Making my collection available for everyone

[Peter Pears]

I guess it doesn't do me much good to obsessively collect every new piece of IF if I keep it to myself and don't use it in some way. So I checked out Google Drive, plus a program to keep folders synched (many thanks for your help. Vaporware!), and, well, here it is.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4qjY ... authuser=0 (Link broken. for the files pls. see link further down in the posts. ... Edited by P/o Prune)
Be sure to read the readme. Basically, this is a copy of my own collection, the way I organise it. Hopefully it'll be a reasonably-reliable backup for many games, and hopefully it'll be as complete as possible. It's not all sorted yet; the "Pending Games" folder is a repository for games I've yet to play and cathegorise. It's a slow process.

If you find that I've forgotten to take out any commercial game at all, or any commercial emulator, PLEASE tell me and I'll remove it at ONCE.

Now, short of posting this link in a bunch of places, I'm not sure where it would really belong. I'd like it to be proeminently available. I'd like for people to be able to say "Hey, guys, where I can find this game?" "Well, you can look in IFDB, the ifarchive or in this guy's Google Drive collection". I'm not quite sure how that would work. If anyone has any idea where the link could be posted for this to happen, I'd be grateful.

Cheers!

PS - ADRIFT games specifically are sorted into 3.80, 3.90, 4.xx and 5.xx games. Under "Tools and Interpreters" you'll also find the windows interpreters for each version. I hope they don't have to be actually installed; if they do, the files themselves probably won't be much use to you, I'm afraid!

[Lumin]

Has anyone had a look at these? There's a lot of them and some are pretty obscure. At some point it might be worthwhile to check through the ADRIFT section to see if rotter has them all on his site.

Mostly though it's just really funny to me to think of someone voluntarily carrying games such as the 3.80 masterpiece 'The Book of Fistandantalus' around on their hard drive for years....Peter, this was a noble effort on your part, but really, it's okay to delete the bad ones!

[Peter Pears]

I don't judge, I just collect. Who am I to say what's good and what's bad? Plus, even the bad ones can be entertaining. Or have a saving grace. Or make me appreciate the good ones all the more. At the end of the day, making judgement and quality calls is a lot of work - I'd just rather carry the lot and let someone else decide whether they want to play it.

Anyway, not all of them are sorted yet, for anyone interested. Lots of .taf files in the Pending Games section. It's a work in progress; I sort as I play, and I play more web-based games and more Inform games because I can play them on my iPod, wherever I am. Games that force me to be stuck to my desktop have fallen really low in my priority...

ANYWAY: The reason I'm bumping this (and until now I hadn't even seen your reply, Lumin!) is that I've just realised I've made this announcement everywhere except here, so here goes.

The link's been changed, because I've run up against the 15Gb limit for GoogleDrive. The new archive is at https://mega.co.nz/#F!LkkmWZQS!5v2eiVbVtcwwii6IVj7rwQ.

It'll be pretty slow loading, be warned. But once it's loaded, it's quite fast.

At some point it might be worthwhile to check through the ADRIFT section to see if rotter has them all on his site.

Probably. I had to get them all from somewhere, after all. I probably downloaded from his site extensively.

[P/o Prune]

Hi Peter.
To me it's a great idea having collected all those games. I'll be sure to have a look at some point. Thanks for your effort.

[rotter]

Good effort Peter. I've had a quick look and so far I have found a couple I didn't have. Also discovered loads of typos on my site as well!

[NickyDude]

Link's broken.

[Peter Pears]

Second link, not the first. The GoogleDrive collection doesn't exist anymore.

[NickyDude]

Oops, so it is, sorry.

[Lumin]

I don't judge, I just collect. Who am I to say what's good and what's bad?

Well thankfully you have me here to judge instead! Lots of games are just straight up terrible, it's okay to say so. All of my released games are pretty bad, for starters, I'd like to scrub them from the internet or at the very least the ifdb, but I've never looked into how doable the latter is. There are plenty of old, bad ADRIFT games, and people are still making bad Quest games every day it seems. (I try not to be jealous.)

I don't think every IF game is necessarily art, or was even meant to be art by the author...the same way as if you hand out some paints and canvas, some people are going to create something deliberate meant to last or make a statement, and some are just going to play around making hand turkeys or mixing colors to see what happens. And that's okay! They're still having a good time and that's what matters, but sometimes it might not be doing them any favors framing their work in hanging it in a gallery where anyone who sees it is just going to talk about how crappy it is compared to the Mona Lisa.

And I think this whole analogy got away from me somewhere, it's actually really cool that you're archiving everything you can find. Does this include the Quest sandpit because if so you are clearly more insane---I MEAN DEDICATED than previously believed.

[Peter Pears]

Does this include the Quest sandpit

It used to.

No, seriously, it did. Then I realised that those weren't even fit for publication in the MAIN Quest site. I realised that way insan- er, extreme dedication lied, and I just deleted all Quest games and re-downloaded all the main ones.

I do some very basic filtering on Playfic. Check the source. If it looks like a modicum of effort went into the game, and if there's a "end the story" phrase, then hey, why not.

I'm fine with digging the S**t, because there's something shiny in there. S**t washes off, and the shine stays on. Maybe it's a forgotten or overlooked gem (in the wake of Coloratura no one seems to remember Legion, which is very interesting indeed), or a modest but thoroughly enjoyable puzzler (I enjoy "A Day At The Iachini House" probably more than I should, but hey, what are you gonna do), or an unfinished experiment (Lex).

As for not doing some games any favours this way... there was a lengthy discussion about something similar in IntFiction some time ago when a bot added every Quest game into IFDB automatically (non-sandpit). Because of the very thing you're talking about now - that place is a very free environment, which encourages people to just do stuff and get immediate feedback, and most of the authors don't even WANT those games being published in IFDB,

I personally think that if something is released - and whether or not is fit for release is the author's prerogative and judgement - then it should be archived. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. Who knows how interesting it'll be to play through the early crappy games of a Steve Meretzky in the making! Not going to happen any time soon, if ever, but hey! Glass half full! And to make it fair, I make it no distinction, within my archive. The games are there. If you want to dive in, you should expect the worst along with the best. Recommended use is to browse for something you've read about in IFDB, or some such. Or, let's say you want a HUGE collection of Inform (possibly Glulx too) games to play on your new mobile? You can download them all as ZIP...

...although MEGA is so slow in zipping multiple files you're better off asking me; I'll upload a ZIP of what you need, then you can just download it.

So, hey. I will leave IFDB to be the museum; the Louvre; the shiny catalog. I'm just the dusty old warehouse where you can find the stuff.

[Peter Pears]

My collection is offline.

I would like to announce that someone has decided to inform MEGA that my collection was infringing copyright. MEGA has promptly removed the whole lot.

Just so y'all know. I'll keep my stuff to myself from now on. The amount of resistance I got on this - exclusively from IntFiction, come to think of it - and now this aggravation, it really isn't worth it. It was my way of giving something back to the community. I made sure to remove games whose authors asked me to (only one, to date). If some people are really that concerned, well. I've better things to do with my time.

Thanks for the support - those of you who did support it and found it useful. I think there's more of you than there were of the other people, but you know, the other people were loudest.

[ElliotM]

It is unfortunate that digital preservation of gaming heritage isn't as respected as much as I think it should be. Sorry to hear that you had to take it down. Maybe at least maintain an index online documenting what all you've found?

[ParadoxGames]

It's good for posterity for someone to have these all.

I have google banned from my computer so I can't access any of these. I'd love to see them archived somewhere else one day (like Dropbox) and go through them.

[Peter Pears]

ElliotM: Not a bad idea, but when I find indexes like that, I always go "well, great, you're telling me what you have. That doesn't help me, I want to HAVE what you have". Also, it would actually be more work to update that index than to just mirror my collection, and I'm kinda pressed for motivation after this. Thanks for the thought, though!

ParadoxGames: It's no longer on Google, and now it's no longer anywhere. I'm afraid you missed your chance on this one...

Of course, I still have the games. If anyone is looking for something, they could do worse than ask me.

[P/o Prune]

Of course, I still have the games. If anyone is looking for something, they could do worse than ask me.

The question is if people know what to ask for