Scott Adams

[Gio]

During a recent journey through the IF Database, I looked up "Adventureland" by Scott Adams and noticed that it had two IFIDs, both ZCODE prefixed. This struck me as terribly wrong; however, upon reading the Treaty, I found that there was no way to right this as no accounting had been made for legacy Scott Adams files.

Some questions:

* What were the criteria for choosing the legacy formats covered in the Treaty? Happenstance?

* Has any attempt been made to contact Mr. Adams on behalf of the Treaty of Babel and perhaps have him join as a signator?

— Gio

[Andrew Plotkin]

(I apologize for letting this question go stale for two weeks.)

On Sun, 2 Dec 2018, Gio wrote:

> During a recent journey through the IF Database, I looked up
> "Adventureland" by Scott Adams and noticed that it had two IFIDs, both
> ZCODE prefixed. This struck me as terribly wrong; however, upon reading
> the Treaty, I found that there was no way to right this as no accounting
> had been made for legacy Scott Adams files.
>
> Some questions:
>
> * What were the criteria for choosing the legacy formats covered in the
> Treaty? Happenstance?

My memory does not extend to the discussion that happened back then, but
I'm sure it was just what people suggested at the time.

> * Has any attempt been made to contact Mr. Adams on behalf of the Treaty
> of Babel and perhaps have him join as a signator?

As it happens, I've gotten email from him just this month, in connection
with the IF conference plan.

However, I don't think it's particularly valuable to add signers for
legacy systems which are no longer producing new works. You could very
nearly cover the topic by saying: Adventureland gets IFID "MSA-1",
Pirate Adventure gets IFID "MSA-2", ...

Well, that's probably a mistake. I expect there are more works in that
format than I'm aware of. So it would make sense to pick a canonical game
file format and just use the MD5 of that.

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*