Not meant rag on any current and future superhero writers. Superhero stories on CoG and HG are pretty common, they all bring unique twists to the genre (sub-genre?), but that doesn’t change that there are a lot of them. Do you think that it’s just a phase that will go away? Is there something about IF that makes superheroes such a popular genre?
2 Likes
rage , stomp feets and hit the no-existant dislike/thumb down button
Joking!
I hope it is not a phase .
And I hope there will be more .
Honestly , I don’t think there is ‘Too much’ of something . Since the stories are all different , written by different peoples . And when you look outside of choiceofgames , and look toward Steam for exemple . You will find Games that give you this chance to play as a super hero…are …there isn’t one .
Superhero genre are…awesome . Some peoples will say that it’s bring out the kid inside of you . I never wanted to be a super hero when I was a kid . In my country of origins , we didn’t have access to MARVEL . I never watched the Original SUPERMAN . I never watched the Original WONDER WOMAN . I didn’t grow up with the original Charlie’s Angels .
I’m grateful I get to share someone world , and I don’t think a cape look good on me ! but I still will defeat that vilain! 
7 Likes
I don’t think it’s a ‘phase’.
Superheroes offer great potential for a large variety of things in a way that, for example, traditional fantasy or straight-forward sci-fi can’t/not always can.
It’s interesting to observe the following:
Ask people how they’d overcome an obstacle in a story
If your story has magic, the answer will likely be ‘magic it away’.
If you have straight-forward sci-fi, ‘blast it away’
But give them a superhero story, and the answer might rather be ‘what are my powers?’
This expands into IF.
Give people magic, they’ll wonder why magic can’t solve their problems. Similar with sci-fi. But give them superpowers and, for some reason, they’ll start to think about how to solve something without their powers.
It’s curious, but understandable. superpowers are always an oddity in an otherwise familiar world.
Granted, it always depends on how good a job the author is doing in terms of worldbuilding etc.
5 Likes
It’s been a few years, so I might be remembering wrong, but when I started writing CCH, it seems like Heroes Rise was the only superhero CoG/HG that had been published. But this was back in like 2013. I tried to get ahead of the curve, but yeah that didn’t work.
But I wouldn’t say they are over-represented. There have to be about 150+ games in the CoG/HG library by now, and superhero games represent, what maybe 10% at most?
Looks like there are 14? I hope I am not leaving anyone out.
Fallen Hero: Rebirth
Paradigm City
Best of Us
CCH1
CCH2
Grand Academy
Superlatives
Diabolical
Hero UnMasked
And the 5 Heroes Rise stories
(Is Psy High a “superhero” story?)
6 Likes
No, but it’s a superpower story.
Haha, I didn’t really think of how many there were. But I agree with others who’ve commented in that I don’t mind. Though I do use the same hero name when it allows, each story is very different like all superhero comics, it’s hard to do the same thing twice without it being super obvious.
1 Like
I love the superhero genre cuz as others have said there isnt a marekt much for them granted u play as a hero in most games but thwres something fun about taking up a cape and going all vigilante with ur superpowers and all
Forum is full of nerds/geeks that’s why… (said the nerd) 
5 Likes
I’m probably set in a bit of an old mindset too, a lot of the more stand out stories to me seem to be superhero ones, perhaps they just stand out because there’s so few of them. There’s 177 CoG/HG stories, and I’d say 18 superhero stories, so yeah about 10% are superhero
Fallen Hero
Paradigm
CCH (2)
Best of Us
Grand Academy
Superlatives
Unmasked
Diabolical
Heroes Rise (5)
Orpheus Ruse
Metahuman Inc.
Psy High
A Wise Use of Time
@Sammysam Yes it just occured to me it might be confirmation bias/superhero stories are just the ones I tend to notice 
@Uniqueth Yeah I tend to make the same hero across all of them where possible, it’s interesting to see how different authors portray it
1 Like
Should we add current WiPs (and what we know from the CoG list) too to see?
I think superhero stories work because it gives very specific creative freedom to people. Superpowers are limited to specifics which means it can’t be used to solve every problem but it still gives a (hopefully) interesting variety of ways to solve them.
They also leave room both for black-and-white villains and more complex antagonists.
Also, I’m not sure superhero stories are that ubiquitous. But a lot of them that are very popular, which might explain the perception that they are everywhere.
1 Like
Feel free to add/make your own, it’d be interesting to see how many WiPs there are too
There is also this many, by no means all but many, superhero saga’s are relatively lazy with their world-building. Meaning it is the contemporary world (at the time the author was writing the work anyway), instantly recognizable to most readers with an overlay of super-powers. On the other hand the world-building for worlds with functional magic or sci-fi takes a lot of background work/research in order really imbue it with a feeling of both uniqueness and verisimilitude.
9 Likes
I don’t know about over-representation, but the amount of superhero stories is disproportionately large compared to any other genre here.
I think one of the (many) reasons might be how superhero genres focus (slightly unrealistically) on the power of one or a few individuals to decide the fate of the world (or similarly grand things) through some sort of personal conflict (combat/persuasion/intellectual).
Which is the model of a lot of the choicescript stories here. Imagine playing an IF like the Song of Ice and Fire Series, where your current MC dies and you switch to a new one every chapter.
Or maybe the genre is just that popular.
3 Likes
Okay, from atop of my head:
Model Citizen
Warlock City
Birth of a Hero
Wisp
freak: amidst the neon lights
villains
Event Zero (though @Jessicanity might correct me on this)
Curious Cuisine
And I prolly forgot a couple.
Rule of hand, I’d say: Worldbuilding is always essential, even if it’s ‘just’ the ‘real’ world.
1 Like
The super-powers tag currently lists 22, though I’m not sure how accurate that is.
Though the mc there is explicitly not a superhero themselves.
You forgot Totem Force. 
Did you mean the renamed the Lawless ones? As that is steam/diesel punk, not superhero.
Sure, but you can more easily limit the quantity and what kinds of research you need if you can take our contemporary world as the base.
- I’d say it still counts. The MC of CCH also has no powers as such (yet)
- Whoops Dx (then again, I think there’s a couple)
- No, i think there’s another one, too. The awakening, or something?
- Still. Not going to name an example on how not to do it, though.
Yes, but depending on gadgets makes them a Batman type of superhero. The mc of model citizens merely lives in a world filled with them but neither has powers nor tries to duplicate them through gadgets. Although they do make their living by unmasking the superheroes. But that a much more tenuous connection then in CCH.
But it is still superhero genre, yes, even if it is a rather different and unusual take on the subject.
Interesting, as my father used to say: “logistics win wars”. Even if it seems that mc won’t get much of the glory or credit for it.
I think it’s safe to include it, I’ve been throwing around ideas regarding a story where you play as a Superhero team manager, I’d classify that as in the superhero genre despite the MC being unpowered and physically detached from any powered conflicts
2 Likes