How helpful or how common it is for a game to prominently include contact information for the author, like an email address, and what type of contact info works best?
Pros of including an email address would be that players could email bug reports or helpful comments. Cons would be, I guess, that the address could become obsolete, or people could send spam or otherwise unhelpful/unwelcome/creepy communication.
For authors whose email address is already public on their website or whatever, maybe it wouldn’t make much difference either way. But not everybody makes that public.
So far as my own work goes, I think that perhaps 10% of people (edit: it’s actually floating between 3% and 1%) who have downloaded or launched one of my games go on to rate, review, or get in touch.
Personally, I wouldn’t be hesitant to share my contact information in a game, given that kind of engagement rate. Hiding, er, I mean sharing my email address in the postgame content for Portrait with Wolf would be very safe, for instance.
Because my games are hosted on itch (I use IF archive for archival only), though, people already have a ready way to get in touch.
I may be an unusual case as an author of mostly arthouse-type parser games.
In Repeat the Ending, I suggested that people reach me here (intfiction.org):
If you discover a bug during the course of play, please contact Drew Cook (@kamineko) at the Interactive Fiction Community Forum (https://intfiction.org).
So far as I know, bots and crawlers cannot trawl parser games (though they can read source code, I suppose). Anyone who has read LLM content regarding my games can attest to this! I suppose that if that changed I would be more hesitant.
I don’t have any statistical data on this, but I think it’s a fairly common practice to mention an email address in the ABOUT text or a similar credits section.
The advantage of email is that it’s probably one of the easiest ways for others to get in touch, because everyone on the Internet already has an address, so someone who wants to give feedback doesn’t need to create an account on Itch or here.
Admittedly, our niche is so small that many of the people who are interested in IF (parser-based, at least) might actually be members of this forum, but email could reduce the friction and effort for those who don’t.
Providing a way to report bugs is very useful, and I also like the idea that someone who isn’t already part of the community could stumble upon my game in ten years’ time and send me some nice words out of the blue. Email addresses can unfortunately become obsolete, as you said, but they can also be longer-lasting than accounts on other platforms (cf. Google Plus, Orkut, or for other reasons Facebook or Twitter/X).
Regarding possible spam or other unwelcome messages, I’d advise authors to not use their “main” address, but to create a separate mail account just for IF- or gaming-related purposes instead.
As a player, I like when I find an email address I can write to.
It makes everything unfiltered and easy, and you can be much more frank (and encouraging).
I’ve put my email in most of my game ABOUTs. Yeah, I might not if I started to think gblorbs were being crawled, but there’s no sign of that yet. And what would I do, now? The other games are already out there. However, it’s different if you haven’t done this already.
I wouldn’t know if people have got my address this way to contact me, or via some other method (e.g. my website, which lets you get to my email but wards crawlers).
In the end, I feel like - you either want to be contactable or not. Everybody in the world hates being made to jump through any hoop to contact someone they want to contact. Ask them to join a service, join a forum – random people will decide they can’t be bothered, or are angry to be asked. I’ve definitely been angry to be asked to get on Twitter to talk to some service I’d paid for. Email has that fundament quality that is hoopless.
If you’re prepared to lose the odd person to protect your email address, you can do a hoopy method but still be contactable.
Creating extra email accounts can be a nuisance, too. If they become just forwarders, you forget you have them. So, there’s something wrong with everything
