For whatever reason - possibly due to their divergent evolution from the standard set by Infocom’s games or possibly due to their embodied protagonist being controllable with the arrow keys - Sierra’s games such as King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Quest for Glory have not been put on the IFDB.
I would like to contend that these games should count as interactive fiction based on several criteria that they share with works that are accepted to the IFDB:
A focus on the parser - while these games gilded the lily with graphics, sounds, music, and having the embodied-player navigation that was used to infamous effect both in the parser King’s Quest games and the pure-adventure-game King’s Quest V, they are fundamentally parser games. Every command besides movement is resolved by typing it in. (There are also easter eggs of the kind that can only be done via a parser, such as “pick nose” and responses to profanity.) I would contend that this resemblance hews much closer to modern notions of interactive fiction than it does the adventure game. Consider how, while plenty of modern interactive fiction still uses a parser, almost no modern adventure game uses the “arrows-and-parser” model of Sierra’s games. I would therefore consider these games to have a home on a database that is catered to interactive fiction enthusiasts. Parser theorists and historians have much to learn from these games.
Other genre hybrids are accepted - games such as Fallthru, which have enough RPG-signature characteristics such as combat and statistical development of the character that even The CRPG Addict considers them to be RPGs, are included on the IFDB due to the fact that they have just as much of a claim as being interactive fiction. I contend that we can view Sierra’s parser games as “interactive fiction-adventure hybrids,” constituting the missing link in Sierra’s gameography between graphical interactive fiction such as Mystery House and the all-mouse adventure King’s Quest V.
The list of 19 games that would be added if this proposition is accepted is:
King’s Quest (1984)
King’s Quest II
Space Quest I
King’s Quest III
Space Quest II
Leisure Suit Larry
Police Quest
King’s Quest IV
Leisure Suit Larry 2
Police Quest 2
Gold Rush!
Space Quest III
Hero’s Quest/Quest For Glory
The Colonel’s Bequest
Leisure Suit Larry III
Code-Name: Iceman
King’s Quest 1 (1990 remake)
Quest for Glory II
Conquests of Camelot
(The Black Cauldron, Mixed-Up Mother Goose, Manhunter: New York, and Manhunter 2: San Francisco, while using the same AGI engine as many of these games, do not have a parser element and so are considered by me to be plain ol’ adventure games. Mixed-Up Mother Goose, Quest for Glory 1, and Leisure Suit Larry 1 all got VGA, parserless remakes as well which are not included in this list.)
I admit that I am more liberal than many, but I would personally include anything with parser input without reservation. The rest of the Sierra games might make for an interesting conversation some other time, but I agree with your proposal.
I probably just never noticed they were missing because I don’t like Sierra’s walk-around games, but I think it’s obvious everything up to Space Quest III can/should be in IFDB if anyone wants to put them there. (I just haven’t played the ones after SQ3, so I don’t know them. If they have a parser like the others, well, boom!)
There was some discussion about this in this thread from 2020, in case you’re curious. But that thread is from before IFTF adopted IFDB. (It might actually be the thread that prompted IFTF to adopt IFDB.)
Speaking only for myself (not IFTF), it seems weird to consider the parser a bright line when IFDB contains so many non-parser IF games.
If the question is what games influenced the modern IF tradition, then you’re talking about the KQ series as a whole; splitting it between 4 and 5 makes no sense to me.
I don’t know where the line is best drawn, but I do understand why someone might draw a line there–not only because the parser gets dropped, but also because there’s a shift away from interacting with the game via text a lot of the time to interacting with the game almost exclusively via its graphics–by clicking cursor icons onto pictures.
It isn’t a bright line for me, as I’d be comfortable going all the way to VII (I think, it’s been a bit). But there might be more controversy regarding the mouse-only games, which is why I punted. Well, and because OP didn’t ask.
I wasn’t thinking bright lines, or even deeply. Just piping into this conversation in the context of the games that I’ve played, where the parser and text, and even their chronology, make them seem pretty obvious fits.
If I go to the beginning of this topic, P-Tux said ‘…have not been put on the IFDB.’
IFDB has no official policy of completism, and no paid staff with goals like that, so it’s traditionally gotten whatever the community finds useful or is interested in, or helps people. You see this in how amateur games have a ton more coverage there than a lot of commercial games that sold thousands in their day, or which aren’t even listed. Now the history of IF’s getting longer and people’s views on what’s IF mostly continue to expand, rather than narrow.
The games in discussion in this topic haven’t needed much help, as that other linked topic points out, which lowers motivation to put them on IFDB, which is work. Someone’s motivation to put something on IFDB is part of why any game is or isn’t there.
If you’re motivated to put these games on IFDB, hooray! I know this wasn’t the question, but in a way, you don’t need a theory debate about whether or not they should be on there if you’re prepared to put them on there. For a bunch of reasons, nobody has done it. I don’t think controversy about whether some of them are IF or not has been one of the big factors. Others can tell me if I’m wrong for some historical community reason.
The answers in here surprise me somewhat! I’ve always understood “interactive fiction” to mean: The primary way of presentation and interaction is text. But the innovation of King’s Quest was that you navigate the world by controlling a graphical representation of the player character through a three-dimensional space in real-time.
It’s a critical skill for the player, too. There are parts where you have to use the arrow keys to carefully shimmy across tight ledges. Heck, you can die on the very first screen by being clumsy and steering Sir Graham right into the alligator-filled moat. That’s not something I’d personally expect when something is labeled “interactive fiction”.
At this point, one could very well add the Lucasfilm/LucasArts adventure games up to Day of the Tentacle, because they still basically operate like King’s Quest, where you use text commands to interact. Here, even walking to a location is explicitely represented by a text command! The only difference is that you build the syntax by clicking instead of typing.
I’ve only ever tried my hand at mouse-controlled remakes of the King’s Quest series, but with the control through parser commands, these would be very similar to The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian, which is listed on IFDB.
Mind you, Maddog goes further than just having the parser. I addition to the graphics, locations are described in text as you enter them, and LOOK pulls up this description again. I don’t know if the original KIng’s Quest games do this.
there’s another point to consider: the AGI format used by Sierra was decoded (sound familiar ?) and there’s also compiler and tools for writing AGI story file format (sound familiar ?) so, I think that the question ought to be generalised in “should the AGI (and SCI) story file formats works be in the IFDB ?”
I find this to be a strange question. The important thing isn’t the engine; it’s what you do with it. One can write a very traditional text adventure in Unreal Engine, and in fact Talos Principle 2 has some embedded. One can also use the Z-machine to write things that are decidedly not text adventures, like Freefall — the Tetris clone which was Zarf’s joke entry to the 1995 IFComp.
If something is historically important and at least somewhat kin to IF, then I don’t think it should have to meet a strict definition of interactive fiction to be listed on IFDB, IFArchive, etc. Freefall is there today, and I think all the Sierra games discussed here have a much better claim than Freefall does. Whether games of that nature should be accepted into IFComp today is a separate question, and not one that has to have the same answer (I’d say no).
now, now… I can understand that answering the question (sierra and the indie sci/agi work should be included in the database ?) can require the definition of the border between IF and graphic adventures, and this IS a veritable can of worms, but what matter is this:
in the 2023 IFComp we have an entry whose is much more akin to the ancient trek games than interactive fiction and a political strategy entry, and no one contested their place in the database, for example. And a Sierra or sci/agi work is more akin to the IF than the pair of examples I offered.
so, my opinion is that Sierra and sci\agi works can and should be placed into IFDB.
I believe being on IFDB is the main requirement for a game to be eligible for the XYZZY Awards, which is why I’m asking.
It’s not totally clear to me to what extent people are thinking “King’s Quest 4 is definitely IF” (or “King’s Quest 5 is definitely IF,” or “All games in the style of King’s Quest 4 or King’s Quest 5 are IF”), and to what extent people are thinking “King’s Quest games are not what we usually mean when we say IF, but since they are adjacent to IF, and historically important, we should make an exception and include them. But we’re not going to turn IFDB into the text-and-graphic-adventure-database.”
That’s been my sort of criteria as well: the presentation and interaction is primarily based on text/printed words and reading and responding.
But parser isn’t the sole-delimiter. Both 80 Days and Sunless Sea provide graphical navigation on top of a choice narrative or QBN, which are both considered IF.
While I feel there’s no problem entering Sierra games to IFDB and they probably won’t hurt anything - Sierra started with a two-word parser, and Softporn is basically a text-adventure Leisure Suit Larry so they’ve got the cred. A recent interview with Roberta Williams proves this.
However one of the things about IF in general is there are many games - such as Sierra - that incorporate IF tropes as a part of their gameplay. I’ve heard people argue that Mass Effect is most certainly IF because it uses dialogue trees. And there’s the “this game is fictional and interactive so it’s plainly IF” argument that is semantics. IF is our specific genre. Graphical Adventures such as Maniac Mansion and Thimbleweed Park straddle the Venn diagram of an exploratory adventure using words and created sentences as an interface so wouldn’t get as much argument from IF fans, but at some point that connection fizzles, where Mass Effect’s primary gameplay is shooter combat and there are cutscenes with dialog trees that might affect the branching cutscenes, I don’t believe calling it “IF” is really helpful to describe the game. I suppose you might be able to remove the shooty parts and make it into a pure choice narrative, but that isn’t really the intended appeal of that game.
My phone is a bluetooth device that connects to my other bluetooth devices such as my humidifier and my cat fountain and my TV for control. My car also connects to the bluetooth of my phone, but it seems less helpful to define a car as a “bluetooth device” since it has so much more going on - I connect to the stereo in my car which is definitely a bluetooth device, but I don’t drive my car using the bluetooth connection. This is similar to the Fallout 3 has dialogue choices so it’s IF! argument. Sort of but calling it IF blurs the line so the actual IF designation is less helpful for someone who needs to know how that game operates.
Agreed. If you think they belong, put them on there. You might get eye-rolls from people but it’s fine.
In fact, later Sierra games stopped using the parser and went to what I could argue is “limited parser” or choice, so technically all Sierra games could potentially be on IFDB. We kind of fudge a bit anyway for folks like Inkle and Sam Barlow who cut their teeth in true IF and branched out, because often IF folk tend to create games that would appeal to fans of the actual genre.
Ultimately, games win XYZZY awards because people vote for them. I wouldn’t use XYZZY eligibility as a fence when it comes to these deliberations. There are a lot of games that interest the community that wouldn’t win an award but seem important or relevant enough to associate with more clearly delineated works. Hanon mentions tropes and conventions originating from Sierra games, and I think that’s significant.
If people want to tag such games in a way that allows players to see those linkages, that’s a research benefit to the community.
I think general community interest is what drives these choices more often then not. It’s not hard to imagine us all having a conversation about Sierra games within the context of IF. There was a larger, blanket term, “adventure game” in those days that covered a lot of ground! We might be less likely to have an active discussion about Fallout 4 (well, I wouldn’t be a part of it, anyway).
