IF Reviews on The Web

Adam Cadre, author of the landmark IF games PHOTOPIA, INTERSTATE ZERO and VARICELLA, recently remarked in an interview that the general upswing in the popularity of IF over the past three years or so will come with a cost. Back when the genre was still being born, anyone who actually managed to finish off a game in TADS or INFORM and get it posted on the archive could usually rely upon it receiving the attention of a small but energetic group of IF enthusiasts who simply read everything that mad it that far. As more and more games get finished, however, and it becomes less and less feasible for even the hardiest keener to play and download absolutely everything that's out there, new authors might increasingly come to find their work getting ignored. Given the amount of work that goes into producing an average-sized piece of IF - not to mention any extra amount of time it might take programming novices to learn their way around the major languages used to write this stuff - getting ignored like this could be incredibly disheartening. How can we prepare for this impending problem for the IF community? A number of people have already figured out that the best way of protecting new authors from this sort of colossal disappointment will be by making a concerted effort to co-ordinate the efforts of all the people who play IF games in such a way as to guarantee that every game released gets at least one substantial, carefully though-out review on the web. Fortunately this project doesn't have to be started completely from scratch. Anyone who has ever visited Baf's Guide to The IF Archive () has doubtless been impressed by the sheer range and quantity of reviews that [] has managed to get written there. There is also a well-established tradition of posting reviews for all of the games from the annual IF competition. There are dozens of sites where such reviews can be found all across the web - my own favorites are Adam Cadre's own set of highly eccentric competition reviews (http://interactfiction.miningco.com/game... and the sustained reflections of Mike Roberts, IF demigod and author of TADS on the complete list of competition games (http://home.pacbell.net/mjr_/ifcomp_99_r... Other places to watch are the recently initiated "IF Review Conspiracy," (http://www.textfire.com/ifreview.html) organized by Marnie Parker and Duncan Stevens, the goal of which is to do precisely what Adam recommended, viz. to get a review out there of everything that gets posted to the archive, no matter how tame or ambitious. My own contribution to this worthy endeavor will be to post reviews to Thomas Freeland's website for The Games Factory (http://www.thegamesfactory.com/games.htm... on a regular basis. The last thing we want is for new 'converts' to IF to shy away from the genre because of a fear that their modest early efforts at programming might get left out in the cold.

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