re: CYBERQUEEN – Thanks, Porpentine, I’ll add it to my list. As you might imagine, I started assembling this list back in late November, after IF Comp was truly over, and of course, I started at IFDB. The downside of that is that any games added to IFDB in late December (or early January) tend to get missed until I go back to IFDB again, after I’ve combed everything else.
re: Choices of Zombies – Thanks, Dan, I’ll add it to my list. Was this announced earlier anywhere at the time of its release? (I have yet to check intfiction.org itself for info.)
re: Frankenstein – I know absolutely nothing about this one. Details, please. And why isn’t it on IFDB? Also, for what it’s worth, I’ve been unemployed for – uh, longer than I care to admit here, so suffice to say my tech knowhow has suffered enormously and I have almost no practical experience with iAnything.
It’s not on IFDB because… no reason why it shouldn’t be, but nobody has added it. Jon has been focusing more on marketing it outside trad IF contexts. He has also stated (to my mind, more or less correctly), that Frankenstein is not a game. And since it’s not freeware (or really designed for desktop computers), it’s not on the Archive and doesn’t match up very well with several of IFDB’s various functions. None of these are really disqualifying factors, but they go some way towards explaining it.
The IFDB rule seems fair enough to me. I have pretty much finished an option so that when uploading games to the ADRIFT site they are automatically added to IFDB too.
Thank you. I’m sure I’m not alone in welcoming that – it’s hard to keep an eye on all the new-release lists for different systems, so having things channeled through IFDB is very nice.
Most Quest games aren’t on IFDB either (no reason why they would be I suppose).
I’ll be adding all the non-Sandpit ones shortly, and when the new website is done this will be integrated into the Publish functionality too (though only after a game is reviewed - you seriously don’t want everything that gets uploaded).
I don’t think an IFDB-only rule is the way to go though. Surely that misses out on a lot of things created using Playfic, Inkle, Twine, etc.? We can’t pretend it’s like IMDB.
The link to the IFDB page for Ghosterington Night seems to be bad. The IFDB loads a page that says it was not found, although it is there: ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=6kko9va64c4o5jan
It’s plausible that a lot of things created using Inkle, Twine and Playfic won’t get in, and that’s okay. It is absolutely not our goal to represent the entire CYOA universe, and it may soon become impractical to represent the entire parser-IF world too.
(Every year, for instance, DavidW goes to some effort to dig up AIF games – they’re often published in fairly awkward-to-access places – but they never get nominated, and the interests and design goals of the AIF community are, clearly, very different. I think an equivalent principle holds if you publish a parser IF game just for your buddies on the Historical Alpine Flintknapping forums, with no expectation that anybody else will want to see it.)
And what we absolutely can’t do is pretend that we now represent the entire CYOA universe, then only include the CYOA platforms that we know about because our friends are involved in them. So the best compromise we can come up with is to say that a game is eligible for the XYZZYs if its author has demonstrated an interest in the opinion of the IF community, or people in the IF community feel that it’s interesting for IF purposes. Adding a game to IFDB is a decent proxy for that. (It takes five minutes to get an account and perhaps another ten to add a game listing. If you don’t do that for your own game, and nobody else can be bothered to either, all in the knowledge that this is what counts for XYZZY purposes, that’s a pretty good signal of a mutual lack of interest.)
So, yeah, my expectation at this point is that for next year, we’ll be moving to using IFDB as effectively the zeroth-round nomination.
Are you saying that the Quest site has a way to distinguish between complete and unfinished/coding-exercise pieces? Because it seems that would be very useful right now.
Anything that gets published publicly to textadventures.co.uk gets put initially in “Uncategorised”. A moderator takes a quick look at it - anything that can’t really be described as a proper game gets put into “Sandpit”, and the others get put into the category nominated by the author on uploading.
I hate to be that guy, but the XYZZY award nominations were open three months earlier last year. Is there anything I might do to help along the process?