October 2023's Writer Support Thread

Game Development Writing and Content
184

Just a random thought of mine, but I feel like word count can be eerily deceptive when thinking of things from a consumers perspective.

I didn’t really know if this thought justified a full thread or not, so I just thought I would share it here, but lets say for example that in one case an author has variables for pronouns and in the other the author copy/pastes then changes the specific pronoun relevant words. In the former case, there would be significantly less ‘total words’ but the experience when read would be the exact same.

This is where having some who paint word count as being the end all be all measurement for if they will buy something will end up being a bit out of tune. Since if you only looked at word count, the former author would look significantly less appealing, even if both of the materials between them are the same one is done with significantly less words. [Mind you, there is nothing wrong with either method of the author’s, rather an issue that can come up with the perception of word count amongst readers]. I think all of this would encourage then for an author to take less efficient routes in terms of their coding to make the game appear bigger just because taking more time to be more efficient may actually put people off since the word count is smaller.

All this leads me to think / say that I think “Playthrough Length/Count” is really important to provide alongside the word count of a game. Anyway I don’t know what the actual point of this whole diatribe is I just felt like sharing a thought. :skull:

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185

I am Spanish and Still without understand the Anglo-Saxon obsession with word account. We don’t have that. We have and is not all imortant a page account but you can have a 100/page book best seller fighting a gainst a 1000 pages one in same conditions.

I love writing short stories and several short stories connected to each other. In Spanish literature that is common. Here Or you make a BIG volume or nobody ever look at your stuff.

Even readers are obsessed with words accounting not with plot or quality value and differences between playthrough.

It is not a fair system for writers or readers. and it is not an accurate metric.

And sincerely I would certainly be encouraged to use bad code to look better as market forces people to inflated numbers just to have a chance of being able to have readers

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186

The other issue with piracy is the fact they don’t just make your game available for free, they modify it which as they are not the author can cause issues which are then reported to the author but obviously no-one would admit to having a pirated version. The result is authors spending hours trying to find a bug that doesn’t actually exist and only occurs when a game is modded.

I literally spent almost three hours trying to locate an error which I couldn’t replicate and that ended up being caused by a variable that was altered by a mod.

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187

I genuinely think a story should just be as long as a story needs to be in order to tell it. I definitely have noticed talk over word count before and to me I don’t think it should really matter that much. If a story is complete, then that should be enough, at least in my mind.

In defense of those who do worry about word count a lot, it might be more about wanting to be able to invest in the story for longer or not wanting to run out of material to read too quickly. They might just enjoy the idea of potentially having a lot more to find, or the like. I just think that ‘word count’ on it’s own provides you with very incomplete information, which is part of why I feel a little odd about it being customarily included to show the ‘length’ of a game without additional information.

Two stories could share the same exact word count while being vastly different in scope and length. One could have that length predominantly in substituting variables for copy/paste while the other having those variables in place of the copy/paste would have a longer story relatively speaking. It all just reads to me as strange as I said before, I suppose. [Again, nothing wrong with either approach, only an issue when ‘word count’ is used as a metric for trying to promote or monetise a novel/book.]

This is an issue you just don’t get with traditional novels or books since every page a reader sees is meant to be read, it is very clear the length of a book you are signing up for. Versus in our medium where it’s quite literally antithetical to have everything ‘clearly visible’ in that way. Even if you know the word count you don’t really know how that will translate into actual gameplay experience.

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188

You are a saint. If I got a report from someone that have pirated my game and dare to send ME a report… I would launch a tantrum message that wuld be heard across the continents.

Reporting someone a error FROM SOMETHING YOU STOLEN is the most heavy insult a writer can receive.

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189

Thing is when I settled on the fact that was the cause. I did message them asking if they had modded it and they never got back to me. I’m just annoyed I didn’t make a note of the email address before it was deleted.

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190

I definitely agree that wordcount is disproportionately focused on, but… I’m not totally sure if playthrough length is entirely representative either - these games and the effort that goes into them and the play experience are greater than the sum of their parts and it’s also not always easy to say “there are ten different endings!” or routes as the lines are very blurred.

What does make me sad is seeing shorter games overlooked because of people making a snap judgment about play time or quality based on a smaller number - when it is perfectly possible to make a less enjoyable, responsive game whatever the word count.

I can see why price point is based on wordcount - it is a blunt tool to very generally describe how much time has been spent on it, but it obviously doesn’t tell the whole story.

For in progress work, wordcount is a way of showing “I’m making progress!” which is why it gets focused on a lot - that’s certainly why I track it, but I also track, (but don’t share, - maybe I should) how far I am through a chapter, and do share when I’m doing things that aren’t increasing wordcount such as planning, playtesting, and editing. I adore when I realise I’ve coded something and can cut it to make a chapter better! I do encourage writers to remember that wordcount isn’t everything and there are other aspects of a project that contribute to it - not to mention how important it is to take breaks from the project to make it sustainable.

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191

I just don’t agree fundamentally that word count should be the predominant tool for deciding that, though, I suppose.

To continue with those examples, if in the case of the author who used variables versus the author who used copy/paste, lets say the copy/paste author doubled the length of the overall story due to this method. Should this expended effort follow through into the price even when for the reader it makes no fundamental difference in the experience of reading it? [Honestly I do not have an answer there, I am just thinking at the moment. To some extent I myself believe it should, really, if the story is worth experiencing either way one deserves to be paid for the work they put in.]

I too like to think about word count in terms of making progress, though I focus less on it when doing coding heavy things. I have had some days where I spend hours and hours on something and I end up adding… 200 words? Why? Because I added a variable system that made everything much more efficient cutting out a lot of unnecessary text. Sometimes it’ll even be in the negative despite adding new content.

This would all be detrimental if we just use word count the primary tool for gauging a game’s ‘worth’ or ‘length’. Why would I expend the effort to make my game more efficient if it means it’ll be less words and thus less ‘value’. You know? That is why I said it can encourage some less than stellar lines of thinking. I don’t think playthrough length should be the only factor, of course not. But I do think that more than just ‘word count’ is valuable as a tool for thinking about these things.

[Mind you, as a person I am borderline obsessive over trying to come up with new ways for efficiency despite it being oftentimes huge time sinks. I just like the challenges it provides to my brain and the idea of future proofing quite a lot. For others though, none of this would be a factor at all, just focusing on material being put to the page.]

Response to @LiliArch :

…to make your job easier when you realize you made a typo, so instead of having to fix it a hundred times you’ll need to fix it only once?

What do you mean by this? :skull:

Response to @poison_mara :

Reassessing my own biases with this discussion makes me believe I should take some time to check out more short stories/novels. I readily admit I have a bias for longer form novels, but I think it’s more to do with my own preferences for writing style / subjects which lend themselves more naturally to that. As other’s have mentioned in the past, Choice of the Dragon was a massively fundamental game with a diminutive word count at the lower cusp of what Hosted Games accepts [30,000 words].

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192

Playthrough length should decrease the amount of complaints like “what I read didn’t feel like a million words” though (of course it doesn’t, if that’s the total wordcount). (I’d vote for having both.)

…to make your job easier when you realize you made a typo, so instead of having to fix it a hundred times you’ll need to fix it only once? (Seriously. It’s a nightmare. I made a 11-or-so-page game with no variables and it was horrible. Never again.)

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193

As someone who has more than twenty short games done. It stinks that nobody cares about your games here because are less 100k.

It discourages me to even try to put something in this forum when 90% public audiemce says I don’t read anything less than 150k.

That is like the fouth first volumes of Harry Potter combined in length.

People don’t understand how they words make many people stop even trying to write.

Why do even going through the work and planning and hard writing if only people cares is an artificial number to even give you a chance…

Sorry for. my bitter sad comments but This forum has killed and burnt all my enjoyment about sharing wips and the whole writing development that should be a great opportunity and experience but for me is forever tainted

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194

Tenosynovitis alert if nothing else :person_shrugging: Imagine you made a typo in the first block of text, then copy-pasted it multiple times, then realized there was a typo and you need to comb through everything manually because it’s a word (or form) you can’t just replace all because it’s correct in other places. Brrr. Also proofreading the basically same text with only minor differences over and over again is bound to make you glaze over.

(It’s not like coding efficiency is the only thing that can make your wordcount drop though. Sometimes it’s just old-fashioned editing.)

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195

Maybe. I don’t really know if many people have a sense of how long it takes to read a certain number of words. It’s easier to look at how large a book is but I certainly wouldn’t be able to look at my copy of Full Fathom Five and say how many words it is.

@Phenrex there are various threads from a while back about efficiency and such which may be of interest. CoG and HC games are edited so they have a baseline code efficiency regardless of how large they are, HG will be less restricted but that’s the nature of them in general. I remember reading @Havenstone and @Gower saying interesting things on the subject, though it was quite a long time ago.

I totally agree with this! Ultimately having an artificially inflated wordcount is more of a problem to maintain than it’s worth. It’s hard enough managing large games

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I’ve had multiple moments like this… at first, it was absolutely my certified joker moment. I sat there for like, a half-hour copy-pasting the same thing over and over.

Then the next time it happened, I turned on spotify and just got to it. Happy to say, that was a significantly less joker moment.

But yes, this is why I’m hoping Hosted let’s me completely make the description for my game when it’s released. Because the way I code poorly pretty much makes it so the entire game is in there twice. That being said, I account for that when letting people know on the forum and everywhere else what the word count of the game is. My game is 1.2 million words long at the moment, which means it’s actually 600k words long, with an average playthrough of about 55-60k words atm.

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That sounds awful, I’m sorry you had to go through doing all that :skull:. I think this is one of the major detriments with the copy/paste method, while I do consider both to be equally valid for whatever a writer needs, having to do this kind of thing sounds awful. [In the end of the day your writing needs to be legible for yourself, if having a bunch of code or variables ends up making it difficult for you to understand yourself what is going on then it won’t be conducive to writing. You know? That is my thought at least.

All I was trying to say at the end of the day is that I had that thought about word count being weirdly reductive.

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198

I am trying to gather strength to write my entry for the jam. But it is beeing really difficult as I have a inner voice saying that it is retarded trying because. nobody will care or read my story anyway. Like why should I bother?

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199

Do what you can and try to remember that lots of people are rooting for you :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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200

What about doing a compilation then instead? A series of stories could allow you to mention the total wordcount as higher, while keeping your short stories. Not that I believe that this would bring back the joy of sharing WIPs, but it could be an approach to having people give your stories more of a chance.

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201

Congrats on your hard work! I can’t imagine writing out brached-8-ways-paths. That sounds immense.

Wow that’s amazing! A game in twelve days can be super hard to do, so that’s something to be proud of! Good job!

Average playthrough wordcount is pretty important, I’d think… Although I’m not 100% sure whether it should be an industry standard? Who knows.

This is why, honestly.

This is why I keep track of wordcount too.

Had to google this word. XD Thanks for expanding my vocab!

Just checking, but I think you mean a Compilation? Sorry if this was obvious to everyone else, I just wasn’t sure.

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202

You have given me the strenght to start as You are one of my idols since your romance mods era. If You say I can I should at least try!

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203

Yes it was, thank you.

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