24.4. The IF Archive

| Chapter 24: Publishing |

| 24.4. The IF Archive

Publishing an IF game consists of two steps. One is the technical task of making the game available to players - unless the plan is simply to email it to close friends, that means hosting it somewhere on the Internet. The second is the promotional task of letting people know the work exists, and where to find it.

It is a community tradition that all serious work is uploaded to the IF Archive, which is IF's answer to a national library. This is a mirrored, stable collection of thousands of interactive fiction games and programming languages, manuals, fanzines, maps, walkthroughs, and other materials. As such, it's likely to stay around even if a personal website goes off-line; it's also the primary resource for people doing scholarship on interactive fiction (and there are a growing number of these).

The Archive is very much a library, for long-term archiving, rather than a book-store. The catalogue is sober and textual, and there are no visual shop-windows, or posters advertising new titles hot off the press. Newcomers sometimes need practice finding their way around. And the Archive hosts story files (and associated manuals, as appropriate) but not advertising for them - it does not provide web-hosting for authors to set up mini-sites.

Uploading a work to the IF Archive is not too difficult, and can be done in two ways. One way is to use the archive's web form at:

http://www.ifarchive.org/cgi-bin/upload.py

The other is to create a new page at the Interactive Fiction Database, at:

http://ifdb.tads.org/

It's then possible to upload the story file to the IF Archive from IFDB. This is easiest all round, since it allows both IFDB and IF Archive to be updated at once.

In either approach, an author chooses and uploads a file, and accompanies it with a name and email address (so that the archive maintainers can verify the legitimacy of the work). The "About this file" field is for a line or two explaining what the game is -- its full title and any critical information -- and is used in generating the archive index. This is normally much shorter than the "blurb" described earlier. There's also a field to suggest where in the archive the game should be stored, but this is optional and intended chiefly for people expert in how the archive is filed. The archive maintainers will file a new story file in the obvious directory for its format. For Inform works, that means other Z-Machine - "z-code" - or Glulx story files. The maintainers sometimes place the same story file in multiple places in the Archive, using links.

As with all large libraries, it takes the Archive a little while for new acquisitions to be processed. When this happens, one of the volunteer maintainers will email with the official URL from which anyone can now download the story file.

Committing a game to the Archive is meant to be permanent. While the maintainers will happily replace older versions of games with new improved releases, they are less eager to remove games entirely. If that doesn't seem appealing, or if we do not want our game to be treated as freeware with essentially unlimited distribution, the Archive may not be a good choice. But it is deeply valued by the IF community, and has saved many works which could otherwise easily have been lost forever. Many contributions important in the history of IF were made by people who are now not easy to trace, and whose websites are long gone. But their work lives on.

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