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To be fair Paul had editorial help:

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This is hardly the persuasive argument you think it is.

Yes, the rules are arbitrary. All rules are, when you get right down to it, arbitrary. No rule made by humans is an objective fact or an intrinsic part of the universe.

I’m actually familiar with Pinker. Why? Because I want to learn more about how the English language works, and the bizarre rules that were invented as part of its construction. You might think rules are arbitrary, and therefore supposed to be broken by anyone who is going to commit pen to page, but language is a construct of rules. It’s a sophisticated thing that is built around a structure that enables communication. It’s why, for example, that when you are learning a new language, you learn the base elements of structure - gendered words in French or Spanish, Japanese sentence construction, etc.

See, if I had to sum up Pinker, it wouldn’t be as someone who encourages people to forsake the rules like some kind of anarchist. A lot of what Pinker says comes down to not being worried about the rules if you are constructing a beautiful sentence with them. I’m sure that if you picked any book of a shelf, you would find any number traditional rules of English broken on any page.

In fact, I’ll even point out some advice from Pinker.

“When [James Joyce] wrote long passages with no punctuation and very loose grammar, he was actually trying to achieve an effect. Namely, peek into someone’s consciousness. So, he knew what he was doing. He was flouting those rules for a reason. Ordinarily though, if you’re not trying to render the stream of consciousness, if you’re doing something more like ‘classic style,’ mainly, using conversation to direct the reader’s gaze, then readers have certain expectations about how the grammar works. They do change over time but, at a given time, you can look up what they are and if you ignore them you will often make your prose more ambiguous, you’ll often just confess to your readers, ‘I haven’t paid attention to the printed page in the past.’ You’ll often confess, ‘I don’t think about what my words mean.’ So, for example, if you use literally to mean figuratively. If you say, ‘I literally exploded.’ What you’re saying is, ‘I don’t really care what my words mean,’ and your readers are less likely to trust you. So, I think there are reasons to take care in your choice of words. This doesn’t mean that every rule you remember from your second grade class is a legitimate rule. Many of them are bogus.”

Emphasis mine.

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I hasten to clarify that the things Ramidel is praising – deliberate use of archaic spellings and a strong, distinctive literary style – are all Paul, as anyone who’s communicated with him on the forum will already know. I was his typo-catcher.

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Anything that promotes quality is good in my book. I understand that some people have a hard time writing fluent English but you have to take into consideration you’re making a product whose purpose is to sell. Your reputation reflects you and, by association, that of your publisher. If a text-game is written on a particular language then I think its fair to assume its main audience are those who understand said language.

Its true that you can write whatever you wish and that free products tend to have a lot of leeway when it comes to quality, but the moment you decide to monetize it and associate your name to a publisher then you can kiss that sort of freedom goodbye. You are now in a competitive market that expects the bare minimum from you and isn’t afraid of sucking your soul if you don’t meet their expectations.

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Then are you going to pay twenty dollars for it? It’s easy to say I have pay… You are not paid the real price of the product. Not by far. You are paid the price of a Starbucks coffee and demand for it the quality value of a Triple AAA product and of course Shakespeare level of quality and 1,000,000 of words. An author has to being poor and lose money because I want the quality of edition I didn’t pay for.

It is like normal market You see a twenty cent t shirt on sale . Would you expect the same quality and design a 100 dollars hand made one? It is easy say I pay 3 dollars. But what do you pay for a editorial book my friend with half of words? twenty dollars fifteen?

People is entitled to receive EVERYTHING for nothing or for one dollar. It has to be free. And if you pay a misery well then You have to receive the quality of a triple A edition of your euro. If the author has to lost 8,000 who cares? I paid my Two euro GIMME A NOVEL OF MAX QUALITY WITH MAX QUALITY EDITION… Who needs to eat?

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This is the most important point for me. What if there are a few phrases that could be better written? What if there is an occasional typo in a 100k+ words novel? We are not paying the “real” price for the kind of perfection that we all like. Or do we really believe that a 300.000 interactive novel is only worth 4 bucks? And guess what, we can’t really raise them much more, or otherwise we will make a niche market even smaller.

So that throws the professional editing possibility through the window. We need to think about other possibilities.

Should we make CoG more responsible and more controlling to what people try to publish through HG label? Jason already explained that something like that would pose the exact same problem that professional editing faces, the only difference would be that the costs would be transferred from the author to the publisher, what would highly endanger the viability of CoG company.

Some people have already suggested the best solution possible to maintain the current system of HG (which is, as the people of the company already admitted, an integral part of what CoG wants to be): community and authorial responsibility and interaction.

What we need to do to make games better, and to avoid lower quality releases by HG, is pitching in. More community involvement with WIP is the way to go. And I speak against myself. In closed or private betas, where I have direct and usually private contact with the author I am an helpful guy (at least I think I am :stuck_out_tongue:). In open betas? Not so much, given that I usually censor my self into only saying the things that I liked. My english is ok, I don’t really have major difficulties with it, and I believe that I don’t commit that many syntactic mistakes. But my most useful contribution is with the plot and the story/world building. So I take especial care in pitching in on those areas. People that are native and good speakers of english need to pitch in with that set of “skills” in mind.

We can’t say to a person “Go away! You are not good enough! You don’t meet our requirements!”, we need to help them becoming the best possible writers. And in that, we can’t turn to CoG, they already did their part in giving authors and buyers this fantastic forum and the amazing HG label. The authors already do their current best, so we can’t really expect them to improve that much on their own. We need to take a close look at ourselves (buyers and persons with the need and will to criticize the weaknesses of what we paid for) and ask “what can I do, on my own, to improve the games from which I demand so much? What can I do to win additional moral credit to criticize a game after its release?”.

I am quite happy with the fantastic overall quality of HG. And I am trying my best, with my set of skills and limitations of time, to increase my contribution to improving other people’s stories. I have just participated in my first official beta test. And I will try to continue helping people with their open and close beta tests, at least from now on. What if we all did the same?

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Here is a very on-topic article about English usage and grammar and all the issues of grammar rules… I highly recommend this article:

Sometimes there is serendipity in the world.

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@poison_mara
The reason why most books cost 20-30 dollars its because they come in physical form. Writing and releasing your work on the internet is no where near the same as publishing and printing thousands of copies in real life, copies that cost money and need to be more expensive in order to cover the costs. And do keep in mind that they too have to pay a fee to their publishers and editors, maybe even a cover artist.

Digital format makes it easier and less expensive to distribute your product, hence why its cheaper. You could get away with demanding a few extra bucks, yes, but when does it become too much? Books, be they digital or otherwise, are meant to be sold in bulks - you lower the price in order to lure more costumers, in the hopes it one day pays for itself and becomes a profit instead. Asking for the real price is doable but also a risky proposition from a business stand-point IMO. Keep in mind that the market is a competitive place, prices and demand fluctuate.

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The prices are about as maxed out as they can be. @JimD I bet gets 50-100 complaints a month about how expensive his Zombie Exodus story is - even though it is a series of 3 stories and such … for a very reasonable price point you can’t beat the value.

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Digital books cost fifteen or more in any legal digital page . Google+ books is a good example. You have to pay 1,000 minimum to have you app in stores. you have part of to revenue to them too. A normal editor cost like 6-8,000 dollars. You as author would never recovery that. You really believe author here have mansions.? If you want a decent picture for sell your app 100 dollars is a minimum.

So you are saying Please author pay 10,000 dollars you will never seen back to I could give you Three dollars and complaint why I have to pay.

People here complaint about grammar but when people asking help for it almost all shut up. People don’t want to help you and even if you offer them all your revenue in exchange. I had offered all my author future monetary revenue from the story in exchange of edition. Nobody wants. I offered code other games.I am currently unemployment trying to access the Spanish judicial system. I can’t dream in pay 6,000 dollars minimum. Almost no one jere can. .

So your solution is well don’t make the game. No one hosted game at all except two or three. Here you go your triple A editing for 3 dollars. That’s the quantity you would receive for it.

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@poison_mara
This reminds me of something I read a long time ago… writing and painting are expensive hobbies that demand everything and give little in return. The job of an author or an artist are notoriously precarious and unstable due to market saturation and individual under-value. I think its fair to say you need a financial pillow if you want to pursue these careers and / or have lots of patience and dedication for it. I understand your frustration but at the same time I’m like - if its that bad then why do you insist on keeping at it rather than finding other jobs? You can only go so far with “Its my dream” till reality hits and you’re forced to change course or risk sinking…

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I don’t want make money from my game at all. Is not monetary value what make me want to write is passion. If I had 8,000 dollars I would use it within thinking on edit. But I haven’t the money. I prefer have the best edition I have at moment with people who help me and later on fixed the game. Maybe People like it and I could gain access some money to pay art or additional content.

Put a bar in triple A editor is like ask in a children height jump the marks for going to Olympic games.

You got a demo version you got a game brief description. You don’t like it just don’t buy it nobody will force you to buying and waste the money you can pay in a coffee

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Yes indeed! This is what I’m getting at when I’m saying that for non-formal writing (I consider formal writing to be international treaties, legal contracts, documents submitted to courts, etc) then you shouldn’t be as hung up on the rules as people tend to be here.

English has a syntax and a structure that comes about naturally to those familiar with the language. Those with a strong grasp of the language can tell if what they’ve written is janky and awkward, they can re-write until it flows smoothly without tongue-tying the reader.

Some of the greatest literature in the English language was written to flow rather than written to follow any kind of arbitrary rule thought up by some university professors that can’t even follow their own rules in the book they wrote to tell you those rules.

This is why I keep stating across these forums to not be so hung up on nailing every single “grammar rule” the English language has. If you can read aloud what you’ve written without getting tongue-tied then you’re on the right track.

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Yay! We serve an actual public function in the company now. :grin:

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I fully agree with @ruhenri, and I’m happy to pitch in. As I said in an early post, maybe the answer is for us to form a little club of “committed authors/beta testers”, and offer (on a voluntary basis, like the judges offer their services for @Lordirish wonderful CSComp) our services for free to @jasonstevanhill to do an extra “constructive” check, just after CoG does theirs. This is not “to catch every grammar issue/typo”, but just to ensure that the author gets a good level of feedback regarding typos, etc. I’ve been doing this with other friends on this forum (for example with @Jacic), and while it is much work, it is also fun, and there is a sense of satisfaction in helping a game that you know will be completed. Sure, I don’t want to go through the game a million times (I tend to only go through it once or twice, but if 2-3 people meticulously annotate the problems they find -regarding grammar, punctuation- and suggest ways to improve the sentences, overall quality can be substantially improved (yes, there will still be grammar issues etc, but we are trying to raise -not make perfect- the overall grammar level of HGs at no additional cost to CoGs). Especially, this can help with the overall quality of the parts that will be seen more often -parts of the game that will be read by every reader, every time-.

Anyway, just a suggestions…

And, @poison_mara, I was trying to find the link to your game yesterday. I’m happy to go through your game, if you send me the link to it (I was trying to look for it yesterday while changing planes, but couldn’t find it…).

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From an authors pov, we still need strive to release a decent game. But no game is/will be perfect so we also need to aim to continue to improve it.

UnNatural was beta tested and bugs still got passed which I attempted to fix and even bugs that appear even now that no one else stumbled across. I try my hardest to fix them when they are reported. I’m also lucky enough to have earned enough to afford an editor @Fiogan who offered a fair and affordable editing offer.

I’ll end on this note. UnNatural wouldn’t be the game it is currently without the help of beta testers. So the mandatory testing is a good thing.

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Ok just thinking aloud here. How about a forum section for FINISHED works beta testing. So similar to what COG does with their official works but run by the authors. So if you have something completed you still think needs a bit more work, you could post the demo (or the whole thing if you wanted) and ask for testers. If it’s private, then you can give out the link or start an invitation only PM for feedback. There will still be a place for the normal WIP threads as obviously once something’s finished, there’s less likelihood of members being able to put in requests for changes to sections or inclusions of story lines in the game. The finished hosted games beta testing would be more clean up and polishing.

It could work a few ways- firstly, maybe there’s more inclination for members to put time into something that is almost certainly going to get published (since it’s finished) and they get the whole game to review before it goes for sale on the store.

Secondly shouldn’t be compulsory to do unless the author wants to (many WIP’s get edited well enough through the existing process, but it could be really valuable for some). But perhaps if something does get submitted to COG with many grammar errors or bugs in the first few pages, it could be requested that it has a run through this section for a few weeks for further editing.

Could have a problem with people signing up for “free stories” and not giving feedback in return but I suspect around here it’ll be the minority and not a big problem. If it does become a problem, could have a strike thread set up where if someone continually does this (not once or twice because sometimes life happens, but if it happens most times they apply), authors could be aware and not have to give the link out if they don’t want to.

Anyway, just a thought, not sure how well it’d work.

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I’ve noticed the regulations already say that forum beta testing is mandatory, but what exactly does that mean? How much beta testing is enough to check that mark? Are there specifics on what parameters need to be met in order for it to count?

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CoG demands that the authors put their full HG projects for testing, the authors decide between an fully open beta, a fully private beta or a mixed one. There is no established “amount” of beta testing because that is completely impossible to quantify.

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My question wasn’t worded well–this is what I was wondering. How much of the game needed to be tested, like whether the author could put part of it up like we tend to do with WIPs or if the finished game needed to be forum betaed.

So, basically there’s already a required beta system similar to what @Jacic is suggesting?