Can we stop referring to CoGs as CYOAs please?

Yeah, I read all in my school library with 8 years. In Spanish they all had a red cover … :sob: So much nostalgia. That books and D&D makes me the role playing person I am today.

Choose Your Own Adventure as others have said has become a catch all term for interactive fiction which is narrative focused, as COG games can be, and doesn’t inherently have any ties with the official series of the 80’s and 90’s. However since they involve stat mechanics nearly all of the time they also have a lot of shared DNA with something like Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf books of the day, which are nearly always referred to as gamebooks. Of course since these things are digital that’s not exactly a suitable term for them either. So I don’t think you can stop it being used that way.

…what does piss me off is when people use Choose Your Own Adventure as a term to describe fan-fiction which involves letting readers pick where the linear story goes next, sometimes from a set of options and sometimes not. There as dozens of examples of this on Archiveofourown under the Choose Your Own Adventure tag and it annoys the hell out of me.

https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Choose%20Your%20Own%20Adventure/works

The writer has no intention of creating a number of branching paths as a classic CYOA would have done even in its most simple form and just wants people to respond and effectively review every chapter for clicks in my opinion, and these types of stories rarely go anywhere in the long run. Granted there are some better crafted fictions which work in this method, but they honest to god need a different name. :unamused:

Whenever we’re getting a lunch, we always ask for Aqua.
We get water by operating the Sanyo in our wells.
And everyday, we ride Honda to work/schools.

When I type interactive novel into Google search Choice of Games is nowhere to be found even three pages in but when I type in “online cyoa games” Choice of Games is on the first page. Also, it might just be because I’m not a native speaker of english or something but I’ve never heard the term “interactive novel” before you said it just now.

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A while back we had a thread about what makes Interactive Fiction (in the form of the question if Heroes Rise is IF).
There we came to the conclusion that while the installments at the time are IF (OpenSeason dropped out of that as all ‘interaction’ has been reduced down to turning the page by all means).

The question I think we MUST ask here, again:

What is IF?
And what does CYOA means to you when you HEAR the term.

Many people will think of the game books, sure, but how many will connect a brandname to it?
They’ll have a good idea of what they can expect from a CoG/HG game.
Would that be happening if one would completely avoid saying that you ‘choose your own adventure’?

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IF interactive fiction is more used than Interactive novel that’s a type of interactive bigger stories focus on narrative then. If are also Parser games … There is a great variety in the media. So I recommend you check out For The cave zork and several other ancient games. In 80’s there are so If video games amazing I still playing today. Like my old spectrum with four colors… I still have my dad’s collection of If parser games Like Alicia in Wonderland a version of The hobbit…

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I’m still adjusting to IF being used to refer to a CYOA…sorry, I mean IF being used to refer to a story where you’re given choices or at least customization options as you read.

IF will always be interactive fiction played by typing commands to me, because I have an association there for the term just like people who call a customizable story a CYOA. It kind of does wound my soul when people use IF as a blanket term, because…actually, no not really. Different terms are useful for avoiding confusion (which is why I’ve taken to using ‘parser IF’ lately) but I wouldn’t judge anyone or consider it a slight for calling it anything they want. Languages evolve and CYOA and interactive fiction both have become pretty generic terms with fuzzy definitions depending on who you ask.

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I remember Zork! Haha that brings me back. Yes I’ve heard of interactive fiction before but interactive novel was a new term for me. I love those old text adventure games though.

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If has been always been more than parser games as have been always games if that didn’t include command list and was the previous entry to point and click adventures.

You have to bear in mind that the CYOA series started with Sugarcane Island way back in the 70’s, so that’s well over an entire generation of people who grew up with that and the Fighting Fantasy Books concept as the two templates for interactive fiction their minds - narrative/story focused, or stat heavy/game focused. Every IF veers more to one or the other, end of the day.

Well … i never refer HG and CoG as CYOA to friends who are new and never heard of them
I told them HG and CoG product as interactive fiction where we can pick the outcome which influence the ending :wink:

I am happy that these friends now know about HG and CoG instead of Choose your own adventure :slight_smile:

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To be fair it is a little easier these days to avoid confusion since the official CYOA books haven’t created any significant new books since the end of the original run in the late '90s. I actually have the bulk of the series myself along with many of the Skylark books (which were written for younger readers than the main series). CYOA’s biggest crime was probably distilling the notion that ‘those things are only made for kids, right?’. Least that’s the impression I’ve had over the years. Fighting Fantasy in contrast had the ties to Dungeons and Dragons going for it I guess, to the extent why fantasy as a genre is so prevalent in interactive fiction.

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“Interactive novel” is a term used in like every single CoG summary. And there are several CoG results on the top page for interactive novel for me.

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To be fair, “4 Common Mistakes in Interactive Novels” sounds like one of those “clickbait” news titles most people skip over. Or at best like writing advice. Not exactly something I look for when looking for a game. And the other picture says “Blog-page 2” which is again not something I’d click on if looking for a game. Besides, I don’t even get that on my computer or phone when I type in “interactive novel”.

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Yeah it’d be like saying all IFs are superior to CYOAs…

Oh wait.

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I mean…I’m pretty sure 99% of us have CoG as our favorite IF publisher. No other company consistently produces games like these that allow you to actually play as the MC and make important choices.

That was a very poor analogy, btw.

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I’ll admit I never understood why people call the titles here CYOA’s. They really aren’t that, even if CYOA wasn’t a brand. Those tend to be a lot more… open ended? Don’t have attributes and so on.

Stuff here fits Interactive Fiction or Interactive Novel much more. IN being more like a book where you control a character that already exists and influence their story rather than being a self insert or whatever.

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Sorry for cog but my favorite If publisher still being Lucas arts lol and close another unknown company that was called Sierra . Cog is a 3rd in my list but lol The fact I compare Cog to those giants should make Cog Boss happy.
How I miss Sierra and Lucas arts :sob: I was learning to read when my dad bought me maniac mansion and monkey island… and King quest lol

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I mean, basing something on what it used to be due to the limitations of the medium or it being new isn’t the best idea. Everything moves forward and so on. I still have older friends who think video games are just toys and are extremely confused by GTA and so on wondering why something so violent is targeted at kids (5-12 years old).

Still that format of IF still does exist in some circles and has new titles coming out, though I never quite enjoyed it. I believe at the moment the whole typing commands deal is a sub-genre of it.

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I know I’m showing my age when I see CYOA, and part of my mind goes to YMCA (from the song).

I don’t mind if a company decides to use IF (Interactive Fiction)…in some ways, the ‘if’ does make it feel like ‘if I make this choice’. Although, I realize this only applies to me.

That said, depending on the person I’m trying to get into the games, I will refer to it as Choose Your Own Adventure if I think it helps. Once again, this also highly depends on the age of the person.

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