I always thought straying away from CYOA was asking for complications… The mechanics of IF, as everyone understands IF, is a parser. The mechanics of CYOA, as everyone understands CYOA, is a passage that gives you choices to click on, or turn to page umpteen, or what have you. We can - and have - discuss the finer points of nomenclature until the cows come home (at which stage we’ll end up saying Fallout is IF and Eric the Unready is a graphical point and click adventure), but I don’t think that’s productive. Really, why not stick with CYOA?
The only real distinction I can see is between CYOA and the RPG-ish mechanics of gamebooks (my reference here is Fighting Fantasy, I gobbled those up as a kid).
EDIT - Ok, ok, a little reading up on my part showed me that CYOA might present real legal issues. That’s what’s screwing this all up, because it’s rather awkward to call an internet-based “CYOA” game a “gamebook”.
Sometimes I think of these things as “Hypertext”. Maybe in my mind it’s HF? Hypertext Fiction?
EDIT 2 - Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time that a certain term had evolved beyond what it originally meant. In that case, it would be certainly ok to use CYOA to describe these adventures while still keeping it separate from the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
If we use “branching-plot fiction” to describe gamebooks, and “choice-based game” to describe Twine and CoG, they’ll be relatively easy to distinguish.
I like the term “branching-plot”, but doesn’t that kind of exclude the ones that loop or pearl? Just kidding, that would be getting ridiculous.
This is how I’ve always broken it down in my head. This is in context of Interactive Fiction, as, with the exception of “parser”, you’d be hard-pressed to find a term that doesn’t apply to graphical games as well as text-based ones.
IF breaks down to Parser or Non-Parser (what I call “menu-driven”).
Non-Parser breaks down to CYOAs (branching-plot), gamebooks, choice-based games, even hypertext fiction if it’s got clickies.
Thanks for discussing this with me, it’s been enlightening! I had no idea I’d drifted so far from the standard (okay, I knew I was pretty far from normal, but not in this regard).
I think if you want to attract some new traffic, making subforums seems like a good idea (I wandered by myself looking for discussions on CYOA design). If you want a board to give people who like gamebooks a place to call home, why not? Same with choice-based games. I would wonder if there’s enough material differentiating gamebooks from other choice-based games to justify separate sections, though. But I’d also wonder if the gamebook community would be attracted to a forum called “Branching-Path Games”. Well, whatever you decide, it will be interesting!
I think from looking at gamebooks.org, that wikipedia gamebook article, and the /r/gamebooks “forum” it is quite clear how the term is ommonly used. CYOA is just CYOA to me, just like Fighting Fantasy is Fighting Fantasy or Lone Wolf is Lone Wolf, but they are all subsets of gamebooks.
Okay, so the term “gamebook” is inclusive of all branching fiction? Now I’m really confused – I thought gamebooks were focused on RPG elements, things like dice and stats and combat. Emphasis on the “game” part, so to speak. But Wikipedia breaks gamebooks down into rpg solitaires, branching-path, and “adventure gamebooks”. Huh. I think I was conflating “gamebooks” with “adventure gamebooks”.
I appreciate you all taking the time to clarify this, even though it’s not all that important in the grand scheme of things.
Funny how the most popular and long running series of gamebooks ever - the Choose Your Own Adventures series - didn’t use stats or dice at all, yet are still regarded as gamebooks.
Electronic dance music has literally dozens of subgenres. Even subgenres of EDM like House, Drum and Bass, Techno, Dubstep, and Trance have numerous subgenres, each of which has millions of fans and many artists contributing.
and yet
a majority of people will still call every single EDM song that they hear ‘techno’.
(this is my flip way of saying that nailing down terms like these can be a nightmare even within a group, and in some ways we’re just going to have to roll with what we see our potential audiences calling them.)
Well, I don’t know if everyone called them gamebooks but I know that’s what people called them back when I was in school and they were insanely popular.
My personal feeling is: I’m not sure that it makes sense to create a separate board for gamebooks while leaving parser/hypertext games together, especially as we have more users whose main interest is hypertext than users whose main interest is gamebooks. Besides, as someone else mentioned, I like having all the design discussion in one place; reading a discussion about designing choice-based games gives me ideas I can borrow for parser-based games, and vice versa. Hybrid IF is cool. But I could see an argument that it would make sense to have separate design boards for each type of IF, and then people could follow all of them or only the ones that interested them, as they preferred.
Alternatively (perhaps just for now, and we can keep thinking about adding a new board or boards) how would people feel if we rewrote the description of the General Game Design board to make it clear that discussion of all kinds of IF is welcome, not just parser IF? That’s easily done.
That said I have a similar sense of the word “gamebook,” except that I only started hearing it a few years ago. I always called the books CYOA. And then I had some solo adventures for RPG systems that were based on the numbered paragraph system, clearly gamebooks by these standards, and I called them… I don’t think I called them anything.
I fail to see the hilarity and consensus about Dear Esther. It’s as though by talking about that we hit a new low. As I recall, I was making a point, and merely one that expressed my point of view and no one else’s (which I had to clarify subsequently).
Is that how this community is viewed from the outside? A thing to be mocked?
Hey, sorry Peter, I didn’t intend to mock you at all. In fact I was the one who originally brought up Dear Esther.
The thing that is being alluded to there is that the “Is it a game?” discussion has been going on kind of interminably for years and years, and no one has been able to come up with a definition that satisfies anyone else, yet the debate rages on like the Centralia mine fire or something. The idea that Dear Esther isn’t a game is no more risible than the idea that it is. It’s like, well, 2500 hits! Why did I (it was me) think it was a good idea to bring that up again?
(Also the duck penis discussion actually took off from a different topic on that thread, IIRC.)
People need to learn about Prototype theory. Categories, including “game”, aren’t defined by boundaries but by centres. There will always be borderline things, and often they’re the most interesting.