Writing Prompt Time limit?

[P/o Prune]

Unfortunately, I don't see things changing. The Facebook generation are never going to enjoy the kind of games we had as kids and they'd choose something like Candy Crush or Farmville over the likes of The Hobbit any day.

Don't be too sure
My 8 year old grandson came in to my "office" while I was testing my entry to the IFComp 2018. At first he just stood there watching, but slowly he got more and more interested and he actually ended up playing it with me for a little over an hour. (Not that I got much work done in that time. Now on the bright side, if it's cr*p I can always blame it on him.)

[Lumin]

The days of downloading and installing a game on your own are definitely gone though, and let's not even get into the terrifying complexity of installing a program just to run another program, and then checking to make sure you have the right version of that program. Seamless no fuss online play is a must. Most of the other interpreters already have that down though.

[David Whyld]

ADRIFT really needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. I don't have much interest in online play myself, but I'm definitely in the minority there.

On the Quest site, they have pretty good online play and you can even write games online if you want. With ADRIFT, online play is pretty hit and miss. Not all games work with it and even if they do, the WebRunner seems to be down half the time. I just tried three games at random - one didn't support online play at all (but no reason was given for it) and the other two gave me an error message that the server was taking too long to respond. And there's never been an option to write the games online.

Of the two, Quest seems to be embracing the online scene really well (aside for that eyesore of a forum), whereas ADRIFT just hits you with error messages. If Quest itself wasn't so bad, and if it had a half decent forum, I'd be really tempted to use it instead. Any newcomers to the scene - checking out each website in turn - are far more likely to pick Quest than ADRIFT.

[Lumin]

I started a game with the newest version of Quest once, just to try it out. It's not terrible, at least nothing like it used to be, but it definitely requires some dramatic adjustment of thinking though just in the way their version of tasks etc are structured and I have no idea how the more complex stuff compares since I was keeping what I was doing pretty simple.

And then the forumpocalypse happened and that was a dealbreaker, my interest in the site just evaporated overnight. I'd still like to know how 'let's take a perfectly serviceable forum supporting a community, then strip away all personality, remove everyone's names in public and all ability to communicate in private, genius!' ever seemed like a good idea. And it took what, a year just to add back any way for people to message each other, after tons of complaining that they mostly bitched at their own forum members for because gosh darn it they just didn't understand their vision.

There are some buried gems on that site though which have received no attention at all. Makes it even more of a shame that more than half the front page is dedicated to games not even made with Quest.

[David Whyld]

I suspect that's intentional. Before the site's revamp, Quest had a reputation as a system which produced some truly awful games. A well-deserved reputation, too, considering how bad most of the games were (and continue to be). Then they had the revamp, games not written with Quest are front page on the site and - hey presto! - suddenly Quest's reputation is much better than before. Why? Well, it certainly isn't because of the Quest games, I can tell you that.

Think about it. You're a newcomer to the world of IF. You Google 'text adventures' - because that's what most people used to call them - and what's the first link you see? Yep, it's the Quest website which is now called Text Adventures. Pretty smart really. If there's one way to guarantee your site gets some attention, it's to call it by the name of the genre. Even better, if that very same site has displayed prominently on the first page games like Zork and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - which are likely titles you've heard of even if you're a total newcomer - it'll grab your attention right off the bat. You'll be sucked in. By the time you realise that none of the good games were actually written with Quest, and that roughly 100% of the bad ones were written with Quest, you're already on the site and have likely started writing your first game.

I don't know whether to be impressed with the sheer nerve of it, or appalled that someone would be so underhanded and dishonest. At the very least, it should clearly state which games are written with Quest and which aren't. I'm also quite surprised that no one has ever taken issue with this as I'm sure if we started uploading classic IF games to the main ADRIFT site, and made a point of hiding the fact that they weren't ADRIFT games, people would be up in arms about it. Talk about false marketing.

All that said, I'm genuinely curious as to what kind of traffic the Quest site gets and how much of it is for the Quest games and how much for the non-Quest games. Something tells me the great majority of it will be for the latter.

[Lumin]

I'm guessing a lot of Quest authors aren't too knowledgeable of the wider IF community and so aren't really aware of what a crappy policy that is. Here's a guy with several decent, if sometimes flawed games that will never see any kind of spotlight even though they're genuinely fun to poke around in. Xanmag here has a couple of pretty large and ambitious ones that are much the same. Because there's no real community on the forum anymore and whoever makes the front page listings seems to have very little interest in showcasing the actually decent games on the site.

Although I've seen links that go directly to games made with other systems, on other sites, which you have to pay for to play which...makes no sense at all unless there was some advertising deal in there, or else somebody just isn't paying attention.

I know our site....could be better but Campbell is MIA most of the time and so we make do. The fact Quest has people actively updating it and making these choices is what makes all the issues over there so baffling to me.

All that said, I'm genuinely curious as to what kind of traffic the Quest site gets and how much of it is for the Quest games and how much for the non-Quest games. Something tells me the great majority of it will be for the latter.

Lol, there's a lot of weird fetish porn stuff on there that gets played a lot. All extremely highly rated despite being stuff even the AIF community would laugh out of the room.

Furries ruined the internet.

[David Whyld]

I've long since given up trying to find good Quest games. While they certainly exist, the sheer amount of unplayable cr*p you have to wade through to find them makes it not worth the effort. There have been discussions on the forum about fixing things, but nothing ever seems to change. I guess the people who dislike it leave and the ones who don't mind, or don't care enough to push the issue, are the ones who stay. It also doesn't help that almost every game on the Quest site has multiple ratings of 5 out of 5 which makes finding anything half decent an exercise in futility.

Ideally what they need to do is clear out 99% of the cr*p and implement rules to stop it happening again, but as they can't even fix that awful forum, it's unlikely it'll ever happen.

Edit: Since when did this forum start censoring cr(a)p? It's really hard to have a discussion about Quest without using that word repeatedly