Talk:The Initial State

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"The" or not?

What's the correct title? According to the filename and to the game itself, it's "Initial State", but the official IF Comp site and the Baf's Guide list it as "The Initial State"... --Eriorg 10:15, 29 December 2006 (EST)

  • Yes, I've been thinking I should write up a page, probably called IFWiki:Title so we can answer questions like this a bit easier. My feeling in this case is that the correct title is Initial State, based on the idea that the game itself overrules what guides or directories say about it. I suspect that the IF Comp site info is automatically generated with whatever the author registered the game title as, possibly months before the game files themselves were uploaded, and it's entirely possible that the author either changed the title in that time, or isn't fussy about the "The". Likewise, Baf's (and IFWiki), in our haste to provide information about IF Comp games, will initially use whatever titles the IF Comp site provides. But now that we're starting to document these games in more detail, we should fix our hasty little mistakes when we find them. -- David Welbourn 11:13, 29 December 2006 (EST)

Thank you for your answer!

Yes, I agree that the title in the game itself should be the correct one. For a few old French games, I did add accents on letters when the correct spelling required them, but it's not really the same thing, because the titles were either written in upper case letters (in French, accents are optional on upper case letters) or without accents only because the old computers they used made it difficult to display accents!

I see that some people really aren't fussy about the titles of their own games, though. Wumpus Run is called The Wumpus Run in the game itself, wumpusRun in the filenames and Hunt the Wumpus in the readme file! I guess the correct title is The Wumpus Run, then.

I have also another question about titles I had wondered about but never asked until now: what about capitalization in titles? In library catalogs, I think the "fanciful" capitals (I mean the ones which aren't really needed in a normal sentence and are just there to look nicer) in book titles are removed... Should we remove them, or just follow as closely as possible the way the author wrote the title in his own game?

(I hope I'm not splitting hairs too much!)

--Eriorg 12:52, 29 December 2006 (EST)