On the topic of systematic puzzles, I just added the tag to Paradox Factor ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=w1ugc4t1ro2joqpg which, I claim, definitely counts. It’s a choice-based time-travel game where actions you take in the past affect the future.
So, I try to avoid the term “CYOA” for the reasons given, and I’ve been trying to use “menu-driven IF” instead. “Gamebook” suggests “formatted for print” and a certain old school mentality to me, but is it actually the best term to use? Speaking from a generic and inclusive perspective?
Thanks for the link to Paradox Factor, by the way. Looking forward to trying it out, since I’ve only played a couple ChoiceScript games so far.
Sorry, but you’re talking nonsense. Parsers aren’t mentioned anywhere in any of the board descriptions. Inform and Tads have their own boards, but only because they completely dwarf all other development systems.
Here is a complete list of topics discussing gamebooks: search.php?keywords=gamebook&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sk=t&sd=d&sr=topics&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search
There have only been 53 in the history of the forum. No year had more than 20 topics. Most of them are probably single mentions in long topics about other things. We are not against gamebooks or any other format of IF. We simply don’t want to create boards that barely get used.
But if the community as a whole would like a new board for discussing the technology of non-parser IF, we can create one. If you’re wanting one for design discussions, I don’t think it would be wise or helpful to separate them - most discussions on characters, pacing, degrees of choice etc apply equally well to parser and multi-choice IF.
I can’t imagine there being enough discussion to warrant it, but it’s a reasonable idea.
But…
OOoooh, how I have to disagree here. Designing a gamebook or a CYOA is very, very different than designing parser IF. I have no direct experience, but I’m speaking from my experience as a player. Very different mechanics, a different design, different concerns, different goals, different ways to see the world. Characters? Fleshed out NPCs with interaction hooks VS instances in text where they are predominant, and may not be again, existing less as entities and more as a passage in the text. Pacing? Rooms and puzzles VS choices that keep you moving forward. Degrees of choice? Flexibility and versatility of the parser that stimulate finding nonobvious solutions VS direct choices clearly visible.
Yeah, I’m reducing both genres to a stereotype, I know, I know both genres are not exclusively this. But it’s enough to illustrate my point - I very much doubt most discussions on those topics can apply equally well to both.
Oh, I know that the different formats will deal with those topics in different ways, which is why I think they belong together - I think those differences can help push authors towards better stories so that it would be a shame if, for example, you only discussed pacing with the parser crowd or only the choice crowd.
Here’s a question for people familiar with the choice-based game communities – do they call their work interactive fiction? If not, what’s the most common term?
I’d say the most common is “choice-based game”. Clunky as hell, but it’s also the only one I’ve come across that doesn’t suggest a particular sub-genre.
In the Twine community, they call them “Twine games.” I don’t think they see themselves as belonging to the same category as printed gamebooks. Many (most?) have never played any parser IF.
On the CoG forums, folks do sometimes call them “CYOAs,” or they call the games themselves “CoGs,” but as often as not they’re just “games.” They do seem to be aware of parser IF; some like it, some don’t.
At CoG, we have struggled to describe our games in terms that make sense outside the IF community. We used to call them “multiple-choice games,” but that term never caught on. “Choice-based games” puts us in the same category as graphical games, (visual novels, The Walking Dead, BioWare) which is sometimes apt, but usually misleading. “Text-based choice-based games” does not roll off the tongue; “choice-based interactive fiction” does a little better.
Due to the length and structure of our games (60K-100K words of source, 20K words in one playthrough), we’ve taken to just calling them “interactive novels” when speaking to the general public. Often they assume that we’re like some other interactive printed book they’ve enjoyed (CYOA, Fighting Fantasy, other gamebooks) and we usually say, “Yeah, our games are like that, but longer, deeper, and richer.”
As to the use of terms.
When I reffer to ‘gamebooks’ i do mean the ‘choose your own adventure’ style of um, game.
That would be the most simplified version of gamebook in my definition.
I auctually played ‘text adventures’ and yes Collosal Cave was my first one played off of a 5 inch floppy. Now what I used to call ‘text adventures’ are now generaly called ‘interactive fiction’.
For a time I heard that co-op turn based story telling was also called ‘interactive fiction’. Though I grew up knowing that to be called ‘round robbin storytelling’.
So now this particular forum thread has boild down to 3 primary discussion points.
A. What is the most accurate term for a 'gamebook or a ‘Interactive fiction’.
B. Why would anyone use branching path instead of parser?
C. Why have the directory at all when there’s so much overlap.
My answers.
A. I’m only asking if you think that there would be a need for the subdirectory.
B. Because one deals with branches, passwords and dice, and the other primarily deals with parser programming, differnt codeing programs, and i’m making a guess C++.
C. The idea is a guide. A pointer. I KNOW there are a lot of good articles here on the IF site but there is also a lot of parser and technical realted articles that have nothing to do with the simplicity of a cyoa style gamebook. Not to mention the differences that occur when you think of the rpg-lite elements implemented into gamebooks and their unique limitations compared to parsers. So I expect a lot of ‘links to other IF forum articles’ at first. A helper, a GUIDE. Then later potentialy gamebook specific post. Then you have the whole CYOA authoring programs that are tottaly differnt than parser based programs. Thats a whole new arena I’ld rather not go into in this particular post at this time.
[size=150]Back to basic.[/size]
Vote
Do you think we should have a ‘Gamebook’ directory?
Simple as that.
With all due respect, you refer to my outsider’s perception / point of view as “nonsense” and then proceed to spend the next two paragraphs providing the very facts to back up my argument - which is simply that most Choice developers don’t feel welcome here, don’t feel that this forum is in any way intended for them, and therefore don’t post very often at all.
I was simply pointing this out. What you guys choose to do about it, if anything, is entirely up to you.
Edit: to clarify, in non-parser development circles the term “gamebooks” has come to mean specifically those original paper works which are now all finding their way into digital media, so that term has dropped out of common use for “any” non-parser works. Likewise, while CYOA is still quite commonly used, it has both the trademark problem and also a more-specific meaning. More and more I’m seeing simply ‘Choice’ games as a collective whole and distinct from parser, as it neatly covers everything from Multiple-Choice systems thru the likes of Twine and CYOA, to original gamebooks in digital form. Again, this is FYI, not a suggestion or recommendation.
You don’t just say that people don’t feel welcome but that we are actively making people feel unwelcome. That’s not true. The forum is not privilaging parser formats over choice formats.
Though perhaps I saw an emphasis in your post that you didn’t intend. Sorry if that’s the case. I’m feeling defensive today.
Both Twine and Choicescript can create games that are not really possible in a printed gamebook, due to some capability to dynamically do things to the text. You can go even closer to parser-based i-f, for instance in that Tiny Text Adventure game for Android, that plays a lot like some old parser-based game, but always listing choices dynamically for the player to choose from. That game even has at least one NPC that is reacting to player actions and moving between rooms.
There are many iOS/Android apps marketed as gamebooks. They tend to work quite hard (too hard often, imho) to emulate paper gamebooks, sometimes even rolling simulated dice on screen 
. Anyway I agree not every game based on choices is a gamebook. I don’t know where the exact point is when a gamebook stops being a gamebook though. But a game based on choices could still have a world model, active NPCs and (almost?) everything else we see in parser-based games (except for guessing verbs?) if we just had sufficiently advanced frameworks to build the games. A game based on choices do not have to be just a mostly-linear branching story with some simple variables just because that is what the current frameworks are best at.
I have a question. While I agree that IF encompasses a much wider art form than parser based gaming (and it’s family), is there no other established forum solely about Choice Based Games? I don’t have much experience with this form, so I can’t say whether the results Google is returning are relevant or not.
.
Because if I am thinking correctly, just creating a new directory may do more harm than good. Say a person registers on intfiction after noticing a dedicated directory and post some question he has about some CYOA authoring system. If the amount of CYOA related posts here are indication, he might not get a single reply because possibly nobody here is ‘in’ that particular system. Now, the newcomer doesn’t knows this and his belief, that people at intfiction hate Choice Based and deserve do be killed, just got stronger- a belief that he’ll propagate all his life.
.
A better approach will be, IMHO, to have some kind of reference page where, if someone stumbles upon this forum to talk about gamebooks, can be redirected to forums, newsgroups, mailing lists and other communities that explicitly are focused upon this artform.
PS. Has Namekuseijin always been like that or is this some special epoch we are living through?
I don’t think the majority of people are trying to making the CYOA crowd feel unwelcome, but I can think of a certain person who’s doing his level best to give that impression. I just hope the CYOA crowd realise we don’t all feel that way.
From what I have been able to find in about a year (since I rediscovered gamebooks) there isn’t any strong universal gamebook community. There are many small forums and mailing lists, each focused on some particular series of books (eg Fighting Fantasy or Fabled Lands) or authoring system (eg Twine) or publisher. The closest to a combined community forum I know of is the /r/gamebooks subreddit (not much, no).
I believe he has always had his particular tastes, expressed strongly when he expresses them, but it is only over the last few weeks that he has felt obliged to jump into every thread to tell us about them.
I was looking some last night and there also seems to be a Yahoo group? Don’t know how popular that is though.
The Yahoo group used to be quite popular at one time, but I think it’s grown a lot quieter over the past few years.
This is basically right: there are a good number of different communities, and from what I can make out they overlap very little. From what I can see, the Twine community in general aren’t very interested in Choicescript games, Quest authors aren’t aware of StoryNexus, and so on.
This is at least partially based on looking at XYZZY ballots - I see a number voters who only vote for Twine, or only vote for parser, or only vote for ChoiceScript. I don’t see anyone who votes exclusively for choice-based games, but does so for a range of choice-based platforms - if someone’s voting for choicey games from multiple platforms, they’re almost certainly voting for some parser ones too. The attachment that people have to a platform is about a great deal more than the platform’s formal features.
There’s a Yahoo group at
groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/tit … lding/info
which has some interesting info regarding user stats. While fairly active in the last decade, though never to the degree of this forum, usage seems to have declined massively over the past few years. Then there’s a Fighting Fantasy specific group at
groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fig … books/info
which has also gone quiet as of late.
If a section of this forum was set up specifically for gamebooks / CYOA discussion, it might be worth posting a message on those groups to let them know. I’m sure a good deal of people would prefer to use a forum as opposed to the antiquated Yahoo groups system.