Why isn’t Interactive Fiction more popular?

I love play they phone way to job or in hospital is really a great way of read and lost myself asmall-scale time in role-playing

:joy::rofl::joy::rofl::joy::rofl:

I remember one of my friends saying Dragon saved his life, lol. We were like 14 and he had to wait on a mall bench for like 10 hours for his mom to pick him up. He played CotD the entire time to keep himself occupied.

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I do this when I replay a game for different outcomes/achievments or to help with beta testing
There’s no point to read the same text again and it gets boring

As for why interactive fiction isn’t that popular: I’ve been reading some novels on the internet (not interactive ones) and I found that the protagonists there are generally more fleshed out and have a lot more story to them (while in here in some COGs the main character is just a blank slate and has no background)/
Also the romance there is a lot better usually. In some novels there is a gradual romance with many interactions between the leads and a lot of cute scenes, and you can see how the character’s feeling develop slowly and how they fall in love.

Here in a lot of games you just choose your RO (sometimes based on your relationship stat) and suddenly confess your feelings and become a couple very quickly.
In some games I’ve seen (for example psy high) that you and your RO were just friends all the way (with no indication of feelings whatsoever) and once you pick them you suddenly say you loved them and want to be with them (even though it was never mentioned before).

This is basically a trade off between choice and more depth.
You gain the ability to choose an RO instead of reading about a set one at the cost of the romance being a bit lacking.

There is also the issue of legnth where you have to write a lot of outcomes here and different routes which makes the average play through a lot shorter than the actual amount of content in the game.

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You appear to be under the impression that a book is just a broken game. Billions of people read books. Books are very good. The modern novel is a very good invention. You can do amazing things with prose and language, and tell thousands of different styles and genres of story. Disrespecting books and readers isn’t going to win any new fans.

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I may have a broader definition of IF, but as far as text-focused games go, it’s super popular at the moment! Fallen London is doing great after nearly a decade, 80 Days did fabulously well, Reigns Her Majesty did great, and on the more gamey end of the spectrum there are games like Sunless Skies, Heaven’s Vault and Cultist Simulator that involve a lot of reading that have all done very well. Visual novels are perennially popular, and mobile story games are everywhere. Season 1 of the Love Island mobile game, made in a variant of Twine, has reached 2 million people! Not to mention sub-Q magazine becoming an SFWA eligible market, Now Play This and the London Games Festival commissioning IF work, and the Nebulas recognising game writing for the first time this year. And there were three CoG games nominated for Nebulas! That suggests to me that there’s more mainstream recognition for interactive narrative than ever. Compared to how things were when CoG was starting out, interactive fiction is more widely understood and popular - just looking at some of the numbers in the Full Time Writing thread is eye opening.

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Same here, but what I’m talking about (and I’m fairly certain Eiwynn was referring to this as well) is when players/readers do this for a game they’ve never read before.
It’s just odd to me and doesn’t really make sense. Especially because as far as I can tell, you can’t really gather the sense of a game and its world just by reading choices.

But I think this is getting a tad off topic so I’ll just leave my bewilderment here for all to see. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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One very cool thing about Interactive Fiction is how many mediums of media it can inhabit. I can have a copy of The Cave of Time, Detroit: Become Human, 80 Days, The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain and Bandersnatch and they’re all interactive but in very different ways.

One more annoying thing though is that the pretence of read interactive fiction being ‘just for kids’ still lingers at times. Searching for any decent ones on Amazon can be a hassle.

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That’s very true what you said about the different mediums of IF. I also agree about the ’just for kids’ point too, which was the same problem video games had for the longest time.

Maybe an IF renaissance will happen soon.

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My roommate actually does the opposite. She peels the cheese off and just eats the sauce and bread.

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I think it’s important to recognize that there are currently games out there that have many of the pleasures of IF, but also include visual elements, and so get excluded on a technicality. Oxenfree, for example, is a great game that revolves around conversation and choices, but it’s also decidedly visual. Baldur’s Gate II had CYOA mini-games for running your stronghold (or thieves’ ring or church or whatever), where the choices were dialogue tree choices. Often, one of the major effects of choices in CoG is which romantic interest you end up with, but that element is certainly present in Bioware games. Another common theme is being able to choose which path you take in a game, and that can appear in a variety of games – I remember it showing up in D&D Tower of Doom, a 90’s brawler, for example.

Because of the additional assets of these games like graphics and music that make them more appealing, IF needs to offer a niche where it does some things better than these games. One way it can do that is with better writing, and the ability to make cool observations in prose. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” or “Crowley didn’t so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards” are the kind of witty observations you can make in text that in other media would need to be dialogue, and you’re expected to not have too much dialogue in most game genres. But, I think this advantage is often underutilized in CoG writing. I can relate, because we’re producing so many words that it’s difficult to find the time to polish all of them to Austen or Pratchett level witticism. I think parser-based fiction often does a better job of this because it’s more linear, and therefore authors can concentrate on revision better, but parser-based fiction is also a highly specific genre with its own conventions that make it inaccessible. Meanwhile, games with graphics can at least include dialogue that aims at being smart or funny. (“Magic is impressive … but now, Minsc leads! Swords for everyone!” – Minsc, Baldur’s Gate II.)

Another potential advantage of text-based choice-based fiction over other genres is the potential to do a lot of big branching, since assets don’t need to be created anew. But, I think this advantage can be overstated. For one, much choice-based fiction actually has a really strong backbone of The Golden Path that contains expected player behavior. This is certainly true of all classic CYOAs and fantasy gamebooks, is basically true of Bandersnatch, and is often a strong part of CoG design except for the final branching at the end. Even in text, it’s just hard to create a lot of branches, and increasingly unrewarding. (I don’t think I got that much mileage out of Magics’ many endings, since many players just experience one and many assume it’s the only one, and most will never experience more than a fraction.) Contrast that with full-graphics games, and actually, I’m not so certain a dialogue-heavy game wouldn’t have as easy a time producing different branches, as long as it focused on plot that didn’t require creating new assets. The question of assets doesn’t seem like a big deal if you’re re-using sets and character models, and just having plot branches be dialogue-based.

So while items weighing in the favor of games with graphics are often obvious - graphics, music, and a gameplay that may have some inherent fun quality to it - the items weighing in the favor of IF are less obvious and sometimes not realized any better than those games: the joys of smart prose, widely branching narrative, the ability to strongly personalize. Tack on a very unfriendly UI in the case of parser-based IF, and it’s no wonder a lot of people might bounce off of IF with one or two bad experiences.

I don’t think I’ve exhausted the unique pleasures of IF in this description. Prose can engage all 5 senses; multiple-choice setups can introduce more interesting and abstract decisions than a game based in physical metaphors, etc etc. Nor have I exhausted the unique pitfalls: consequences potentially feeling arbitrary, figuring out how the heck you can compel someone to try to see a better ending, etc etc. But for the 10,000 foot view, a person considering CoG-style IF is asking “do I want to read prose” and “do I trust that making a bunch of decisions will be a good time”; and their experience with both IF and other video games will drive the decision of which will be more satisfying.

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@trevers17 Sounds like your roommate should just switch to marinara pizzas, providing she likes garlic of course :smile:

@kgold Then it should be very interesting now that Baldurs gate 3 is now in development…and by Larian Studios, no less.

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There are a few things working against choicescript fiction ever going mainstream. First, there are some big asks for playing these games that not everybody has the capacity or willingness to accept. You need an attention span–a decent one–which is an ever dwindling resource, especially among younger people. IF isn’t about instant gratification and flashy dopamine hits. It’s not going to win this audience away from their much more visually stimulating games.

Another big ask is imagination: many of us take our imagination for granted, and can live in a fantasy world all day, but not everyone can. Not everyone can play make-believe, at least not at the level required by choicescript games. For many, this sort of roleplaying can be exhausting instead of relaxing, and not the choice of many after a hard day’s work.

On top of that is a simple matter of demographics: around 75% of readers are women over 45. That’s a huge group, many of whom have never played a choose-your-own-adventure or would ever come across one. But even if they did, you have to consider the benefits of the interactive vs the non-interactive story, and it’s not necessarily true that the interactive story is superior.

Not everyone likes having to make choices, worrying about mistakes, or are concerned with second and third-playthroughs being unique. Especially when there is a plethora of other stories out there to choose from. When you have a countless number of stories out there, as traditional readers do, there will be plenty that resonate with them even without the aid of a customizable main character and romance options.

It really is a weird spot IF finds itself in: go too literary, and you’re competing with centuries-old masters with libraries stretching countless miles. Go too gamey, and you’re not going to get Candy Crush’ed, you’re going to get Candy Curbstomp’ed by development teams who can make an infinitely more appealing product.

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it might be as simple as people not knowing they exist. I’m a reader. A big one. I love games With branching story lines. But I had no idea anything like this existed, outside of the odd fan fiction site. I’ve been on steam for years never even crossed my mind that there might be more professional type of games like this.

I got lucky. Was reading an article about the best missed games on steam for some year, and they mentioned, the Ghost of You. While it lacks the build your own character, it is fantastic. It made me laugh, it made my cry, it made me very angry, in short it gave me all of the feels. So I was hooked. So I went looking for more. I found the Wayhaven Chronicles. Another must have in my opinion. After that I found a couple less then stellar entries. And really that probably would have been the end of it for me.

But reading the comments on steam and lots of people were talking about all the choice games I couldn’t find anywhere on steam. So I went looking on my phone in the App Store. And found Hosted Games. And once again got lucky, finding Fallen Hero. Another great game. Followed by Tin Star. And I was hooked again.

Anyway I’m mostly babbling but just pointing out that first you have to know they exist, and then you have to find them since there is no great sign in the sky pointing the way. So I would imagine just finding them is a fairly large barrier to entry.

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Probably because a lot of people don’t even know it exists. I stumbled on this site entirely by accident myself. And then I feel like otome games/visual novels will always be a little more popular because they have pictures.

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Wow, a lot of people just stumbled here.

I can’t even say that for myself! lol

My friend introduced me to Affairs of the Court (then known as Choice of Romance) about five years ago (?). Weirdly enough it was through the Chrome webstore rather than for mobile, and as far as I can tell, games weren’t terribly popular in that store, so I can’t even begin to tell you guys how she found it.

Anyway, had she not told me about it then, I don’t think I would have ever known about IF as it’s simply not a genre that I was ever interested in, and to be perfectly honest, outside of CoG and Hosted Games, I find most other forms of IF lacking a certain je ne sais quois.

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The world is changing…now most of present generation prefer to, video games over book reading and interactive games.

Only people who love reading books can actually feel happiness and fun while playing interactive fiction game.

People who don’t even like reading books other than a necessity how we can expect them to be interested in interactive fiction.

Also understanding the fact that there are a few good companies which publish these sort of games officially.

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Maybe what it needs is talking big gaming companies into putting some resources into releasing IF stories (ifarchive forever in my heart for introducing me to text games) as a side/bonus content to their main games.

I think there might be some connotation to how all media are consumed these days - flashy headlines, quick, cohesive messages. Long texts - just the text! - might seem like an old and boring way when there’s near endless supply of other entertainment sources.

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That’s how the current situation is…for many people spending hours for just reading a long series of words is boring…

Instead of reading and appreciating the writers work…many prefer to just go and watch the abridged version of book as films.

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Exposure is definitely a problem for games like CoG/HGs which do fit into a niche crowd. You can count me as someone else who stumbled into it. I’ve tried to share it where possible, and I’m pleased that at least a couple of my friends do like some CoGs (they are more into genre/setting than anything).

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