spreadsheet to be correct, dammit! Also, I’ll put the full list of titles / authors / years / votes out there for people to play with.
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Yes, you are right with both games. Thanks for the involvement and forgive my por writing
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Do I have a teaser? I have a teaser!
(Yes, there are more than 50 games in this chart. Lots of games sharing 49th place.)
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It seems that there aren’t people who have played jewel games from the gold era. Perhaps too young people or people that don’t remember that years anymore.
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I think it’s more likely that a lot of old time players aren’t part of the modern IF community and don’t even know about this poll. Personally I like it when there’s a good spread over time. Though there will always be in built biases based on the voting group.
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I don’t have hard data for this (though IFDB could be used to collect them), but I suspect there are more games beings made – and certainly more games being widely disseminated – now than there were back in the 80s and 90s. So if average game quality has remained the same, this graph isn’t so strange!
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It is very usual in top 50 over many decades to have this distribution. Eg: for movies.
Only the creme de la creme for older decades emerge while our brain is skewed to include more recent, less good works, because the memory of the enjoyment is fresher in our mind.
That being said, I have film critics friends that do not hesitate to say “everything I’ve seen this past year is not worth mentionning in any top, a thousand movie from the last 50 years are better than any of these” (but they don’t actually say it too loud in public lest they’re considered snob a-holes)
(Source : having worked on building a recommandation engine for a streaming platform)
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The memory bias is certainly at play (one lists games they’ve played recently). But there is a different sort of bias in remembering games you’ve listed “best” in the past and never updating the list. This happens in game criticism and cinema. “Citizen Kane” was a great film when released eighty years ago, and belongs in any film studies class, but it isn’t actually much fun to watch for modern audiences who’ve seen the same techniques repurposed and improved upon in more modern films.
I think the same is true of many of the canonical IF games from the mid 90s. I won’t name specific examples, because many of those authors are still around (writing even better games) Those 90s games influenced what came after, but aren’t necessarily the best modern example of the technique or style they launched.
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Yes, but some of those games were incredibly formative, and so play an outsized role in our minds. For instance, I don’t think anyone doubts that Counterfeit Monkey still belongs very high on the list, but even if it had been bested by more recent games, I can never forget how wowed I was by playing such an amazing game by a woman who was kicking ass and taking names in what I had perceived to be a boy’s club, which nudged me closer to wondering if I could do it, too. When a game had such a profound effect on me and my writing and my getting up the gumption to attempt this, they are favorites and they will probably remain that way. For me, anyway, it’s not that those older games are still on the list because my canon is static, it’s because I still look to those games for inspiration.
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Yeah, making something groundbreaking typically means someone else will get the opportunity to polish it into perfection later.
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Perceptions can be deceiving. I have never considered text adventures to be the domain of men, as many of the greats from the golden age of text adventures in the 1980s were actually women.
In the modern age, there’s probably an even greater proportion of female authors. The dominance of narrative-based and choice-based interactive fiction has been largely responsible for that, but there are also a lot of women producing parser-based interactive fiction (including yourself), and that’s a good thing, if you ask me.
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I see what you’re trying to say, but I feel like that misses the point. It doesn’t matter if the insiders think it’s not a boy’s club; it doesn’t matter how many women have written great text adventures. The problem (if you think it’s a problem) is the perception of outsiders like past-Amanda and others that they don’t belong, regardless of what the reality may or may not be…
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There are several different threads of IF history, and how women were treated differ in them.
I know that in the era of type-ins and magazines like Garry is discussing, women were more prolific (including my boss; she ran classes for young girls in the 80s to write text adventures).
In the Usenet->ifcomp->xyzzy awards->intfiction thread of history, women were ostracized a lot. A quick check of the XYZZY Awards show that no women were even nominated for a single award (out of around 40 nominations per year) for the first two years, and only 2 nominations were received for a woman-written game in the third year.
Suzanne Britton and Emily Short were early prominent authors, but Emily Short has mentioned receiving frequent harassment and was often asked if she was a man in disguise, while Suzanne Britton quit the community after events such as the game Futz Mutz being entered in IFComp containing a diatribe calling her several profane words for a woman.
So it all depends on which part of history you were a part of. The type-in/magazine/illustrated adventures seem to have been less misogynistic than the ifcomp/xyzzy group.
Edit: I was wrong about there being no nominations in 1996; see the reply below by St John Limbo!
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Whoa, I consider myself part of the modern audience, and I still think Citizen Kane is a lot of fun to watch.
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Without skewing the conversation too much: If Emily Short was not such a celebrated member of the Inform 7 community (back when I had picked up I7), then I would never have made an account on this forum. Women having respect and recognition in a community is usually a primary litmus test that people of certain minorities use when gauging if they’ll get harassed and dismissed upon joining or not, or how welcome they might be to share their experiences and offer input.
A lot of people don’t generally want to enter a community “under cover” to scope it out first, and then have a “coming out” later, because a lot of us already have to do that enough irl and it’s exhausting. So a lot of us might check some external indicators to see if it’s even worth the effort, or if we should cut our losses and move on.
Also, this indicator isn’t 100% perfect, of course, but it’s a useful-enough statistical trend that it can be used to avoid getting too comfy with a community and, one day, discovering that everyone is totally okay with tossing hate speech around and saying horrible things about the other parts of you, which you have kept secret during your time there so far. At that point, you cannot feel like you matter anymore, and it completely defeats the point of sticking around.
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Emily Short was my entryway into IF because of reading her blog and finding a link to SpringThing. I waffled over submitting anything, mostly out of anxiety- though the blurb on the website went a long way into feeling comfortable enough to submit.
Spring Thing especially welcomes diverse voices and populations traditionally underrepresented in gaming, including women, people of color, queer and LGBT+ folks, and blind, neuro-diverse, or disabled creators. People from all walks of life should feel encouraged to participate as players, authors, or reviewers.
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This, 100%.
I do not want to minimize the accomplishments of women in IF before 2000, because I know they were there and doing brilliant things. The point is, I did not see them. All the great games I read about, heard about, and played were by Johns and Grahams and Andrews and Adams. Plus, there was (is?) a whole societal cesspool of ugly about women gaming at all. So the perception I had as an outsider was both true and false, and it would take a while to unpack all that if I wanted to.
But back to topic-- old games staying on favorites lists-- my favorite Shakespeare play is still A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Not because it’s his best play; it surely isn’t. Almost every other comedy he wrote was richer and deeper, not to mention the wealth of the tragedies and histories. But it was the first play I GOT. It was the first time I felt capable of reading, understanding, and enjoying Shakespeare (for a 14-year-old, the way in is always a good butt joke). So Dream stays high on my list of favorites, because every time I read it, I remember and re-experience that thrill. Plus, Wall is truly freaking funny. Same with many older games.
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