There is a modern tendency to include political views as it were social responsibility.
Social Responsibility is as well if you label your game as educational or not fictional. It would need to respect gender equality and oppose racism, other hateful speech and patriarchal stereotypes.
However, in fiction if you put tags and don’t glorify illegal stuff. You don’t have any responsibility for what readers want to interpret from your work.
I agree to an extent, but if someone writes a game that allows or even encourages the player to be sexist or homophobic or what have you, then that writer absolutely is responsible for someone interpreting the work as being supportive to those mindsets. That’s not even to say that the author should be dissuaded from creating that game, but, assuming it’s being made for a purpose other than to promote harmful beliefs and behaviors, then the onus is 100% on them to make that purpose as clear as possible.
No one has a responsibility to predict any and all possible ways their statements can be misconstrued, whether unintentionally or in bad faith. That said, realizing that a game which allows the players to be a bigot might serve as positive reinforcement to actual real life bigots, for instance, doesn’t require any outstanding foresight. In cases like that, I personally would not buy the idea that said interpretation was impossible for the author to foresee.
I agree with what Audien wrote above. I don’t approve of censorship and I think that, because of literature’s capacity to influence peoples’ beliefs and understanding, that games which allow the players to pursue negative actions can be very valuable if they’re handled well. Being conscious of and accounting for, within reason, of the ways in which their writing may likely be interpreted is the author’s job, but I don’t think anyone expects them to predict and account for every potential misinterpretation.
Then you are really calling for censorship. I write many distopias that are clearly not on this planet and with creatures that are no human. I am not accountable if people want to search and twist my ideas and compare them with earth parallelism I don’t even know about. That is the reader fault that she wants to interpret things that way.
The author of fiction should not be mortally scared to write about everything because any person would find that is glorifying X. In many cases, X didn’t even exist when the book was written to begging with.
I am tired to cancel culture wanting to erase from history everything.
Socrates, cancel. Shakespeare cancel. Cervantes cancel. HG Wells cancel Huxley cancel
All of them have open the perception to many generations of human beings to how humanity can strive to be better.
Cervantes, for instance, was one of the first men to defend the right of women in Spain and defend the right of women to not marry by force. In The Quixote second `part, he also made a defence of Jews and their right to be in Spain, portraying How a jew family neighbour of Sancho was forced to abandon The village and Spain crying.
Art can move us. And nobody should cut down that power by fear X would take another meaning from it.
One of the worst moments of my college life was reading For Laws philosophy Nazi laws and Main Kampf. That reading should be forced same visiting the hell camps. To ironed in any single person what fascism has caused in the entire world.
Forbidden that books only cause many young people in Spain to believe Franco wasn’t that bad when I saw all the damage he did in my grandma generation and my dad, a young boy, a union member and representative for many years.
Fiction is Fiction Put tags and disclaimers, a real responsible age label and follows the law. That is the only social responsibility you have to have. Follow your vision explore, and make art.
However, if you write non-fiction and children material, you have to have a big social responsibility. Be gender positive, denounce the patriarchal beliefs, be equalitarian and LGTBQ+; that is where you have to be proactive and activist.
In fiction, you can be that too, but it should be voluntary, not forced upon the writer and readers.
Yes, so much yes!
I think, to eliminate all possibilities of accusing us, as authors, we can write short disclaimers like “we don’t approve horrible stuff in real life, don’t be a jerk to other people, fiction is fiction”. This will probably help to avoid misinterpretations from some passionate (in any way) reader. And clarify our stance if needed.
Reminder to please not direct arguments at each other and only at the material in the post.
While I too agree that it should be common sense, I meant the same purpose as safety disclaimers and warnings like “all this is a fiction, all characters and events are frictional”, so there won’t any accusation of “supporting destructive behavior” or stuff. Or making defences from such accusations easier.
In case it wasn’t clear, this was pretty much what I was saying too. A writer is free to write create whatever morally complicated setting or plot that they want to (within the bounda of the law, which I would consider to be a type of censorship which society at large seems generally ok with). I support peoples’ rights to make almost whatever art that they want to make. That said, I cannot agree with the idea that an author is powerless to influence how their work is perceived by their audience generally, just because some people will likely go to great lengths to twist the meaning of a work to support their hateful agenda. Something as simple as a disclaimer saying “this is a work of fiction containing instances of (whatever problematic content). The inclusion of this content does not reflect the author’s beliefs, nor should it be seen as condoning said behaviors” would satisfy me though. At least it’s something unequivocal to point to if an attempt is made to co-opt the work to support a hurtful agenda.
Again, it’s not about preventing the creation of a work or censoring content. It’s about creating whatever content in a way that best aligns with the creator’s goals while limiting the likelihood of of the content being appropriated for a cause that the creator may not support.
To bring it back to IF games, I love when games give you the option to be a scumbag. Zombie Exodus: SH gives you plenty of chances to live out your murder-hobo fantasies, sometimes with little provocation. The next installment in the Infinity universe allows us to have taken advantage of someone in a very callous way in the past. Those are choices that I would never make in my own playthroughs, but they certainly enrich their respective games by allowing for radically different character types and plotlines, and I also think they’re handled in a good way. For the latter example, your character can be repentant for their past actions or completely fine with them (if i remember correctly), but the game draws attention to how negatively it would be perceived by everyone around you if it were to come to light. I think that that’s a great way of maintaining player and character agency while still reinforcing that treating a person that way is just generally a terrible thing to do.
I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I’m curious as to how authors balance player agency with their vision for the story and characters. I have several stories that I have thought about making into Choice Games, some of which even have multiple chapters written, but I’m having a hard time justifying the transition when I have a plan for all of the characters in it, especially the MC. I don’t know if I would realistically be able to make it varied enough without feeling like I’m losing important aspects of character and plot.
There is one story I have that I am writing with this in mind, but I’m having a hard time planning it out because I’m sliding back into full-story mode.
Just out of curiosity, what’s your motivation in wanting to make an IF game?
If it’s any comfort, this is something I struggle with in CoV.
Curiosity, mostly. I’ve been on the forum for a few years now and read tons of other people’s works. I write a bit myself and thought about trying it out. 
I would suggest deciding what agency you want your readers to have and what agency you definitely do not want them to have. Once you decide this, it will be easier to incorporate into your writing.
I try to focus on how the player will be interacting with the plot and characters and how the PC affects the world around them. That can inform different possibilities and open up other branches, which then open up more. It can help to think about play styles - eg how would a player who likes talking their way through a problem deal with a situation? A ruthless player? A sneaky one? That can inform potential branches too.
What if this means I have the most railroaded story ever written? 
But what if the MC has to become a certain type of person for story reasons?
There will be fans, and there will be haters, whether it is the most or least railroaded story ever. Tin Star, one of the sandboxiest CSGs ever made, has an early bad end wherein PC dies right after character creation if they refuse to go to Lander County as the new Marshal.
Every CSG, and every CSG protagonist, has a central set concept that gets the plot going–Sidestep doesn’t want to spend the rest of their life hiding from unfriendly eyes (and if that makes them a villain so be it), Inae Dirriman suffers PTSD (no matter how much they see themselves as forged, rather than broken by the war) which governs their thought processes, the Marshal goes to Lander County because it beats getting stretched (either they feel they owe their savior, or doing what Marshal James asks beats getting shot).
The first challenge is to complete the story. Once you have your first draft, you can go from there.
Establishing what key characteristics are fundamental and need to remain the same for all MCs and what the player selects is one of the most important things to establish early for yourself and reader expectations. For example, what experiences are a commonality between all MCs within the context of the story? Same childhood? A similar cynicism? A familiar alias? The less commonality between them, the more branching there should be for factoring difference in how they present, just think for example of the work involved in integrating a set of backgrounds over having one primary background.
I want to read through this full conversation. I skipped the middle. I think this discussion is really interesting though.
Then you may want to rethink if IF stories are right for this story.
I might recommend reading the Samurai and Hyuga series. The plot overall is a rather railroaded story, but still give the reader choices.
Well my most recent story is being written with player choice in mind, but I feel like most of my other ones would only work if I structured them kind of like the Witcher series, wherein the MC is more of a pre-established character with their own thoughts and motivations, and while the player can pick dialogue options and make choices, they are essentially just along for the ride.
As am I when I play these games. It’s part of the reason why I’m looking for insight.
I’ve actually been thinking about this series a lot, because while the player does have choices over the Ronin’s personality, they don’t seem to control their inner thoughts. The Ronin definitely seemed like their own character to me, rather than what I chose.