List of all stories by word length

An outsider like me is certainly in a poor place to do it, and I’m sorry for advancing my guesses with an over-confident tone. Only you guys can assess the dollar cost of the extra editorial time that gets sucked into this, and decide whether on the whole that’s a cost worth paying against the much-harder-to-measure odds of excluding profitable authors. (It’s also a cost worth mitigating–it’s great that you coach your selected authors on this, I’m sure you do it very well, and I’m sorry I missed out on it.)

Absolutely–I’m from the transitional era. :slight_smile: But isn’t the contest a different way again, and one in which there’s some danger of discouraging good authors if issues of code quality are given too prominent a place?

I wasn’t using myself/XoR as an example because I’m personally affected, but because I thought CoG might be more likely to do some reflection based on the concrete example of a successful game. There’s another very good author who spoke up upthread, and I wasn’t sure whether the implications of what he and others said were being taken seriously or not.

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I guess I’m confused. No one’s being excluded from working with us because they aren’t especially good at using ChoiceScript. That’s not how we decide to offer contracts or even (that I’ve seen) spike games in progress. Authors don’t learn ChoiceScript until they have been offered a contract. It’s 5% of the contest score, so it’s not a huge factor there, either. I mean, even the (to me!) basic prose styling, “how well you write at a sentence level,” isn’t given as much consideration (10% of score) as I tend to give it in evaluating writers. So on some level you don’t have to be that great a fiction writer or coder to win the contest, though presumably, if the competition is tight, the winner will be the one who excels in every category. That’s the point of a judging rubric. But perhaps your point is that efficiency shouldn’t be part of the consideration at all?

I don’t think there are any real implications here, certainly not in terms of preventing people from working with us. I just wanted to point out that not all word counts are created equally.

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Personally I think the gosub vs copying code shouldn’t make that much difference to a reader. Sure to an editor having to edit a scene once is better than five times (and likewise for an author to only have to go through one scene instead if five) but still to a reader they would still see the same amount of words.

I’d probably says it’d be fairer to have an average play length instead of an overal word count which can be bloated by code even without repeated scenes (obviously depending on the complexity of the game).

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On the note:
I’m certain I am somehow managing to just not find the answer on the forum, but how can i do a ‘without code’ wordcount?

But that too leads to misleading numbers when a game isn’t efficiently coded… A efficiently coded 100,000 words with a 20,000 word playthrough is better than an an inefficient 100,000 with a 20,000 playthrough because by implication, you’d need to play 5 times and make different choices each time to get the most out of the first, but the second you might just get the same 20,000-ish words …

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Well, there’s always the hard way… Copy and paste “just the text” into something like Microsoft Word and have it count the words for you.

Should viable playthrough count be a part of standard evaluation, then?
It would take up minimal ad copy, I think… Example:

200,000 words. 6 playthroughs.

And you can always have an asterisk after linking to a longer explanation of what’s meant by 6 playthroughs, or however many there are.

I think the problem with this setup is that some text in the early game will inevitably be repeated in order to get to later choices, given the ‘traditional’ design of current games. That will skew any estimated playthrough count.

This dilemma may actually be a continuation of the “what counts as an ending” discussion, because I think what it boils down to is the potential amount of unique content the player experiences per playthrough.

I wonder if there’s some sort of abbreviation that can be used… Potential Unique Content… PUC?

PUC: 20k / play

Maybe?

That’s a good point especially regarding variations.

Maybe we ought to look not only at how efficiently something is coded, but also at how the branching in a story functions.

Does a story go from A to B by routes A 1, A 2 A3, maybe branching those into A1.1 A1.2 A1.3 A2.1 etc, or does it go from A to B by A1.1 1.2 1.3?

Because even an efficiently coded game can have little variety if it does the latter.

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I’d love to hear you explain that a little more–I couldn’t quite parse the distinction you are making. I guess we need to establish a nomenclature for the family tree of branching.

Is your first example one in which there is a branch that doesn’t ever rejoin a main narrative, while the second example has a brief divergence and then rejoins the trunk of the tree?

They both rejoin the maintree.
Let me use two scenes from Hero Unmasked! and Heroes Rise as example.

HU more commonly does the first kind of branching:
At the first real branch (chapter 2) Firebrand, a pyrokinetic villain, is holding up the TV studio you are working at with a bomb-threat. He is, however, giving people 15 minutes to evacuate. That is storypoint A. You are then given four path how to react while people evacuate the building: 1. Find the bomb and try to disarm it. 2. Grab a camera and get some footage for the news 3. Get everyone out as quickly as possible, or 4. Confront Firebrand yourself on the rooftop.
Now, each of these paths splits into subpath again, accounting for various skills/stats you can have gathered up to this point. For example, if you picked the choices before that higher your athletics and your tech skills, you can successfully run back and get a flashlight to look for the bomb in the basement if you had chosen to try and disarm it. If you pick that option with a low athletics stat however, you’ll be too slow and need to get your bacon saved from getting roasted. Either path can lead to success or failure (you won’t die though). Whether or not you succeed, you will come to the parking lot with everyone else. Storypoint B. So you here have a branching method that accounts for various approaches to a situation and various stat-sets therein

HR more commonly does the second type of branching:
Early on you are asked what you want to do on your first outing as hero. Point A. While you are given different options, they all directly move to you taking the same case each time, (point B) even when you say that ‘this is a bit out of my league, I’d like to take it slow’. The game does not, for example go, let you take a smaller case and have you wind up in the bigger one. Instead it says ‘oh but you need to prestige and money, so you take the bigger case’.
HR does this in 9 out of 10 of its ‘choices’ to the point that many are more pseudo-fake-choices than anything.

Now, a game can, of course, have both kinds of branching-methods, but with the latter, IMHO, the author should make certain there is a logical, comprehensible explanation etc as to why there’s only path A1.1 and A1.2 instead of A1 and A2 with subpaths.

Thus, even an efficiently coded game can have little variety if a lot of the text is spent on explaining to the reader/player why they don’t actually do the thing they wanted to do.

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I like this idea.

I also want to point out, to readers in general, that the criticism that a CYOA is on rails and that your character can only do so many things is only somewhat valid, at best.

We’re talking about projects that are usually written by a single person. These are not massive, open-world, endless, MMO-depth RPGs written by a team of highly paid individuals.

If a single person could design and code something like that, don’t you think they would be working for someone like EA or Blizzard, or even have their own company?

Where I’m going with all that is that when we better “establish a nomenclature for the family tree of branching,” I’d like for said branching to be judged fairly and on an appropriate scale.

The A1, A2 thing or the A1.1, A1.2 thing can be a bit confusing. It may be easier to think about story chapters.
If the A in A1 represents chapter 1, then…
The 1 in A1 represents what exactly?
(That “1” can represent different things for different stories.)

So after we branch out and finally come to B (B1; B2; B1.1; B1.55555, etc.)
Now we’re talking about Chapter 2.

C is chapter 3
D is chapter 4
E is chapter 5, etc.

As far as the numbers… let’s look at A1 again, for example… 1 can represent a plot point, or perhaps the first choice tree.

If we go with the latter, consider this example:

I am buying a car at this dealership. I want the color to be…

  • Red
  • White
  • Blue
  • Green

If we use “A1” here, we’re talking about this first choice tree in chapter 1. At least, to my understanding.
So does that mean that the second choice tree should be A2?
Where would it make sense to use A1.1 instead?
(This is not a rhetorical question.)

However, before this becomes too confusing, we must remember the reason(s) why we are seeking to establish this nomenclature in the first place.

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Admitedly, I won’t deny that one of the biggest, if not main factors that lure me into trying and buying a game is the word length, so this kind of list comes in hand in regards to the titles I haven’t yet read… :yum:

As much as I love to read as much of it as I can, it’s hard for me to subconciously stray from the ‘cost-benefit’ mindset, specially depending on the situation I’m in… I love and revel in binge reading, and the longer a game is, the more content it has, the more times I have to restart and replay, again and again, mid-game or after a playthrough, the better and worthier the purchase it feels (although I’m well-aware of how much time and effort it takes to put those together :see_no_evil:), and dislike when at last it comes to an end, haha… And due to different currencies, I can’t refrain from feeling a bit bad when buying a 20$+ game that will be finished in few hours or by the end of a day, reading casually (also why it’s hard for me to go with visual novels). I don’t repent reading all the games I bought, but, after being surprised sometimes to see how short a game felt, regardless of a big word-count (especially when the story ends up being more linear, or the game has a wide branching, but a more horizontal one), I realized that can be a flawed mindset… :flushed:

It’s all very relative, though, and in the end, there are many other factors to take in consideration to define an actual game’s lenght or replayability.

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As someone who’s been around since Choice of Romance was new and has sunk woefully masssive amounts of money into COG since then, the one thing that infuriates me more than anything is this:

#choice
*Play a sultry kazoo solo
You play a positively spicy kazoo solo!
*Play a mournful kazoo solo
You begin to play a mournful kazoo solo,
but suddenly, it turns sexy.
*Don’t play the kazoo
You have all this free time and a kazoo.
Why not have a sexy kazoo solo?

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Yeah.
As said, sometimes these things are ok (I mean heck, I have them a couple of times in my WIP too, but I always try to make to U-turn to the other option be comprehensible).
Just when there is no reason why the story should detour you over to another option, the author should sit back down and maybe brainstorm with friends and betatesters what to do here

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If it’s fairly minor such as food preference, eye color, which tie you’re wearing for the seminar, that’s one thing. If it’s at a junction in the story that is set up to be important, and all actions lead to the same consequence regardless of your input, that’s another.

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Yeah. Honestly, the only time I saw this work so far was in CCH (and we all know which bit I am talking about Dx ) mostly cause it gives the player the sense that this was unavoidable, no matter what you’d have done.
But when you have it like in, again, HR for example where you are pretty much bared from using common sense, left alone chose your own adventure, something went wrong.

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As @Gower says, it would be interesting/helpful to have some nomenclature. That’s a fascinating look at it from @Carlos.R and @MeltingPenguins
(Has this been discussed before, or is there common parlance among COG staff?)

I think we may find that branch width is still best established by dividing total word count by readthrough length, but if we were to try to illustrate branch width using an alphanumeric reference system instead of a visual page tree, I’d be tempted to look for more simplistic method, instead of a technically descriptive one. Because, who’s it for? A prospective reader who likely isn’t a technical savant.

If each digit represents a chapter, and is delineated (here with a / ) for clarity, you can show if a chapter contains major branches:

3 / 1 / 3 / 1 / 3

The example would show that in your 5 chapter story, chapter one has 3 major branches.
You’ve also shown you’ve written 3 chapters in which a reader can enjoy 3 substantively different experiences, and 2 more linear chapters in which their experience will be largely the same as all other readers, excepting some flavour text.

You’d still require consensus on what a ‘major’ branch is.

The boring thoughts about the other system being discussed

Using a A:1 A:323 method to show branch width:

  • doesn’t take into account length of branches,
  • won’t help with any games that use loops.

Referencing specific choices using it:

  • would require an in depth knowledge of the story for anyone to know what you were actually talking about when you used it,
  • needs common understanding on whether you include *fake_choices (or *choices that lead to the same text) and how or if they’re distinguished.
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I checked the figures for the latest version of UnNatural.

277,764 words (with code)
240,077 words (w/out code)

I also worked it out on average a playthrough is roughly 68,564 words.

I find the figures facinating,

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That’s an impressive, if mysterious, figure.

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I just copied it from the calculator lol

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