My hunch is that Sierra games wouldn’t be a great fit for IFDB. I, myself, would not create game listings for them. But if someone else did, I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to delete them.
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Sincerely, I would have added them years ago, but I assumed someone else would delete them.
I don’t like wasting my effort.
Beyond the arguments already made, Sierra had a huge following back in the day. Many of those people who spent many an hour beating their heads against the parsers in those games (“put gem in mouth” really!?) would naturally be drawn to the plethora of modern IF games. Excluding them can make newcomers with that background wonder if they don’t quite belong.
I would know.
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The early games from Mystery House to The Dark Crystal should definitely be on there, if they aren’t already, as these are pure parser.
From King’s Quest on, I tend to feel that if you include one, then you should include them all. However, the mouse-only games are questionable.
In ParserComp, one of the criterion is that the game must be able to be played entirely via keyboard. Clicking on hyperlinks and that sort of thing is allowed, but only as an alternative to keyboard entry. Would this be a valid criterion for IFDB? Mind you, this criterion would rule out choice-based games, so where does one draw the line? There are hundreds of Sierra-like games out there. If you include one, then you’ve set a precedent and you have to include them all.
Point ‘n’ click games have their own communities. Maybe we should just leave them out of IFDB and let those communities do their own thing?
If I remember correctly, “interactive fiction” demands text input and output. A parser is optional, graphics are fine as long as the above definition applies. Thus, Detectiveland is interactive fiction, and Doki Doki Literature Club! is. Where’s the line? Maniac Mansion uses text as input for verbs and held items, but not for objects in the environment. It uses text output for dialogues, but everything else is depicted as graphics. Is that the line? The early Sierra adventures are on this side then.
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Yeah, actually, I’d stand by this.
Also genuinely surprised the Sierra games aren’t already on the IFDB. I kinda assumed they were.
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Just in case it needs to be said…you belong. 
(Psst…if you haven’t voted in this poll already, feel free to do that!)
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I’d like to add that there are already games on IFDB with very little text focus or even no text at all (e.g. some of the Bitsy games)! By comparison, the classics being discussed here seem like an obvious fit.
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There is no “have to” here. This is a community discussion.
There are no demands either. :)
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While not directly relevant to Sierra games, I’d say that not everything that’s interactive fiction needs a page. Almost all visual novels are unquestionably interactive fiction; but visual novels are vastly more popular and already get a lot more attention than what we currently have, and visual novels are already served by larger and arguably better websites for that purpose. And while many current IFDB users love visual novels, a large chunk of users don’t interact with them regularly. So while I embrace visual novels as ‘true IF’, I wouldn’t support adding every visual novel in the world.
So there’s a social aspect, too. But it can’t hurt to add a small number of games that may or may not fit the desired criteria; the worst that can happen is that they get only small interactions (like Disco Elysium or Heaven’s Vault on IFDB).
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Technically objects do create words. In the SCUMM engine hovering your mouse over a valid object in the scene puts that word prospectively at the end of the sentence you are making and if you click the word is added. SCUMM games like Secret of Monkey Island (at least before they adopted a similar “hover and get a wheel o’verbs” thing like Sierra eventually did) could be argued to be a fancy quasi-choice/parser engine. Similar to how Sunless Sea is a choice narrative where instead of maneuvering your mouse over links, you maneuver your boat to a “link”. It gets points for constructing sentences as the interface instead of just doing something by clicking a hotspot.
I’ve always thought a parser engine where you constructed a sentence command by clicking words in the description text would be cool.
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