First point: While it’s totally understandable that Choice of Broadsides can be interpreted as English v. French, it is not explicitly, so for a French person to be offended about there being no option to be French in a game where traditional countries, while maybe having close analogues, don’t actually exist, doesn’t make sense.
Second point: Yeah okay, that’s fine by me, in the OP I actually don’t suggest an acronym, but actually a specification in the description.
It is however a resonable possibility that a French person might be offended by Choice of Broadsides, just like you were upset by the non-mention of gender and orientation.
My main point is that different people can be uspset or offended by a lot of things that appear minor or insignificant to others and gender/orientationis is only one these things.
Another example is Fatehaven that has recently triggered a very intense discussion on treatment of animals and the depiction of it.
That’s an example of False Equivalence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence You can’t compare not being able to be French with not being able to choose your gender and/or sexuality. It has no real relevance to the discussion at hand.
Most of the choice games now have “Play as gay or straight, male or female” on them. It’s one of the important aspects of playing Choice Games. So I can understand why it’s assumed that this might be the case with the hosted games too…
I never opened a discussion about moral principles so I’m not sure why we are talking about animal cruelty
Just to reiterate again, countries as we know them do not exist in Choice of Broadsides so for a French person to be offended by something in that game, based on their connection with real life nationality, makes no sense.
I also wasn’t offended by anything, as I state in my OP, I think it is simply a sound business practice to make sure buyers are made fully aware of integral aspects of the thing they are buying.
I’m starting to get the feeling that no one read the OP and that this entire thread has turned into a game of Telephone haha.
@FairyGodfeather, @Letra I don’t want to make it a discussion moral principles. I think it’s possible that someone could be upset by other things than gender and orientation, I mentioned Fatehaven because one user criticised it for the unexpected and not announced amount of what he considered animal cruelty.
Anyway, I agree that people who know the official policy on genders of the MC and the ROs might have similar expectations on all hosted games and I would like to find a solution for this. So far, one possible reason for the non-mention of genderlock seems to be related to the limits on characters for game descriptions that @AlexClifford1994 mentioned.
The most useful info now would be if the authors the concerned games, namely @Amith_Shaju, author of GoOC, @Mayday, (PoL), @Cataphrak (SoI) and @AlexClifford1994 (MiB) could say if this limit is the reason why they don’t mention the limited choice of gender and/or sexual orientation in the Game description
@WulfyK
As depressing as this may sound, it was actually an oversight on my part.
I actually had a canned long-form description ready to go, so when CoG asked for one, that’s what I gave them. There was also the fact that I put in a disclaimer on the very first page, which I thought would do the trick.
That being said, I’ve been thinking of the idea of some kind of short code-phrase to tell people what options they have available to them, like “FO: NR” (Female Only, No Ramances), for example, with the assumption that any game description without that code would be entirely inclusive.
That seems like it would be more unwieldy than anything, covering the art with some kind of label reminisce of the PARENTAL WARNING of old CDs seems heavy-handed.
I think you did it best in Swords, there is a large disclaimer on the very first page and if someone doesn’t read it that seems to be their problem (Why would you buy a text-based game and not read it, I will never know). In addition, the gender/sexual orientation choices occur most often in the early parts of a game, which are almost always available in the demo. Buying a game without trying the demo is not something I would recommend either. Maybe make it standard policy to put some kind of ‘disturbing content’ on the first page, as well as any gender/orientation/race/class/whatever locks.
In terms of level of violence etc this should be covered in the maturity rating given to the game by apple and Google play, e.g. for Murder in Berlin on iTunes it says:
Rated 12+ for the following:
Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
In terms of gender etc, from me it was a pure oversight not putting it in the description although to be fair, it is clear in the demo I think that it is gender-locked. The difficulty with the description is the character count, 250, 120, 80 and 50 characters (including spaces), so my descriptions ended up like this for Divided We Fall:
250:
The Spanish Civil War is the setting of Divided We Fall. You will shape the lives of 4 Spaniards on both sides of the divide; will they be brutalised, stay true to their principles or even survive? You decide in this 130k word illustrated interactive epic.
120:
Spanish Civil War epic, in which you decide the fate of 4 Spaniards. Will they be brutalised, principled or even survive?
80:
Spanish Civil War epic, decide the fate of 4 Spaniards. Kill, live, die, you choose.
50:
Spanish Civil War Epic, decide the fate of 4 Spaniards.
So you can see how tricky it is to even provide a basic description of the story never mind a variety of codes/phrases
One solution could be implementing a series of icons, that can be selected by ticking in boxes once the game is published, and when you hover over the icon it has a description. At least that wouldn’t count towards the character limit, but it would require a redesign of the homepage.
@Letra@WulfyK Gangs of Old Camp is my first RPG. Being a Windows Phone user, my early experience of RPGs was confined to the Delight Games publications. So that did play a great part in shaping the general format of the game. It was only towards the end that I became aware of the gender and romance issues. By then I found it hard to add them to the game. That is the reason for the limited choices.
As for not putting it in the description, that too was due to my lack of experience. I hadn’t seen any games with such warnings and I don’t exactly look for them when I play a game. I sincerely apologize for my mistake and promise to not repeat them if I have the good fortune of publishing another game.
This has been a fascinating discussion. When I wrote Planetary Quarantine I went in the opposite direction – I put in no choices whatsoever on the subject. You don’t choose gender, orientation, ethnicity, anything. That was deliberate, because it meant that you were whomever you pictured yourself to be. There’s a single sort-of romance section where you are given the choice of hitting on either male or female characters but it’s entirely up to you which (if any) you pick and it’s left at that. The game’s romance sort of withered because I was having a hard time writing it well (but you didn’t let that stop you write the rest of the game, you might joke) but it seemed to me that having explicit choices was somewhat self-limiting. When you are defining yourself you are necessarily defining yourself against something.
My question is does that approach rob the player of the chance to affirmatively choose his or her identity? Is there some empowering or affirming quality on being able to see an entry on the screen of how you view yourself, and then choosing it? And then knowing that the game is written in such a way as to provide a point of view coming from that perspective?
@AlexClifford1994 The 250 character description is actually just a guideline. It’s that only 250 characters will appear before a “read more” link appears in the iTunes description. So the 250 character description can actually be quite long (see the COG descriptions). I think the actual cap is 4000 characters, and that’s mostly for Google Play.
On that note, because of iOS 8 and our new Android UI, we’re going to be progressively re-releasing a bunch of the old games in the next few months. If anybody wants to submit patches or update descriptions or whatever, now is a good time to get those things filed with us.
Thanks for the info I’ll get in touch with my proofreader to see if I can speed things up. Would you recommend updating to the latest choicescript as well?
I guess another, related question for me is: Are people buying games without playing at least a part of the demo? I always do, and so I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that most others do as well. If so, then I think one of the first screens of the game could be that description as discussed above, probably bullet points, as @FairyGodfeather suggests:
-Play as Cassandra of Troy!
-Choose romantic encounters with men or women…or both…or none at all!
…etc.
The game description is usually short, punchy, and designed to give a quick synopsis of the plot and make you want to try/buy the game, like a back-cover blurb on a book. I don’t think it is necessarily the place for a breakdown of the game’s gender/orientation/violence/animal cruelty etc etc.
I’m also not fond of abbreviations (can never remember them) or warning label/stickers on the cover.
