Non-ChoiceScript demo

And that’s why you’re the Grouch-in- Chief! :joy:

Now in all seriousness, running the risk of agroing the boss, I’d like to respectfully disagree.

I can’t comment on the financial benefit, it’s none of my literal business.

But as I see it, ChoiceScript (as a tool) is not the main reason people want to publish through CoG. There are many great alternatives out there, capable of producing virtually the exact same mechanics and esthetics of a ChoiceScript game, such as Twine, Ink or TADS to name a few. And all of them open source.

The main advantage of CoG is two-fold.

First, the publishing support. Choice-based interactive fiction is a niche market and CoG has been able to successfully carve a space for itself. Any author has a better chance with CoG than by publishing in itch.io and marketing on their tumblr.

And second, the community. It is my genuine belief that the community CoG has been able to foster on this forum is part of its success. The community is enriched by the threads you mentioned. There’s definitely an invisible gain there that is hard to measure.

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If you don’t want these threads because they’re not what this forum is about, but the community AND the mods want them to stay, then maybe it’s time to reconsider what this forum is about.

Maybe this is the problem. Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve seen, you guys are easily the biggest IF company around, and yet you distance yourselves from other IF even though you represent them in a big way. You guys are constantly fighting to make IF more popular but it seems like you’re swatting away any potential competition. Competition breeds progress, and in this case, progress breeds popularity. If you want it to be more popular, you should foster it in all of it’s forms.

I got a bit carried away, but the principle remains the same.

Also this. People come for the games, but they stay for the community.

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Well, it is their forum after all. I don’t think it’s wrong to not want to allow discussions of other tools not related to ChoiceScript. There’s a link to the intfiction forum a few posts back. Granted, I don’t find that community as vibrant as this one and the crowd there skew heavily towards parse-games. But it’s something.

This is 100% true.

Ok, now let’s take a breather. :grin:

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There’s a pretty big difference between allowing one thread for discussion of non-Choicescript interactive fiction (which the forum has always done) and allowing an unlimited number of WIP/Hobby threads for game developers whose games will never make a dime for CoG/HG.

Both of them help foster interest in the wider IF market, sure. But one is a lot more costly than the others. (The cash costs of running a forum may not closely scale with number of threads, but the time and energy costs certainly do.)

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for CoG to do a cost-benefit and figure that it can do its part for the wider IF community without providing free space for developers in other languages.

No, but nothing written in other languages will ever be published through CoG. It’s possible that expanding the forum with a Twine Hobby Projects section would bring in either (a) lots more paying customers who wouldn’t otherwise have discovered CoG or (b) a qualitative improvement in forum discussions/sense of community, but I’m not convinced that either is likely, and I’m not sure what other invisible gains we would be looking for.

Declining to provide free space on their forum for development threads for the competition != swatting it away.

CoG is an active ambassador for interactive fiction in lots of major forums; at conventions and awards I’ve seen them discuss IF ranging well beyond CSGs. CoG blog interviews (including mine, back in 2017) have regularly featured a general question about what IF the author has enjoyed/played lately, which certainly have pointed me to other authors and formats.

Sure, CoG’s mainly about promoting their own games, which is their job as a company, but they also raise the profile of other IF. And this forum is the Choice of Games forum, not a general IF reddit. I don’t think it’s as unreasonable as you’re suggesting to keep its primary focus on ChoiceScript games.

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This puts it perfectly. This is the Choice of Games Forum, so I also fail to see what’s wrong with the decision to keep the focus on, well, that very company and it’s products.

Although, where I disagree is the threads like Funny and Videogames. I believe general dedicated threads like that should always be welcomed, as they help manage off-topic discussion. Someone above said it best: allowing one general thread for something is not the same as allowing multiple for different IF games and topics.

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I meant exactly what I said. Compared to other tools available, ChoiceScript is not particularly attractive. Take Ink for example, it’s more powerful and flexible, has a less verbose syntax, is much better documented and can also be compiled as a browser app, not to mention open source. You don’t have nearly as many games available in Ink as in ChoiceScript and I believe that’s because ink doesn’t have a place like this one. And Inkle, the company behind Ink, does not publish third-party games.

I didn’t say that to defend that the forum should allow games written using other tools. Although, personally, I don’t think it would be a bad idea. I said that to highlight the importance of the community and thus the Off-topic threads. And the community is the invisible gain, hard to measure, which I mentioned.

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Got it, and fair enough. But that is the topic of both the thread and the bit of Jason’s post you quoted, so you may understand how someone could read you that way. :slight_smile:

I totally agree with you that the forum community is a hard-to-measure but very real good, and that the freedom to chat about off-topic stuff is part of that community. If I were still a mod, I would have been one of the ones arguing against Jason’s threadocidal tendencies on movies, video games (a topic I had the honor to turn over), and funny.

But I agree with him that

notwithstanding the limitations of CS as a language, which are a worthy topic of discussion but maybe not entirely relevant on this thread?

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Thanks for not removing my game’s post from the forum even though it wasn’t finished when I first made that post :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I guess this is a new rule… as of today? There are a lot of threads for non-CS games whose “completion” status is kind of arguable. I suppose they’re grandfathered in?

So, tumblr has recently developed a community for twine/other IFs, but I feel like it’s still easier to have 2-way discussions in a forum vs blogs, and discovery is hard. The interactive fiction reddits are pretty slow, at around one post a day. The twinegames subreddit is a bit more active. intfiction.org is a lot lower traffic and doesn’t really have the same interests in terms of game styles or subject matter. There are a number of active IF-related discords, but most of those are for specific development tools like twine or ink, and I feel like they lack a sense of stability and permanence compared to a forum. It’s unfortunate that the twine forum shut down. The intfiction forum isn’t really a replacement.

Twine discord link

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Hm, really? I usually skip the OIF section, but on a quick glance over it I’m mostly finding short posts announcing completed games rather than much resembling a WIP thread. Maybe rather than a case of lots being grandfathered in, this is one of a few slipping by?

I can understand why Twine, Ink, etc. writers would appreciate the COG forum community, which as you say is more robust than most of the other ones on offer. I’m still not convinced that it’s in COG’s interest to host game development threads for those writers – depends on how much traffic is brought by the “other IF” threads to the forum. And also how much forum drama they generate. :slight_smile: On the latter point, so far so good, I guess?

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But none of the hobby section wips will be published and will as you say “never make a dime for CoG/HG.”

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I get that. But people publishing in ChoiceScript allows us to make sales, which allows us to support this forum.

If you’re not publishing in CS, you’re making use of the resource that is this community without contributing to its maintenance. And, frankly, I don’t have time for that.

Except, no. I’m not going to take on more work for myself. Especially more work that neither me nor anyone in my company gets paid for.

Depends on what you call “IF,” but generally, no, I wouldn’t call us the biggest IF company at all.

I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I think you’re imagining things that don’t exist.

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Fair point. But because they’re using ChoiceScript, they’re part of strengthening the overall developer community that does write CoG/HG games. Sam Ursu is showing what it’s possible to do with CS in a way that might inspire many other writers in the community to try new things. That’s less the case with works written in other languages that do things CS can’t.

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While it might sound a trifle harsh to straight up ban non-CS WIP threads, it does make sense. Some of the absolute largest and most unruly threads in this forum’s history are WIP ones. There’s no reason for the company to want to absorb all that mod strain and such for noncontributors, plus they could crowd out other actual CS projects. Beta readers are as finite a resource as anything else, and it makes sense to maximize them reading and contributing to games that will actually release on CoG or HG rather than letting them get siphoned off to to fill some other outfit’s pockets. And at least you can still come here to tout your off-market releases and get some free publicity. Not all places would allow for that, I imagine.

Don’t forget there’s always the interactive fiction subreddit for feedback or potential beta readers for any non-Choicescript outing.

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There are different ways to contribute such as giving feedback to authors, helping people learn the ropes of ChoiceScript, build auxiliary tooling, etc. I know you meant in a generic way, but I have done some and plenty of each of these.

I know it’s easier to look at the numbers in the accounting book, but I’ve dedicated time and didn’t get anything out of it either. Imagine if all of us had the same attitude. And I’ve stayed around because of the threads you want to shut down (and the funny thread is my favorite one! Don’t put quotations around it, please.)

I don’t think shutting everything down is a smart move.

I’ve said more than I probably should have. So I’ll rest my case now.

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My reading of the quoted comment was “if you’re publishing in something other than CS (and consequently, on a moneymaking venture through something other than COG/HG/HC)”.

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well maybe a group could be created for that (like the adult group) and at a time only a select number of people could be part of that and those could be unlisted so someone would see those only if they searched for it.
@Havenstone

Just a regular old forum member here, not an employee, not a stockholder, not a moderator, and not in any way speaking for the company itself.

But from my perspective, this forum is the public face of CoG as well as its fans.

And yet I consistently get the impression that all of us, from full-time staff on down to level 1 forum members, are being held hostage to the whims of a single individual, @jasonstevanhill who consistently and vocally complains about his job.

I’ve seen him complain about people talking about movies, complain about how forum messages are too long (and thus require “skimming”, which might potentially offend someone who can’t properly read a long message on a forum dedicated to people who read long passages of text for fun), complain about people discussing things that were also discussed years ago (even though folks might still want to add their own two cents today), complain about having to do work like answering emails before drinking a cup of coffee, answer perfectly legitimate questions in a rude manner, complain about having to manage multiple Reddit threads, complain about having had to write an entire book (Choice of Vampires), and endless, endless, endless complaints about what a horribly expensive, time-consuming chore it is to “manage” this forum.

First of all, the forum software used (Discourse) is free. I don’t know what the hosting costs, but aside from the rare image, the postings here are almost entirely text, and I’ve got literally thousands of images hosted on my own personal blog which costs me less than $20 per year in hosting fees. If the company has got ten grand to give to Marxists, I imagine it can afford to host a niche forum using free, open-source software.

As for the moderating side of things, I usually log in to this forum once per day while I eat my breakfast, and it rarely takes me more than 30 minutes to read everything posted over the past 24 hours. Admittedly, I’m not doing any moderating work, but it can’t be that difficult to remove the odd post that violates the rules, can it? Moderators are volunteering to do this, after all.

Aside from the random spammer/troll, a lot of which can be auto-blocked with the software, why is it, exactly, that JSH thinks that these forums are so troublesome?

Is it because of a fanatical need to exert granular control over absolutely everything, including banning people from asking a published author when new material might potentially be forthcoming (something most authors would kill for), locking away the Hobby thread from the internet (including Google) to avoid authors being “bombarded” with feedback, or banning folks “for a thousand years” solely for the crime of “questioning the rules”?

Or maybe it’s deciding ex-cathedra that anyone who violates one rule will never learn and thus needs permanent banning?

Is it perhaps from the Herculean labors constantly being performed to merge and close threads, supposedly so some theoretical user in the future can more easily find answers?

Because, aside from some technical CS coding stuff, there is never going to be a “permanent answer” to things like whether saves/checkpoints should be implemented, whether or not to add a “back button,” implementing more features, etc.

Delete or ban this post, if you like (or use your admin powers to rewrite it under my name, as I saw JSH did just two weeks ago to someone else), but the overall impression going out from the so-called “head” of this company (honestly, even that topic is needlessly shrouded in mystery) is that he friggin’ hates his job, and it’s all because of all the troublesome peasants on this and other fora (Discord, CYS, Reddit, and Tumblr).

In other words, we are to blame for Daddy’s bad mood.

If I’m wrong, feel free to show me a single example of positive affirmation or participation by JSH, even something as simple as “Wow, I love this game” or “Great comment,” because I sure as heck cannot find it. All I see are complaints, announcements, non-answers, and rude comments.

The moderators, employees, fans, paying customers of CoG books, and authors (including WIP authors) love this place a lot, and that includes chatting about non-CS games, sharing memes, and posting funny animal pictures. That’s because we see this place as a community, not a workplace where we must produce profit for the CoG Company AT ALL TIMES.

If the person at top of the food chain no longer gets a thrill out of reading, playing, and discussing interactive fiction, maybe it’s time to find another career path and let someone happier take over, eh?

Just a thought, from me, a nobody, with love.

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What’s wrong with Marxists? Or with giving them money? Aside from the fact that the company didn’t “give money to Marxists”, it gave money to a movement co-founded by a self-described Marxist which is dedicated to doing the evidently necessary work of challenging the obvious, pervasive, documented and injudicious prejudice that underpins US law enforcement. Trying to delegitimize that with such a self-evidently reductive and stupid formulation is Not Cool.

As for JSH’s moods, I can claim no special insight on that. But I would imagine that having to deal with massive, aggressive, derogatory rants that single you out by name will sour anybody’s morning.

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I don’t see this going anywhere productive.