That would be a very long game then!
But you wouldnāt know until you play/read it. So my point is that total word count is not a good indicator either. Iād much rather know how much commitment Iād have to invest when starting a game, thus average word count, especially because I donāt replay games.
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Well then youāre wrong.
Absolutely any metric you adopt will be flawed in some way.
But some will be consistent and objective. Total word count is both, because whenever you look at the project, you will always get the same number. Average word count will always be different, ergo it will never be fully accurate, even putting aside the other issues.
This statement makes absolutely no sense. As if measuring by total word count encourages choices.
It doesnāt enourage or discourage choices, because ten paths with 100k words each will give ten times the word count of a 100k linear story. Meanwhile, the average word count of both games will be 100k, making the shorter game look just as good, because the number of options is not reflected by this āamazingā stat. Ergo, choices are discouraged.
Story with Choices  |
Story Without Choices  |
|
|---|---|---|
| Total Word Count | 1 million | 100 thousand |
| Mean Word Count | ~100 thousand | 100 thousand |
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If itās average it wonāt always be different. I donāt know what youāre talking about. If youāre saying average wonāt match actual word count on the playthrough, well, duh, but so what? It at least gives me an approximation. No one is going to count word by word during the playthrough to see how close it gets to the average. And if you go by total word count you wonāt have even that.
Total word count by itself doesnāt necessarily mean there are many branches or tell you how long each one is. You can have a small total word count but short playthrough and high variability, or a large total count but low variability and a mostly linear story.
If you like replaying games, it doesnāt tell you how much to expect from a playthrough. If you donāt like replaying, it doesnāt tell you how much to expect from your playthrough.
Iāve already said that ideally we would have both metrics, but if weāre pitching one against the other, average is objectively better.
No need to ruffle your feathers.
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One of the reasons why I get so frustrated on the emphysis of more words = better game as thatās rarely the whole story. If there wasnāt this hard line long games are good happening it wouldnāt matter but yeah.
Thereās actually less incentive for people to code efficiently than there is to copy sections of text and change a few words as it inflates the word count. In the end coding efficiency makes little difference to what the player sees except a number on the gameās āaboutā page. Many people will not even pick up a game to try it unless its over a certain number of words even if another game thatās efficiently coded (and that makes it cheaper to buy also!) essentially may have a similar number of actually seen unique āplayableā words. There is a big assumption with CSGs that high wordcount = quality well made games, lower wordcount = rushed, poor quality, too short etc. Iām not saying itās right to inflate wordcounts (I tend to write shorter games and use a lot of gosubs and variables myself so as not to do so within the bounds of my coding ability and not introducing unnecessary complexity and bugs) but Iām also saying the temptation would be there.
Thereās also genuine coding skill (or lack there of). Iām editing my first published game at the moment to try and fix it up a bit more and the coding is terribly inefficient in a lot of places. Iād forgotten how bad I was at coding stuff to start with. It all works, but you could bring the word count down with a few more variables and gosubs like I tend to use more of now.
As others have said yes it does. Thereās positives and negatives to this. The player does not see the code, but games with a lot of coding under the surface are likely to be either a) more efficient and/or b) more reactive to choices/displaying variables in text etc. Games with fight sequences, mini games etc often have a lot more effort put into making them work as well.
Actual playthrough length would be nice to have with total count as it can give you some idea on how replayable, stat responsive or efficiently coded a game is (although sometimes it can be difficult to know which one it is unless you play it through or the author tells you.) Unfortunately this is not usually displayed. By themselves, neither are great metrics to make decisions on a game. Together they at least give some idea on length and replayability.
Going to disagree with you a little here (although granted youāve said lower words doesnāt = lower quality, Iād also say higher words without proper editing does not always = more skilled either (speaking as someone who wrote a 100k game as my first attempt. TBH in retrospect I feel I should have written a series of smaller games, learned from each one then gone higher in wordcount would have resulted in better quality games overall) 
. Shorter games can take skill to pull off well. If done properly they can be fast moving, focused, complete sequences that get to the point. Theyāre also easier to edit well for bugs and grammar. If done poorly they can feel rushed, incomplete or half hearted efforts.
Long games can be well written, immersive epics, or poorly edited and coded, buggy rambling storylines with pacing all over the place and unnecessary sequences that probably should have hit the cutting room floor. (One of my personal complaints with a selection of longer CSGs (not all but definitely some) is that a lot of material I personally would have cut for pacing and relevance is left in causing sections to feel unnecessary or the pacing to jump around and feel too slow in sections.)
Choice of the Dragon is I think a bit of a masterclass in making very simplistic microgame. Its defnitely showing its age, but it does everything in a fun simple, bug free manner that means that I sometimes give it a play through even today and still enjoy it. Not everything needs to be super complicated to just work
I think it just gives a very easy and consistent way to price games on the stores. Ideally itād come down to quality of the writing/coding, length and anticipated popularity, but that would be harder for COG staff to assess and probably cause more confusion on the stores about the inconsistent pricing as some people seem unaware for HG in particular it is individual freelance authors rather than a company making the games.
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I thought it was because it is a metric easier to obtain. Gross word count. And because the community has more or less come to expect it and make judgement based on it, whether fair or not.
Hopefully CoG staff does use some of these other metric you mention, otherwise thatād be punishing efficiency and rewarding the artificial inflation of word count.
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Pretty sure itās just word count . I think thatās just the easiest way for them to consistently apply a price point, especially as many of the HGs donāt get edited (none on the ones without steam releases are edited, so basically as long as they pass the tests and the content is ok, theyāll usually be published regardless of coding efficiency, grammar etc.) Thereās been discussions about raising the bar on quality control in the past, but it sounds like HG wants to keep the bar very low for admission via their original mission statement so anyone can publish through them if they can create a game meeting basic criteria. Thereās also the thing that paying for professional editing is beyond the ability of most small time authors to afford, while getting people willing to beta with feedback via the forums appears to be getting harder for many projects compared to earlier in HGās history.
There are other reasons to want efficiency from an authorās end. Less editing is definitely one. (Much less annoying to change one gosub than go through and change stuff several times in the text and try to make sure you get each one.) Iāll admit the temptation is strong from my sector to just throw coding efficiency to the wind given I write shorter length games on average, and decent coding makes them shorter still and far more likely to get completely ignored. On the other hand, at least if theyāre shorter and not largely padded out with repeated text/codes, theyāre probably going to be a little cheaper and might hopefully head off at least a couple of the crankier ātoo short for the priceā comments, so thereās that.
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Iām at a point in my life where I prefere everything shorter. 
A movie over 3 hours? Pass. A book over 900 pages? Pass. A series with more than 3 seasons? Pass. A video game with more than 100 hours of playable content? Pass. I just donāt have time (or the ability to care anymore). So rest assured thereās an audience (even if small) for shorter CSGs. I really liked Oedipus Rex, by the way.
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I guess Iām looking at it specifically through the lense of CoG, where authors are likely to have a WIP thread where they are (hopefully) getting feedback constantly. Sure, just churning out 100k words without any thought or reflection isnāt going to magically make you a better writer, but 100k words worth of feedback and rewrites likely is.
My issue with pacing is the exact opposite of yours. Economy of storytelling is a skill, and often shorter works will leave out what I feel to be essential character development. If something is there but boring or unnecessary, I can just skim it, if it doesnāt exist there isnāt much you can do about that.
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Spice of life and all that. Everyoneās allowed to like different things 
. Iām actually listening in the car (ran out of time to read) to the last couple of wheel of time books by RJ and I no joke have some chapters running at 1.5x speed to get through them because they have dragged out plot points just donāt need to be there or could have been significantly condensed into something more interesting. And if I have to listen to one more detailed description of what someone is wearing for the upteenth timeā¦
(This is what happens in regular publishing when authors become too big to insist on edits I think. Love the books overall, but if it was me I probably would have cut 1-2 books worth of text out of the entire series.)
Same! Itās like give me something I can finish in the small amount of free time I can scrape together to read/play in 
Thanks so much, means a lot that you liked my game!
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Sorry, man, but this is such a terrible take that Iāve got to take a second to belatedly respond.
Code efficiency is not a part of many, many peopleās creative process. For a whole host of authors, worrying about coding (including but not limited to its efficiency) is an interruption and a distraction to their creative process. The genius of ChoiceScript is that it makes the basics of IF coding simple and intuitive enough that those authors can still use it to write great interactive stories.
Inefficient code doesnāt correlate with not caring. An author whoās focused on getting their story out there and creating a particular experience for their readers ā and who cares deeply about that, enough to pour months or years into writing it! ā need not (and often will not) care enough about coding to figure out all the ways to do it with minimal repetition of text. You can be a great painter without caring about how your paint and brush and canvas are made. (Many great painters do also choose to become experts in the finer details of their media and tools, and can do nifty things as a result; but itās hardly a requirement for creating great art.)
Reading code written with lots of gosubs and multireplaces is for most people a hard-to-acquire skill, and even when acquired, writing that way has its drawbacks. Compare a bit of code I wrote recently:
with a less coding-efficient way of writing the same passage:
Lots more repeated words in the latter way of doing it. But even after years of getting myself comfortable with reading gosubs and multireplace, itās way easier for me to comprehend that ā and thus to gauge the tone of the passage, make sure it says what I want to say, avoid typos, etc. I care a lot more about those things than I do about avoiding repeated words!
tl;dr - Shoddy code != a shoddy product. Caring about your work != caring about code efficiency.
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Unless your work is about writing efficient code. (Sorry, computer scientist here.)
(Also huh, Iāve never thought about using gosub that way! Iām guessing youāre using that exact piece of text in multiple possible locations?)
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Thatās the problem with tl;drs ā the nuance is lost. Caring about your ChoiceScript game writing != caring about code efficiency. Better?
Yes, not just the location shown here. In general, for any bit of text that would otherwise pop up in multiple locations, if it goes beyond 8-10 words or so, I throw it behind a gosub for code efficiency. It has a big cost in readability, but it reduces accusations of padding out the word count.
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Ultimately itās because average word count is annoying to measure, while total word count is easy (CSIDE will even give you total count sans code). Jane Authoress is unlikely to bother finding it out for her hobby project and the forums have a culture of exulting total count, so itās easier to just post that (Iām certainly guilty here).
Thereās a bit of a problem with a general assumption that more words are more gooder, current WIP culture is quite honestly more based around getting free games than it is actually testing and trying new projects, so the bigger the number you can slap on your topic, the more traction you can get. Average count is nice, sure, but total is always gonna be a bigger, juicier number.
As for code efficiency, I personally find joy in having clean, efficient code where I can, but Iām certainly more familiar with CS than the average author (not a brag, Iāve just been digging through these games for the better part of a decade while some excellent authors have never touched one before). I donāt think itās fair to judge an otherwise competent author for messy code, unless it is actively causing issues such as lag/crashes (can be caused by plenty of ways of messy variable checking/setting) or other errors. Not all good authors are good coders (even in a language as fluid as CS) and all good coders certainly arenāt all good authors. Both are skills that need knowledge and practice.
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I wasnāt criticising the authors, much less for works in progress or hobby projects. Although, Iād really appreciate if an author went the extra mile. Thatās why I said CoG and HG and not CSGs. I donāt think it would be too much trouble for CoG staff to run 100 iterations of randomtest and get the average word count from the output.
As has been discussed plenty in this thread, total word count is misleading and overestimated. Not to mention it can be inflated (whether on purpose or not).
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For the more traditional, linear-narrative CSG games, this could work. But this would be harder to execute for games which are heavy in menus and management systems, like mine. Randomtest has no brains and constantly goes back-and-forth in my management systems when attempting to complete the game, which would have inflated the average word count.
True. But it is the bigger and more impressive number. 
Which is why we like it from a marketing standpoint, misleading as it might be.
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