Great links. I see these two things as complementing each other rather than being in competition with each other, though. I rate a lot of games on IFDB (I am the number 5 reviewer, I believe); but rarely do I sit down and ask myself which games are my favourite IF games of all time. I’d love to do that, and I’d also love to see what other people would come up with.
(Blue Lacuna. Make it Good. Oh wait, we haven’t started yet?)
Rather than a single “Top 100” list, I think it might be better to have several shorter lists - perhaps one “overall favorites” and several others by genre.
I don’t see an Ad Verbum or The Gostak being able to rise on an overall list to the level of an ADVENT or Zork, but for the kind of person that likes the sort of puzzles that those games - and/or Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Heads or Tails Of It - offer, a list headed by those three games might well be of more interest, and get the person to explore the other offerings from such a list, than a list populated by Zork, Planetfall, Deadline, Kook University, Sand-Dancer, and so on.
Granted, IF isn’t books, but The New York Times broke up their best-seller lists by genre a long time ago for good reason; I’m suggesting that we apply the same logic to IF.
(As a side note, can anyone think of a workable way to get IF more into the public eye? Doing so might increase the interest in the form, and start a “renaissance” of sorts. I can’t see more interest as a bad thing.)
If we get 100 participants, that might be feasible. 
But isn’t this territory well-covered by the polls and recommended lists of IFDB?
(Don’t start talking about the most-discussed topic in IF as a side note, please! 
)
One of the most obvious things to come out of this discussion is that you’re likely to get very different lists depending on how votes are solicited, how they’re structured (numerical score vs. unordered best-of list) and how the results are displayed. Victor’s approach is likely to throw up quite different things from Juhana’s IFDB-ganking or the IF-Ratings-but-more-so thing that Grueslayer wants. (Apart from anything else, a vote-by-mail list is going to pick out a different set of people than a site with account creation and continuous open voting.)
So, the more the merrier, particularly if it’s treated as an experiment. (One of the reasons I like Victor’s approach is that it’s pretty low-investment for the organiser in terms of skills and time. Anybody with a few spare hours can organise it; and if it’s tried and not judged useful enough to be worth repeating, or to overlap existing resources to the point of redundancy, then no great loss.)
If no one feels that I am mowing the grass away before their feet*, I’ll organise this.
That would overlap very heavily with IFDB.
There isn’t really enough IF to make this kind of splitting feasible. There are probably more books published every year than all the IF that has been written, ever. I could list all the Gostak-Ad Verbum-type games without taking off my boots.
The NYT is able to make divisions because different genres of book really are distributed and read in very different ways: romance novels are not written, marketed or consumed like literary fiction, and neither are self-help books. The only strong, pre-existing division by genre in IF is porn vs. not-porn; the other divisions are by platform and language rather than content. (Yes, we grump about puzzle-heavy vs. puzzleless and strong-characterisation vs. AFGNCAAP a lot, but there isn’t a Puzzleless-IF Community or anything.)
All hail!
Please just let there be enough time to organize a maximum of effect on public, id est ideas on how to promote the stuff so that it’s not a thing within this limited scene, but rather something the targeted audience has indeed a chance to stumble across.
Like, if it’d be a site on its own it’d be easier to draw the attention of non-IF game sites than if it was just something within this forum, with some 15 votes for or against a top X list, stuff like that, ya know.
Well, the voting should probably be done by the scene, because who else has a top 10 of IF works? So I’m thinking of posting it on the forum, on my blog (which is indexed on Platen IF) and on the newsgroup. That should reach basically everyone who is active in IF.
The results are the thing that is (if enough people participate) interesting to the public at large. If someone wants to create a site for them, that would be great, but let’s wait till we see whether the results are worth making a site for. 
Make that “every week” and it might still be true.
The other thing IFDB could probably offer is a top X table of recent downloads. In some ways this is more akin to charts as it shows what people are playing right now.
Better yet if it could be integrated to the “Play Online” button. I suspect a significant number of people aren’t downloading as much as playing it on Parchment (where applicable, naturally). Those are the games people are “playing now”.
Heck! I’d be more than happy to host a site for the results. I’ll Work on it so I can put it up before ‘elections’.
So I guess the only thing is to set a tentative closing date, and to advertise?
Though I guess the form needs to go through some revisions
I already made a topic, because nobody seemed to mind and I wanted to (a) have a full month and (b) stop before IF Comp starts. If you want any revisions, please discuss them here, and I’ll be happy to make changes.
I’ve done a bb post at ifMUD, just to cover a few more of the bases.
Great. I’ll take care of Planet IF and the newsgroup.
Just wanted to mention that I find the format in which Victor posted his favourites exactly represents what I was hoping for. And I hope many people will follow by posting their favs.
Grueslayer: I’m glad to hear that.
For anyone who has been bookmarking this post: https://intfiction.org/t/participate-in-the-interactive-fiction-top-50/2744/1
A little update on the Top X. I now have 18 participants, who have voted for a total of 126 games. If my Excel wizardry… excuse me, if my LibreOffice Calc wizardry works, this is the way the number of votes per game is working out right now:
Games with 1 vote: 82
Games with 2 votes: 21
Games with 3 votes: 12
Games with 4 votes: 4
Games with 5 votes: 4
Games with 6 votes: 1
Games with 7 votes: 1
Games with 8 votes: 0
Games with 9 votes: 0
Games with 10 votes: 1
Which gives us a top 11, 23, or 44 depending on how strict you want to be. 
If you haven’t participated yet, please consider doing so! Right now, every list of votes makes the project a lot more useful.
I now have 21 voters, and the number of games with only one vote is actually beginning to decrease – a good sign. The current histogram*:
Games with 1 vote: 79
Games with 2 votes: 27
Games with 3 votes: 13
Games with 4 votes: 5
Games with 5 votes: 7
Games with 6 votes: 0
Games with 7 votes: 1
Games with 8 votes: 1
Games with 9 votes: 1
Games with 10 votes: 0
Games with 11 votes: 1
Keep 'em coming; there are still two weeks to participate.