Heart's Choice FAQ

I suppose that sex scenes, or at least heavy romance scenes in games, are the hardest to write or code when one is having to write them for both core genders (or indeed even harder if you have more complex gender aspects like trans). One only has to remember Choice of Romance where reading it as someone who was attracted to women had situations where things felt off in various ways since the series was evidently written foremost with a male romance option perspective… so there’s an advantage to opting for gender and romance specific if it gives a greater descriptive narrative in that field in ways that can feel more natural.

Not saying that means all Hearts games should be that way, just I can understand how a writer would find it easier when romance and sex is the core driving force of the story/game.

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I can really see how your perspective makes sense in many circumstances. But, as @derekmetaltron said, my first thought was about how obviously “Affairs of the Court: Choice of Romance” was written for a female MC and male RO(s), and I found it pretty awkward to have my male MC’s priority in life being getting pregnant. I think that’s a great example of how badly gender-swapping arbitrarily can go.

I think it would be awesome if every author was great at writing every gender and orientation and wanted to. I’m just really against pressuring or making a rule that they have to if they don’t want to or won’t do it well. I think with Heart’s Choice romance/adult focus, it probably requires more talent to accomplish it successfully, so if I was an editor/manager, I’d shy away from that pressure even more than CoG or HG as to not get a reputation for awkward gender/romance expression. At least make the mpreg not a main storyline. lol

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IMO, the idea of writing a true romance/erotic story designed to appeal to all genders, all sexual preferences, etc., seems unwise (bordering on impossible, but no, nothing’s impossible). It would force the author to go so wide that the depth would be sacrificed. They’d basically have to write different stories within the same story.

Take a “regular” romance novel, so assume it’s female MC with male love interest(s). Could the author take that same text, leaving everything the same, but just switching out all the pronouns and names, and market it as a romance for straight men, or lesbians, or gay men, or anyone else? I’d say not. The narrative would likely have a heavily feminine tone. The main characters would interact with each other in a way that respects the well-established tropes and conventions of the genre. Even little things make a difference; the MC would probably have a best friend, and two women talking about one woman’s love interest would sound much different than two men talking about one man’s love interest.

I don’t understand why every story has to be for everyone. As long as there is a library of content, and within that library are works aimed at different audiences, that seems like enough. Probably even the better way to do it.

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I am a role-playing so I totally like read gay content as a literature piece and good plot I d consider Erotica pornography for me is literature andin literature you can enjoy stuff that is out of your normal life. But just me.

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What is that about a FEMENINE tone? That’s the big problem of the market. Assumptions of What is feminine or masculine. That leads Almost all stuff for females treatment us or like slaves orlike Victorian prices. While we have to behave as Women (a old times perception of womanhood)
-Submissive.
-Abandon all to fit in male expectations
-Want marry
-Do stuff for our male that normally doesn’t do anything for us.

What I expect for a Cog is Gender equality and diversity. Not exactly same is in the market now and since Jane Austen. If I want read Jane Austen represed romance I just do taht

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So the problem with having ROs for everyone in romance games is that there are only 2 options for doing so, and neither one is particularly appealing.

The first is, as @Eric_Moser mentioned, to genderswap everyone. A Choice of Games title can get away with that because the main selling point is the story, and the characters tend to be fairly shallow anyways. But in a romance-focused title? One where all the spotlight is on the characters, and the characters alone are meant to sell the game? That certainly wouldn’t do it for me. I like my romances to be with real, established characters, not templates. With those type of undefined characters they end up feeling more like some sort of formless thing rather than a real person, something carefully designed to be able to slot into any gender and orientation combination needed.

The second would be to provide 1 or 2 options for every gender and orientation. For example, in a game with 4 ROs, you could have 1 straight male, 1 gay male, 1 straight female, and 1 gay female. With this approach each character could be fairly fleshed out but the problem here is that the vast majority of your buyers would have no interest in 75% of the game’s content. And why buy it when such a huge chunk of the game is content that doesn’t appeal to you? Personally, I’d much rather have a game released every now and then that caters to me entirely, with 4 or 5 romance options that appeal to me, over having 1 or 2 options in every game released under the Heart’s Choice label. Even if I had less games to play I know I’d enjoy those few games a whole lot more.

No matter what you choice you make, you’d have to water it down in some way. And I don’t think that’s a sacrifice worth making when instead we can have a wide variety of content where everyone gets something they like. As the saying goes: “Appeal to everyone and you’ll appeal to no one”.

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Bisexual and pansexual characters are real people, perfect flesh out. You could have a cast of 4 5 pansexual people in different grades romantic and or sexual.

Not all is binary, not all are closed relationship. And not everyone want be tied up to a unique way in a choice game.

I like that both styles be part of the catalogue. And help people understand not all is Or you are A or you are B. And show awareness to a market were is basically A and a very very little of B. and absolutely nothing of other letters in the vocabulary.

If all catalogue is closed , fixed and targeted in same way the market is were is the positive and the awareness Cog is proud of? I for instance Want read and be part of the testing in a future gay men wrestling game and I am a heterosexual cis woman But my character can be anything. And see other perspective is great for me and help me understand other people. Not is all black or white at least in my humble opinion

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Hi, folks! Thank you for your questions and interest. Here are some answers.

Re: app status: Heart’s Choice will have its own omnibus app on iOS, separate from the Choice of Games omnibus app. We’re still working out the details of what will happen on other platforms, and we’ll let you know when we have more news on that.

Re: gender: We’re working hard to make sure that Heart’s Choice will have a balance of gender options and gender combinations. Heart’s Choice has the same level of editorial oversight as Choice of Games, so we can ensure that there are roughly equal numbers of games with each gender combination. There will also be some Heart’s Choice titles with genderswappable PCs and NPCs so that everyone can choose the combination of genders that they like best.

As mentioned in the original FAQ, Heart’s Choice titles will also be as feminist, inclusive, and egalitarian as Choice of Games titles.

Re: genderswapping more generally: we know that some people love genderswapping; some don’t. There’s a lot of existing discussion about genderswapping on other threads, so if you’re interested in having a lengthier conversation about that, please follow up on one of the other threads.

Re: level of explicit description of sex: that will vary from game to game. The spiciest Heart’s Choice games will be more explicit than the spiciest COG games. There will also be some less-explicit Heart’s Choice games. The ratings will be clearly marked so that everyone can find the level of spice that they like best.

I think that’s covered it all!

Thanks, everyone! It’s great to see all this enthusiasm for talking about Heart’s Choice. We’re having fun working on it, and we’re looking forward to being able to tell you more about it soon.

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Being open-minded is certainly a nice ideal. But in practical application and when monetization is a factor, there’s more than idealism at work. CHYOA has over 10,000 stories, and I guarantee you will not like them all just because they could be considered “roleplaying”. And you definitely wouldn’t pay for them all. I don’t even like half of the gay stories on there. You can’t launch a company hoping that lots of people are “nice”.

Of course pan and bi people are real people No one here suggested otherwise. What some have pointed out is that to be all-inclusive, that pan character needs different dialog/behaviors with a straight opposite-sex RO, a gay/bi/pan same-sex RO, a trans RO, and really engaging friend dialog with an ace MC. That’s a lot of writing to get right.

I’ve not seen anyone suggest ‘closing’ a catalog. There just seem to be two camps, one that wants everything to be for everyone, and the other camp wants quality/worthwhile stories, even if they’re more infrequent. CG and HoG have proven to us that just having the goal of being inclusive does not in and of itself produce engaging romantic/erotic content. Unfortunately, in the real world, our options are quantity or quality.

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Just have a quick question about erotica. Namely, how are you guys getting away with it on the App Market? Apple is about as puritan as it comes! Would hate to see the HC omnibus app get axe’d in the review process.

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Did I have said the catalogue should be all open? No I don’t. I have said that Both options should be part of the catalogue and a separate could be more productive and profitable in most cases .

A healthy catalogue should have a mixture of many genres and styles. And genderswaping and more defined.

Always the goal of being gender equality and not include discrimination bigotry The Cog company should be proud of their catalogue. You can be commercial and Positive

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I want to argue against gender-swap being yoked together with shallow. I don’t think those two things go together. Certainly there are gender-swapping games with shallow characters, but I don’t think there’s any particular reason why a gender-swapping character cannot be a “real, established” character who can, nevertheless, have switchable pronouns (at a minimum) or fleshed-out and varied gender presentations.

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With Hearts Choice I going to assume the best solution will be having different numbers of writers for both specific gender/sexuality and more varied gender and romance options. So one or two straight male writers, straight female writers, gay male and gay female writers, bisexual writers and the like. This will mean all options are being catered to with their specific romance focused writers, whilst a number of others work on stories where there is more open ended ones with romances of multiple genders or the ability to select your romance’s options gender, accepting in these cases options for romance will be more open ended and so more limited with specific preferences.

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You brought up a closed catalog, but I’m not sure why. You argued against it. I was assuring you that it wasn’t on anyone else’s mind… I certainly did not ever say that you supported it. ???

Anyways, this is getting redundant, and they asked us to take the conversation back to the main forum where it’s all been said 20 times, anyways. I just think a romance/erotica-specific brand demands better than some of what we’ve seen accepted by CoG and HG. That is all.

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My HG, The Magician’s Burden, contains several erotica scenes. I think Apple is mainly worried about that stuff being in screenshots on the app.

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Yeah, we’re keeping a close eye on the Apple requirements!

A couple things in our favor: first, they’re much stricter about images than they are about words; and second, as @Samuel_H_Young notes, they’re much stricter about screenshots than the general content of games. So, as long as we don’t have any explicit content in the screenshots, and as long as we stay within the more generous boundaries of what’s allowed in verbal descriptions, we’ll be OK.

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Heart’s Choice is going to be an interesting experiment. I know when I first heard of it, I expected it to be sort of like Hosted Games in the sense that the author, etc. will be able to lock certain things (like gender, etc.)

Heh, and if the line takes off, then you might put it on Steam at some point since Valve did add filters for more adult content, even text.

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Something relevant, I hope:

Related news:

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Is there any rough eta as to when we might get info on the first round of Hearts Choice Games, incidentally?

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Next year, maybe Q2.

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