Continuing the discussion from IFDB TagFest 2024 (information and guidelines):
Should this be a tag? It emphasizes works with a very specific easter egg, defeating the purpose (in my opinion) of there being such an easter egg. It’s always a pleasant surprise when IF has a response to this, and I feel like having the tag ruins the element of fun.
True, but if someone wants examples of games where XYZZY is implemented for a specific reason, that might be useful.
Since XYZZY is a command that someone can type at any time, it isn’t really gated in the way that, say, entering “hello, sailor” is in Zork III. I think an option for someone wanting to be surprised would be to launch the game and then enter the verb before reading the tags.
All tags are potential spoilers.
I’m curious, then, has there ever been a case where “XYZZY” could actually be used to solve a puzzle? Well, “Collossal Cave”, of course, but I mean since then?
I can’t think of any, but there must be some.
527 games got tagged, but the only game of mine in which I included XYZZY, specifically drawing attention to the fact in a topic on this subject, did not get tagged 
so I’ve tagged Ghosterington Night which punishes for typing XYZZY.
-Wade
Okay, seems like XYZZY has merit as a tag and ought to stay.
I played some game in the last year that was old school and the last action was something like, ‘Well of course, we must type the magic word to solve this little puzzle’ in an act of deliberate nostalgia. I wish I could remember which game it was…
Depends how one defines “solve a puzzle”. In my IFComp game of last year I allow the player to skip part of the game (the initial visit to the Sage etc) when using “xyzzy” as the first move to enable UNDO right at the start, taking the player back to the Choice where the player has the option to go directly for the final leg.
IIRC, decades ago someone collected many answers to XYZZY in a text file, now somewher in the if archive.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
You might be thinking of David Welbourn’s.IF Responses page which includes responses for “XYZZY”, “Plugh” and “Plover” among other things.
I used that list to tag a good number of games
Yeah, in Miss Gosling XYZZY is normally just an easter egg, but it can also bypass three puzzles—at a couple places in the game the correct direction to move is randomized and you have to solve a puzzle to know the right one. In those instances, XYZZY will choose the right direction for you automatically. (Makes unit tests a lot easier!)
Similarly in Stormrider XYZZY was the debugging command until the final release, when I changed that to XXYZZY, just to avoid people stumbling on it by accident.