I personally dig the term “gamebook” because its name overtly bridges the divide between those two mediums. The negative is that it’s not a term most people have heard before, so we’re still having to educate.
I wonder why no company has slapped “gamebook” in its company name.
I like Gamebook, “book but you can die”, CYOA (because you literally do just that), text-based game (bit boring though), and interactive fiction, as I like that term.
I don’t really think it’s a big deal though
Hmm.
I swear I’ve read the term too many times that I thought, though not widespread, people would be familiar with it. I even described my WIP as gamebook (once I’ve edited the thread, that is) instead of IF/CYOA.
From a legitimate stand point all cogs and HGs are Choose your own adventures, so it’s hard to imagine your in the minority on this.
We can go with choose your own adventures
Yes it’s trademarked but that trademark in modern times would be like saying you couldn’t call the English a empire back in the olden day
Becuase the romans were a empire.
All games with rpg elements are technically choose your own adventure the cyoa people just wanted recognition for stealing the words and charging people for the obvious.
Another thing we could call it is choice games
Wich again is every single rpg game out there technically.
The big difference really is cyoa is a recognized descriptor for a heavily choice based game that is word based as apposed to say a visual novel or video game.
In the end the trademark name is the embodiment description for all games like this. The key thing is from a Legal stand point it’s offically I think the party line was (I think if I remember correctly reading about it a long time ago) “Choice Game” if I remember, but of course for anyone who hasn’t heard of it obviously you can just say “think of the old CYOAs but better”
“You remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, that had like, ‘if you want to do this, turn to page 80? These are stories like that published on the internet, but usually with more game elements added and not limited to being kids’ books.”
How I describe what’s on this and other sites and how I’ll continue to because it’s the most straightforward way to make people I work with and such have any idea what I’m talking about. I’d be sorry if it offends anyone here but welp, can’t please everyone and in this particular case I see no compelling reason to try.
I’m always pretty happy seeing people showing an interest in this kind of fiction regardless of what they call it. So few people enjoy reading for pleasure at all, it just seems really pointless getting hung up on semantics.
While I understand that you don’t want to be grouped into things with poorer writing, does it really matter what we call it? If someone doesn’t know what CoG is and we refer to it as CYOA and they think “oh, I know what those are, they’re pretty fun, maybe I should check these out too.” Then we’ve increased the size of our community, which I think is more important than trying to avoid being grouped into the CYOA category.
I second this, it may get annoying especially if cog is something you’re extremely passionate about…but I mean, it won’t really hurt anyone if someone says cyoa game to refer to cog, especially because they’re easy to mix up and cyoa is just more commonly known. It’s just like if someone says samsung instead of lg or something like that, sure they’re very wrong but you can simply correct them, no need to make a fuss.
“And hillbillies prefer to be called sons of the soil, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
This whole topic is amusing since there are tons of old school IF elitists that turn their noses up at anything created by choice script or twine and their reasons are just as silly as this topic.
CYOAs, IFs, Gamebooks, call them whatever you want people, there isn’t some CYOA royal decree that’s going to stop you.
If anything insisting on dividing this sort of thing into “proper” labels is what causes people to get unreasonably hostile over what amounts to nothing in the first place.
While i agree with your point of view regarding this … i also can understand the passion and reasons of others who want a distinguish “brand” of interpretative term on interactive fiction such as HG and CoG…
It is something like you want to come out from the shadow of your successful father within the company, while some may not mind to be refer as " Mr X " 's son/daughter by people who they deal with… some may prefer to be acknowledge as his/her own distinguish self than to be forever be refer as " Mr X " 's son/daughter
same can be refer to our electric car or hybrid car, while it would be easier for us to simply refer them as Car … but electric car or hybrid car makers of course prefer to distinguish their car design with respect to other car models 
Well, everyone has given their view, but it’s clear by now that this is just turning into a dog pile. Would a moderater mind shutting this thread down?
That seems a bit of an exaggeration? From what I’ve seen it’s just a bunch of people tossing their two cents in on the subject, barely anyone is even addressing the OP directly. Certainly haven’t noticed anyone attacking them.
Is it okay if I shut my own thread down? Do I have your permission to do that? 
You’ve just made me realise how hard COG is to find if you don’t know the exact words to search for. I searched for cyoa, cyoa digital, interactive novel digital. I didn’t get a single HG or COG specific suggestion within 5 pages. If I put “interactive novel” I did get 2 results within 5 pages but none were to specific games. (One was a forum link and one was an article on the main site.)
To be honest though, when I say I write interactive fiction, people’s eyes glaze over. If I explain it’s like a CYOA but on the computer, there’s immediate recognition.
Edit- just saw you want the thread shut down (sorry)
I only took issue with the misrepresentation of what was going on here. I even scrolled back up and reread a bunch of posts because I thought I’d missed some kind of argument.
This actually seems like an almost unusually harmonious topic so far and it’s been interesting getting a kind of poll on how the terms for the genre have evolved. I’ll be saving the thread for future reference but of course if you’re unhappy with it then you do you.
Aspirin was a brand. Popsicle was a brand. Band-aid was a brand. Bubble-wrap was a brand. Chapstick was a brand. Dry Ice was a brand. Dumpster was a brand. Escalator was a brand. Flip Phone was a Motorola trademark. Frisbee was a brand. Laundromat was a brand. Ping Pong was a brand. Super Glue was a brand. Styrofoam was a brand. Trampoline was a brand. Zipper was a brand. Videotape was a brand. Windbreaker was a brand.
Need I go on? We don’t need to disassociate with words for some added sense of entitlement and superiority. Use whatever you like and don’t rant about other people using what they like.
Thread closed at request of Original Poster.