I understand the bewilderment about why objections to choice-based games might be considered misogynistic. However, there is a broader context to this conversation that I suppose some people here may be unaware of.
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Twine has been adopted by many creators who feel left out of traditional game creation power structures, especially women and queer authors and people of color: in some cases people who do not program or do not have the time and energy to program; often people who face disproportionate challenges in getting hired in the game industry. The traditional parser IF community has always skewed towards white men, but the Twine community has a different composition, and for some Twine authors it is the one context in which they feel their voices can be heard.
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A number of female and queer game developers and journalists have been the target of a sustained and in some cases criminal harassment campaign for the last two months, including rape and death threats, hacking attacks, the distribution of private financial information and nude photos, and attempts to get them fired from their jobs. There is a huge, depressing story here (you can google GamerGate and spend all day reading if you really don’t need your faith in humanity any more), but at least some portion of that situation has been about organized, overtly anti-feminist and anti-queer attacks. At the center of that campaign is Zoe Quinn, author of the Twine interactive fiction Depression Quest, and there has been a flood of discussion about interactive fiction – by which in this context they mean Twine, since our corner of the internet mostly isn’t visible enough to appear on the radar – being not real games, as being part of what is “ruining” games. A number of Twine authors have come under direct attack in the process. Several valued devs and journalists have left the games field entirely because it wasn’t worth dealing with the risks and the attacks any longer.
So there are a couple of issues here. One: for those of us aware of the GamerGate situation, there’s something very uncomfortably reminiscent of that in a group of people denouncing choice games as not real IF when the large majority of the choice games submitted this year are in Twine. Maybe not intentional, maybe not something that the writers of those posts were aware of, but they echo some unpleasant things said elsewhere, and that colors the experience of reading them.
Two: even if no conscious misogyny is involved, the practical effect of the parser IF community excluding an influx of Twine authors is, among other things, to exclude people whose presence would make our community more balanced and diverse, people who have faced a lot of previous exclusion. That’s something that we should think about a bit. In my experience a lot of the reason the game industry is so tough for women is not because everyone’s overtly sexist (though there certainly are a few such people) but because there are a lot of institutions and pieces of infrastructure that have traditionally been male-centric and male-serving, and preserving the status quo for its own sake often also means preserving a situation that objectifies and talks over women. It is easy to contribute to that situation by accident, even for very well-intentioned people; even for women themselves. But the problem is a real one. I was totally astounded by the level of functional sexism when I entered the game industry. I seriously could not believe it. I’d thought that as a society we’d finished with some of that stuff back around season 5 of Mad Men. But no.
So, to sum up: I’m not saying anyone contributing to this is intending to be misogynistic; I’m not saying that being female is now a reason to win all disagreements; I’m not calling anyone names. I understand the feeling of loss if parser games go away. I am, however, saying that there is a surrounding context to this conversation in which issues of gender and power are absolutely in play, and it’s going to affect how people feel about what is said.