For anyone curious, parser and choice-based games are both included in the official definition of interactive fiction nowadays, although earlier papers included only puzzle-parsers (which then of course dismissed parser games that don’t include puzzles). VNs may be under debate.
5 Likes
The idea that the phrase Interactive Fiction could ever apply strictly to solving puzzles by inputting text commands is laughable. Academics sit up there in their ivory tower playing their own parser puzzle game:
> RESEARCH "INTERACTIVE FICTION"
Your scope is too high and this paper is too difficult.
> NARROW DEFINITION
No need for further research. Nailed it.
> SUBMIT PAPER
Publish or perish.
7 Likes
Those academics in ivory towers just happen in this case to come from the community itself.
Crimes Against Mimesis is an awesome title though, so I can’t be too mad.
1 Like
I think it stems simply from the fact that’s what the first parser games universally were. So a definition coined around that time or not long after would reflect the state of things at the given time.
3 Likes
Yes and no. Paper gamebooks already existed, and any sane person would agree they were the pioneers of IF, and they’re closer to choice-based IF than to parser-based IF (arguably). However, I don’t think the term “interactive fiction” was a thing yet. I think it was coined around the time parser games became a thing, so in that sense, yes. I might have to brush up on my history of the community, though. 
7 Likes
I had no idea you wrote Grey Painter!
It’s easily one of the most memorable HG stories I’ve read. I didn’t even know nude drawing circles were a thing, and the loop mechanic was awsome and took me completely off guard.
I didn’t care that the game had no “RO’s”, (big air quotes) but can imagine, it’s not the sort of game to get a cult following on tumblr.
2 Likes
I got a grant from the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation once to write a history book of IFComp, the XYZZY Awards, and indie parser games a few years back. It’s on itch for free with two kinds of citation styles (Chicago and APA) and a few formats (pdf, epub):
It includes an essay on ‘what I learned from playing every choicescript game’ and an essays on Night Road and Creme de la Creme.
Interestingly, while Zork and Infocom essentially coined the term Interactive Fiction and the early usenet groups rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction were mostly parser based throughout the 90s, those groups started as choice-based academic hypertext groups that got pushed out by the (moderately more popular) parser games. It is true that parser games have not been commercially viable for years (Hadean Lands is the best seller, and is great). I think Choices and Episode were the best-selling IF for a long time; at one point they each brought in more than $80,000 a day.
8 Likes
I had a friend who played either Choices or Episode, I forget which. I told her I had tried them but I was spoiled for all time for frivolous little microtransaction engines by the existence of better things.
3 Likes
Its crazy how much those apps pull in, I’d heard before how profitable they apparently are. Soapies + Microtransactions = 
it seems.
I still remember they had a couple of computers that still ran q basic they taught us to code a short, basic CYOA on when I was at school. At it’s core, its surprisingly similar to what’s still around today and relatively accessible to anyone who wanted to make one so possibly also helped with popularity? (Print text, choose x or y, maybe some basic graphics above the text if you were feeling fancy.) I didn’t realise it started with choice games, then parser, then reverted back to choice being the more widespread form though.
2 Likes
Looks interesting, I’ll need to remember to check it out! Preferably sometime I don’t have brainfog or whatever it is this should be called.
1 Like
You may appreciate reading the responses in Do you NEED romance options, personally?
I don’t care if a CSG has romance or not, unless it was inaccurately advertised as having romance when it didn’t. (Or, I suppose, as being romance-free when it isn’t.) However, lacking romancable NPCs will decrease popularity.
- 39% of respondants in this poll said it’s almost essential to have a romantic interest.
- 30% of resopondants in this one said deep friendships/non-romantic relationships wouldn’t be enough to interest them in a game with no romance.
- And in this one roughly 25% said they wouldn’t play a game with no romance.
I don’t think that means you need to or should change anything. Write what you find fun. If writing some romance in would be fun, then yes, it’s absolutely worth the effort. Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about it.
sucks.
Granted, defining IF is hard.
The IFTF defines interactive fiction—IF, for short—as a kind of video game where the player’s interactions primarily involve text.
(Welcome in, Bookworm.)
Choice-based games are another well-known form of interactive fiction. […] Choice-based games can be […] physical, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Paperback CYOA novels are video games. QED.
I think the consensus is the term “interactive fiction” became widespread through Infocom’s marketing in the 80s. The term “gamebook” was probably coined by Puffin in 1982 with the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.
While books we can retroactively label gamebooks existed before parser games, the commercially successful gamebooks most people are thinking of when they invoke “gamebooks” are really not much older. Adventure came out in 1976. Zork I came out in 1980. The first CYOA was published in 1979, the first Fighting Fantasy in 1982. I think it makes more sense to see them as contemporaries.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised given mobile F2P is pretty lucrative; Candy Crush makes a billion dollars a year, or roughly $2.7 million a day.
This should probably be spun off into another topic, but why? Is it the heavy romance focus? Mobile availability? The pictures? Accessible prose?
I tried Episodes and it didn’t appeal to me. Objectively expensive and subjectively not the greatest writing. However, it obviously appeals to a lot of people, so it must be doing something right.
Is COG/HG/HC the most commercially successful IF company of the last couple decades? It’s not clear to me this is true, and I’m not taking about Episodes/Choices/etc (I don’t consider primarily image-based visual novels IF).
2 Likes
What else do you think it might be?
I think those are the plausible competition. Telltale is defunct, Fallen London has dwindled. One-off hits like 80 Days or Pentiment didn’t (as far as I know) launch a company; Disco Elysium killed one.
Entirely possible that I’m overlooking some big success in the IF-sphere; let me know if so.
Yes, and existed before 80 Days too – but by “launched” I had in mind success with multiple hits. Maybe I’m underestimating how well their other games have done just because I’d not heard of most of them. 
But I think of Inkle as a boutique studio with one big hit, that doesn’t have the scale or resilience of CoG’s business model.
1 Like
Do you mean the game by inkle? I haven’t played it myself, only came across it when looking at different existing scripting languages for IFs. But the company still exists – though I can’t really say whether they are successful, but they do have regular releases according to steam … But I certainly only hear their name rarely.
3 Likes
Inkle’s still ticking along. They just don’t have the same high throughput model as something like COG (or forbid Choices/Episode with who knows how many published each month). The Sorcery! series is very well known and along with 80 days sold very well. Heaven’s Vault I think also did moderately well. I haven’t played the others but they’re still putting out a game every 1-2 years. I’ve heard overboard did very well and was award nominated too.Inkle is head of a lot more outside of COG circles.
Fallen london is also ticking along. Their main site has possibly dropped off because of their aggressive grinding component in the later game which punishes play and discourages long term players sticking around. They tried branching into sunless seas/skies, but the gameplay wasn’t great. I haven’t finished it yet, but I noticed they have gone into VN territory more recently which I think is a very wise decision for their game style, but surprisingly from what I heard did not do super well on steam.
Telltale was doing extremely well until they made some bad business decisions, over expanded and went under. (They were actually bought out and are operational again under a new management. Remains to be seen if they can revive it back to anything approaching previous sales levels.)
I don’t actually think anyone can argue that Episodes and Choices are by far and away the most commercially successful IF companies in recent times regardless of what you (and I) might think of them. They are IF. It’s a broad category that does not just include things that look like cyoa novels.
9 Likes
I’m with you on that. The context where the claim came up was of course:
i.e. CoG's degree of commercial success is why we get so many people using the term 'IF' parochially.
That point doesn’t rest on whether we put CoG in the literal number one spot. I’m happy to hand the crown off to the hyper-commercial Choices (Pixelberry is the company) and Episode (Pocket Gems). Their model is fundamentally about mobile game monetization, but they hang it on a recognizably IF skeleton. And they’re way bigger than CoG.
But not only are they way more cut off from the Twine/Ink/Inform/IFComp/XYZZY world than the CoG community is, they barely talk about themselves as IF. I struggle to imagine anyone around Pixelberry talking about their ecosystem as “the whole IF deal,” because I don’t think it fundamentally categorizes itself as an IF company.
CoG always has, because Dan Fabulich comes out of the IF world and has from the outset been a bridge to it. That’s where the CoG fanbase was originally taught to use IF as the label for what we do.
I’ve never submitted anything to IFComp or Spring Thing, but I do hang out outside CoG circles in the IF world. That’s exactly where I’ve heard CoG described as the most commercially successful IF company, including by people who like/admire other brands of IF a lot more. CoG’s degree of commercial success is what’s brought in lots of strangers to the outskirts of this world and taught them to call it IF.
I don’t think that was really true of 80 Days, huge as it was. Inkle is indeed ticking along, and some of us would indeed know them from Sorcery! (their adaptation of the classic paper gamebook) even if 80 Days hadn’t subsequently blown up. And being TIME magazine’s Game of the Year is a level of commercial visibility that CoG has never come close to having.
But those 80 Days fans for the most part never learned to think of what they were enjoying as “IF.” And I can’t look at Inkle’s library – much smaller than CoG’s, with significantly higher dev costs per game – and believe that they’ve got as broad a base of games that return a profit to the company. Commercially, their success is narrower and more brittle than CoG’s. (When it comes to quality, I’ve got no gripes with anyone who wants to put Inkle on top.)
Telltale was also way more prominent in its day, but blew up for reasons significantly related to their business model and the cost of doing Telltale-style IF (where you trade off some breadth of choice for graphics and voice acting). You’ve got less scope to survive bad business decisions if your business model has skinny margins.
CoG has been so commercially successful because it can shape itself much more like a book publishing company, drawing on the economics of that world, compared to other companies that are much more video gamey. (Pixelberry and Pocket Gems are even more commercially successful because casual mobile games are a higher-margin business than e-books.) That’s only partly to do with CoG’s inexpensive UI – it has even more to do (IMO) with the terms that book authors expect and their willingness to leave a lot of long-tail royalties to the company in exchange for a bigger up-front advance.
I get the annoyance with so many people who’ve only experienced CoG talking as if that’s the whole IF world. But I do think CoG has hit on something more commercially successful than any other company that talks about itself as IF; and that’s an opportunity for the wider IF-sphere. People who play CoG games are more likely to stumble onto the world of Twine or IFComp, Counterfeit Monkey or Hadean Lands, than people who played 80 Days or Walking Dead.
7 Likes
I learnt of Inkle from my professor! Of course, I was on a course about interactive fiction…
3 Likes
Funny thing is, not only Grey Painter has a RO, it’s one of very few games where you can’t swap RO for friend or relative or whatnot and story doesn’t lose anything significant. That list of grievances MC unrolls for Harper at some point is exclusively SO or spouse thing.
1 Like
To be honest, I’d say yes. From my perspective, if an author is a good enough writer, they don’t necessarily need to include intimate relationships between the MC and other characters, because their writing alone can make readers emotionally invested in the story and its characters.
The problem is that, more often than not, the writing and storytelling aren’t quite strong enough to achieve that on their own. As a result, intimate relationships often become a way for authors to help readers connect with the characters and feel more immersed in the story.
1 Like
If an author doesn’t have the skill to get readers invested in the story and characters, doesn’t it follow that they most likely wouldn’t have the skill to write an emotionally impactful romance arc either?
5 Likes