I’m sure this has been discussed before, but what would it take for all the top authors of IF to get together and form some kind of committee or quality assurance collective? I don’t specifically mean in the sense of commercialization, as I know TextFyre has tried and failed, etc. but just something like a set of regulations and guidelines that a title has to meet to be worthy of being a “good” work.
In other words, I see some disparate examples of high quality output (Hadean Lands is often at the top of anyone’s list, etc.) but where does a person (perhaps someone only casually getting into text adventures) go to in order to get something to play that they know is going to be worth their time?
Back in the day, you could pick up any Infocom title and be sure that it had some redeeming quality to it. Sure, some may have preferred certain titles over others, but they had all been tested and had a degree of thought behinds them. They all had substance, even if the particular story wasn’t your “cup of tea”.
From my perspective, blindly going to IFDB and then trying to separate the wheat from the chaff isn’t a good way to represent the art form. All the stuff there is all over the map. You’ve got 1-star stuff mixed in with stuff that is 4-star, and so on. I have no confidence that when I download a title that it’s going to be worth my time, that it will be presented well, that it’ll display well on my interpreter of choice, etc.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it would do great things for the IF community to appoint “board members” of some type to generate author guidelines, to promote the art form, to put a stamp of approval on high quality titles, to define some sort of benchmark or “bar” that IF titles should strive to meet.
There’s a certain stigma to self-published works in any medium, be it YouTube videos, MP3.com (back in the day), ReverbNation, or dumping an eBook on Amazon. Even if IF can no longer be commercialized in a monetary sense, can there at least be some kind of “guiding hand” steering its course–something to lend an air of authenticity to a body of work?
I know that’s a lot of unclear rambling, but basically I’m looking for a bunch of the sages and gurus involved in this crazy IF thing to form some kind of unified front, operating as if a company, even if there’s really no money to be had. Just something to help the energy reach a critical mass, instead of authors orbiting around this nebulous concept like lonely satellites.