intfiction.org

Anchorhead. It's the reason I'm aware of modern IF at all, which is a huge impact to have because I spend a certain slice of my time, now, devoted to making IF, to playing contemporary works, and to playing older works I never would have known about without the modern community's resources (IFDB, etc).

So, it changed my life, in a big and noticeable and very positive way. And I admire/respect it; it's a good game ... but it doesn't strum my strings in quite the way it seems to for the community.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Interesting discussion. I've been heavy into reviewing games lately (trying to play through all the IF Comp winners and Xyzzy Winners for Game, Story and Writing), and the star system irks me: 5 rankings isn't detailed enough. As someone else said in this thread, 1 or 2 stars is easy: those games are bad. 3 stars is a "good" game, but what then? I rated Tapestry a 3 star game, and So Far 4 stars. Then I played Small World--I liked it more than Tapestry, but didn't think it was a good at So Far. So how many stars does it get?

I ended up giving it 3, but praised it in a review. For me, reviews matter far more than ratings. They give you a sense of what the game is like. Ratings, on the other hand, are just an index of whether people liked it; but then again, some people might rate games by their own private rubric.

I like the site boardgamegeek.com, which gives rating guidelines, based on how much you want to play a game. So for instance, a rating of 9 (on a 10-point scale) means "Excellent game. Always want to play it," while a 4 is "Not so good, it doesn't get me but could be talked into it on occasion." As such, ratings just tell you which games are hot; users often adjust their ratings as they burn out on games. Whether this is a good rubric or not, I think that community gets a lot of benefit from having some standard by which to understand ratings.

I think IFDB would benefit, too. The standards might be silly or not in accordance with how you would personally like to review games, but it makes picking a game out at a glance a lot easier. As it is now, we're seeing that a three-star rating means something different to different readers--making ratings very hard to use.

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My IF blog

Exactly as it should be, IMO.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com