@Entracte I guess that’s the difference then. IFs are absolutely games to me, even if there is no stat checking at all.
@Meira_Litch I definitely don’t like kinetic novels either. And the 1 choice every 2 hours? That’s even worse, especially since the 1 choice usually doesn’t even do anything to alter the story. And I tend not to even realize that until I go back and try a different option… and I’m just like, okay I’ve been scammed.
Yeah I’m glad that western visual novels are becoming more popular, because when I started getting into the IF world it was mostly japanese ones and boyyyyy, they are so restrictive in general, I hated the experience.
Thankfully now these games a lot more popular, be it just text based or visual too, so I’m glad in that regard!
For me it’s just the reading and the choices. The more “gamey” parts are not interesting to me and I feel like the story almost without exception suffers because of this. The customization and the choices, that’s what makes these stories unique… whether the choices are illusions or not doesn’t really matter to me as long as it’s well written and you feel like you had a choice.
To reverse what some have said, if I wanted to play an actual game I’d go play an actual game, like BG, DA, ME, PoE, Tyranny etc.
I just don’t see anything that’s completely text based being good as a game, no matter how many stats and checks and possible deaths you put in it. At the end of the day it’ll end up being a worse game than any actual game out there, with a story that usually suffers because of the more “gamey” parts like stat-checks, dying and having to go through several minutes of just skipping pages to get back to where you were and pick the “correct” option… etc. At least in my experience. That said it’s hard to draw an exact line on how much “game” is too much.
And to be honest I feel like this whole conversation can sometimes just boil down to a semantics thing, like what some people consider to be a game, others might not… I’m sure there’s some people who would say that simply allowing choice makes it a game. While I would say it doesn’t.
I love a good story more than anything else but i would just buy a novel if all i wanted was story. The reason i buy cog/hg games is just to immerse myself in playing the game.
I think it’s more the effect of the choices. I’ve played games where you’re completely railroaded no matter what you choose and I hate that. I don’t mind being forced to RP a set character, as long as the choices in the game help define that character’s path (like in I, the Forgotten One). If there are choices that have no effect, and the path is the same no matter what, it’s not a game. It’s not even an IF. It’s just a book with the illusion of choice. Besides, if all of your MC’s choices are just ignored, what’s the damned point?
The way I look at it is that it is a game, just one where your control as the player is the path the MC takes and their general behavior. Which, really, if you look at it, is pretty much the same as something like DA or ME (except for the third one, which I don’t even want to get into). And those choices effect the NPC’s behavior, which helps shape the story.
The stat aspect of these games is the “game” part I don’t so much like, most times. In IF, it’s often difficult to discern exactly what the author is going for unless they spell it out, which results in MC death or plot misery. And I hate the stat raisers because, while it was fun in Elder Scrolls to jump up and down for an hour to raise your acrobatics skill (insert sarcasm here), that doesn’t translate well to text games. I don’t really want to have to make a choice every few chapters for my MC to do a hundred push-ups, a hundred squats, etc. each day in order for them to become One-Punch Man. Just let me choose at the beginning if they’re buff and bald and be done with it. Then give some choices within game to enhance their skills in that area and others.
I think I’m more into the playing than reading COGs and HGs myself, too. The interactivity and customisation and getting to choose between different alternatives and seeing the different ways things can play out are what draws me in. I also do have a tendency to skim(at least a bit) through the text unless it’s extremely well written and/or funny(like Jolly Good-cakes and ale) or particularly sexy/sensual or just good dialogue. I don’t usually feel the need for long descriptions and I do enjoy “building” and developing the skills and abilities of my character and watching my character grow better and more impressive( I don’t really enjoy so much having to keep track a large number of opposed personality traits, though).
I’m not saying that the story as such is unimportant to me, I do enjoy a good plot/story and whether the characters have interesting characters and/or characters I care about apart from my own character can make a huge difference(whether they are ROs that I choose or not). But I have found that I tend to enjoy COGs and HGs more when they at least have a bit of rpg-y feel to them, where you can choose character classes or the equivalent or get interesting abilities like a rpg character. I do enjoy imagining my character outside of the story of the COG/HG and I find that easier to do when the COG/HG allows me to really develop the abilities and skills of my character, though I find that also making the world-building interesting enough, making the scope of a game big enough, often making the game into a part of a series and having the ending feel less like a “back to normal” than just a start or a small part of “the wonderful adventures of my character” is a good way for doing that. That way I’m can kind of come back to the COG/HG even when I’m not playing it.
In many ways, Jolly Good-cakes and ale, seem to be an exception to many of my preferences, since that is my second favorite COG/HG and that is a game that I probably read more than play. But for me that’s probably to due with it being so extremely well written and funny that I do want to read each scene more thoroughly than I do with other COGs and HGs in order to catch all the fun parts, so to speak, which I guess also shows that quality always shines through. The fact that it’s the COG/HG where it’s easiest to get into character and play/act out characters that are really different from me IRL also helps as well.
My God, it’s all coming back. Like, I can hear the cliff racers and my left eyelid starts twitching. 
Praise Saint Jiub, hallowed be his name.
Narrative-heavy, game mechanics-light choicegame titles are far more popular than super branchy and hyper replayable ones are. This is a trend that, in my opinion, will only increase as interactive fiction becomes more and more mainstream. There’s a lot of reasons for that, including demographics, but also what the general audience has come to expect when they open up a choicegame.
Note that the general audience I refer to isn’t present on this forum. By being here, you’re inherently a power-user, and that’s always something important to be aware of when you’re talking about readers and what appeals to them.
A choicegame, more than any visual novel, looks and feels like a book. Those who require more visual stimulation will not be playing these games to begin with, and of those remaining, the appeal of immersing yourself into a story, its world and characters is the primary goal.
In 2022, having romance options in your choicegame is all but mandatory, and the expectation for lengthier stories has never been greater. We’re talking full-fledged novels with plots and character arcs you just can’t make happen in a branchy, gamey-style format.
When I think of the future of the medium, I consider it like a replacement of the traditional novel for the modern audience: more customizable, for example, with the romance elements adding appeal for an increasingly lonely population. But it’s also much more friendly to newer readers who have record low attention spans year after year.
For a growing many, reading a hundred pages is a dreadful, painful task. But when you get a hit of dopamine courtesy of a choice every 8 paragraphs or so, suddenly they’re reading for hours on end. That’s the direction we’re headed–in my opinion, anyway!
The Evertree Saga manages to pull both off in my opinion. It’s also a very popular series.
Mainly reading, but a well-crafted gamey aspect of the story will get me to finish things I never would have in prose form.
I think that’s why I say I write “interactive fiction” instead of a choice-style game. Although, I also like the term “story simulation” which sums up how I see things.
But yeah, my love of reading brought me here, but wow, the things you can do when you add interactivity and branches to it. It’s a whole new ballgame. I wonder if I could ever write a normal book again.
I definitely feel like what sets them apart from novels is the “game” part. Obviously being text-based means that there does have to reading, but the way I see it, that reading should be relevant to the characters and plot at hand, and nothing more.
That’s not to say authors can’t have their own personal style; they obviously still can. But there’s a difference between writing a 10-line paragraph info dump versus discovering that same info organically through plot events or character dialogue.
It’s like a screenplay. There’s a world and a whole load of info not actually written, but the good writers are able to bring that info in when it’s relevant and in a way that doesn’t necessitate reading novel-length pages of text.
Choices should also ultimately mean something. Obviously there are situations that might come up in any game where no matter what the player chooses, forces outside their control end up dictating a certain outcome anyway. But when it comes to choices the character should be able to realistically influence, then the player’s input should always matter. I do recognize that it’s not easy to pull this off, but in my opinion that massively elevates the quality of a text-based game.
Jason Stevan Hill shared the list of the 20 most popular COGS and 20 most popular HGs saleswise not so long ago. The HG list included 5 HGs by Lucid, who is probably one of the “gamiest” HG authors. Tin Star, which is probably less gamey, but quite branchey, is also in that list and the list also includes War for the west, which als seems to me to be on the gamier side of things, so to speak. The COG list had Choice of Robots, which is one of the branchiest COGs at the top and another branchy COG by the same author, Choice of Magics, also in the top 10. Choice of Rebels, which seems to be branchier and gamier than your average COG is in the top 5 of that list.
I don’t have detailed enoughknowledge about all the games to know where they fall on the gamey/story-focused spectrum or how branchy they are. and since 20 + 20 games is quite a lot, it would take up to much space to list each one of them according to where they fall on the gameyness/story-focused spectrum or level of branchiness. But given that at least a third of the top 20 HG games seem to be more gamey and/or with a high level of branchiness and at least two of the top 5 and three of the top 10 COG games have a high level branchiness and maybe also more gamey than your average COG, this seems to me to indicate that things are a lot less clear cut than what you claimed.
As of now, anyway, it seems you can still have success with a COG/HG that is gamey and/or branchey. Of course you have HGs like Wayhaven Chronicles 1 and 2, that really focus on the story and relationships between the characters and have been hugely succesfu. That certainly shows the huge commercial potential of more storybased COGs or HGs, particularly those that focus on romance and relationships But just because those kind of COGs and HGs become really popular, that doesn’t have to mean that less people will buy the more gamey and branchey COGs and HGs. I suspect that the target audiences of the respective kinds of HGs and COGs, outside of the hardcore Choice of Games fans, who often buy all kinds of COGs and HGs, are quite different from one another anyway.
It could be that this changes in the future, and that the audience for COGs and HGs will mainly be people who have a short attention span and mostly prefer more storybased COGs and HGs, like you predicted. But I suspect that the people running Choice of Games have a better sense of the direction in which things are evolving than either of us. And to be honest, I do hope that you’re wrong and that in the future there will still be room for both gamey and storybased COGs/HGs and branchy and less branchy COGs/HGs.
Depth and breadth have nothing to do with the systems and mechanics you have built into a game.
I agree that the text-based IF game market is growing and that longer, more involved releases (both single titles and series) are preferred.
Systems and mechanics that add value to the reader’s experience, whether that is immersion that strengthens hooks, customization which appeals to the reader’s vanity, or some other dynamic will be popular, no matter the composition of the narrative.
Execution of the game, is the key.
The trouble with trying to mesh the “casual” and the “gamer” markets into broad sweeping analyses (stereotypically represented by app stores vs Steam/Epic stores) is the very simple fact that you are (currently) looking at two very different traditions and histories.
With the changes happening, both in the store-fronts and in the production side of things, we will see a continual synergy happen. Sony bought Bungie, not to make more games, but to make Netflix tv series.
Trying to hold on to old paradigms that really never fit in the first place will only harm yourself; no matter if you call yourself, reader, author, developer, or producer.
I also disagree with the continual attempt to sever the virtual novel genre, because frankly, there is enough overlap and cross-over that you, as an author, limit yourself, by doing so.
There is still a very real denial among many veteran IF authors that produce games. A Golden Joystick Award will never be acceptable to these folk, whereas a Nebula Award, in their mind, automatically makes a game a popular and loved.
There are almost an infinite number of ways of blending the narrative and the mechanics… there is no “automatic win” in development, only execution.
ymmv.
Wow, I’m more torn than I expected to be. Not about why I like interactive fiction, which I’ll get to, but about if these are more books or games. I lean towards books too, especially coming from the perspective of someone working on a project myself… But at the same time, whatever satisfaction I get from reading a good book is decidedly different, less immersed, and less, like… gratifying than the enjoyment I get from playing a good choice-based text game. I think that’s gotta say something about the nature of this medium as games, regardless of the points made for them being closer to books. Points that I agree with and found perfectly worded by @Entracte to be clear 
hence me feeling unexpectedly torn!
But yeah, I love this form of fiction for both reasons, pretty evenly. On the reading end—
look, I’m a big nerd. For as long as I can remember I have spent my free time engaging with my imagination in weird, inane ways; even before I had a computer and internet access. I was an avid reader as a kid, but I also had a few, um… shit books that I deemed boring enough to require some spicing up for me to get a proper read out of them. And I would go through and replace the most important characters’ names with the names of people I knew. I’d choose which person I knew was most likely to be in that role, and just spend god knows how long crossing out and scribbling in books I didn’t like This was a short-lived hobby of mine because I started writing my own stuff quickly after, but I’ve always been predisposed to the idea of interacting with fiction. When I first stumbled upon a CYOA in a Waldenbooks, I freakin lost my little mind. There was no way I wasn’t going home with it, I probably would have stolen it if my mom hadn’t been so supportive of my reading 
I was shocked this was a thing. The book lets me change the story??
And then the internet came along and I graduated* to visual novels. *Not that VNs are superior, but between like… mid-00s to early 2010s, they were it for contemporary interactive fiction. and most of them were in japanese 
the suffering. And now I’ve largely replaced my VN reading with IF coming out of CS and Twine.
Text-based interactive fiction has replaced most of my reading over the last couple of years (the occasional traditional book that I pick up nowadays is almost always non-fiction) but it has also replaced most of my gaming time (the number of titles, old and new, languishing in my Steam library while I replay CS demos and scour itch for interesting IF can attest to this lol). I think if the choices are impactful or fun, they’re games! what else can i call it other than “playing” when I return for playthrough #3 and decide I’m gonna be the biggest dumbass possible this time around? What else would I call it when I insert my original characters into someone else’s world and let them affect and be affected by it? I understand why that’s probably too simple a metric to measure it by, but I can’t possibly choose and it’s just true for me. I love the duality of this format 
it’s taken over my life!
I like reading, but I’m definitely another one of those people who think ‘if I specifically want to read, I’ll read a novel’. It’s quite a different experience imo, and a novel does that far better than any interactive fiction does.
It’s tempting to say that the opposite is also true, i.e. that a dedicated game will always make a better game than a CS game will - but that depends on which element of the game experience you’re after. In some ways, interactive fiction is like taking a story-focused RPG and distilling it down to its purest narrative form, so that there’s no gameplay at all, and only the interactive story is left. And if that’s what you want from your games, then it’s ideal.
So yes, it’s the fact that IF is a game, but in a very specific niche, that brought me here. Not so much the reading element, because I can do that anywhere.
That’s basically what I decided, well one of the things, when I was deciding how to feel with this question. I love the idea story-wise for so many CRPGs, but I just can’t fucking get into the gameplay of old style isometric games like that. Like the story and possibilities of Baldur’s Gate sounds so up my alley, but it just sucks to play to me (I can’t take it for even like half an hour). Pillars of Eternity falls in a similar boat. Tyranny I’m fighting through slowly. But all of those, the entire subgenre of it, it’s the gameplay I can’t stand. Interactive fiction solved that problem: it’s a “game”, with plenty of interactivity and choice (on the ones I like), without being bogged down by dull or painfully tedious gameplay. It does it even better, honestly (well, has the potential to), because you don’t have the excuse “oh but the budget doesn’t allow for a female protagonist” or whatever other shit because there’s no visual or auditory elements, and various details of how your character looks can actually be acknowledged. It’s just a far better medium for a story (books is better books thank games? shocker, I know), and that is my main draw to RPGs. It obviously fails on longevity and, well, gameplay, and the immersion can’t compete with first person games (at least for my aphantasia self), but it’s a great medium that takes the best parts of a game and a novel, in my opinion.
So, uh, to answer the question of the post I like both. So long as it’s still a “book” you interact with/within, and not a “game” you read like the management or stay heavy ones; it’s cool to do I guess, but that’s focusing on the weaknesses of the medium and ignoring the strengths, not that text-based games can’t be a thing of course but that’s not “interactive fiction”.
And just to speak on a thing I saw in this topic, I also dislike, maybe even hate, having cut-ins that don’t involve the main character. It just bugs me so much. Like I just wanna keep it to what the MC knows or is interacting with, for immersion’s sake if nothing else. It’s totally fine to have shit happening in the background that you and the protagonist aren’t privy to. Keeps them ffrom impossibly just happening to have meta knowledge that someone’s planning something, or about to ambush them, or whatever it is.
Sorry for the long rambling. I’m pretty bad with that…
For me, this is where it comes back around to IF as a new medium in its infancy, as I mentioned earlier. I can’t think of many novels I’ve read that would have been better if they were interactive, but I also can’t think of many CS gamebooks that left me thinking I would just as soon have experienced the story as a conventional novel. And that’s true even of the ones that appealed to me more in the “quality literature” way than the “fun game” way. In the right hands, the medium becomes inextricable from the message. Interactive fiction positively facilitates exploration of the themes of fate and free will, the nature of narrative and the creative process, in ways that are - I won’t say impossible, but certainly much harder in conventional fiction.
I will freely admit that I find it hard even to relate to the concept that, in your words, “a dedicated game will always make a better game than a CS game will.” Maybe it’s because my processing style is overwhelmingly verbal rather than visual, on top of having extremely poor hand/eye coordination, but for me, if I had to choose between playing only “dedicated games” or only CS games for the rest of my life, I would choose the latter with a certainty that belies exactly how much of a formative effect my favorite games have had on me.
Huh, I also have aphantasia and don’t find first-person games immersive at all. But I think that’s mainly to do with the input controls. They just… aren’t similar to how a person works.
I’ve also been kinda wondering if aphantasia is a part of the reason why I don’t really like books that much. I don’t know how much the vivid imagery is a part of the enjoyment for people who actually do experience it.
That depends, I believe. I personally enjoy the language itself way more than the imagery it may or may not evoke. (Then again, I also rarely see books that would evoke imagery strongly enough for me to care about it.)