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As part of our support for the Choice of Games Contest for Interactive Novels, we will be posting an irregular series of blog posts discussing important design and writing criteria for games. We hope that these can both provide guidance for people participating in the Contest and also help people understand how we think about questions of game design and some best practices. These don’t modify the evaluation criteria for the Contest, and (except as noted) participants are not required to conform to our recommendations–but it’s probably a good idea to listen when judges tell you what they’re looking for.

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I am thrilled to announce that Choice of the Vampire is currently undergoing review by the App Store; barring unforeseen problems, it will be released in the next few days! As many of you are aware, to date, Choice of Games has published a series of fantasy multiple-choice games. Being a relatively progressive lot, and unconstrained by market research or corporate interests, we’ve been free to be politically progressive (specifically with regards to gender and sexual orientation). Because these games have historical themes, they have had to be situated in fictional realities, realities in which, for example, women crew ships

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Based on number of comments on this topic, clearly the next game should be Choice of Romance. 😛 – Jake Forbes Yeah, the thought crossed our minds, too. The Great Villeneuve Debate, aka TGVN (thank you, Jake, for coining a term that will make me grin for the rest of my life) demonstrated among other things that there was room in the Choice of Games stable for something that relied more heavily on personal interactions and less heavily on hitting things with swords or crunching them with your dragon teeth. (Don’t worry, we haven’t given up on those games. We’ll

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“Villeneuve is way cooler than any of the boring boys at the dance! We made such a good team.” Quoth my friend Becky, explaining her surprise that it was not (at that time) possible to pursue a same-sex relationship with Villeneuve. A common sentiment, as it turned out. “I think there’s such an interest in this aspect of the story,” wrote Spider in a comment to an earlier blog post, “because Villeneuve is the best-fleshed-out character. You don’t have the same level of interaction with the three marriage interests, and relationships with them feel rushed…” And Spider is quite right

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Authorial intent is a slippery concept at the best of times, but it becomes even more so in the context of interactive fiction (IF), whether multiple-choice games like Choice of Games makes or text adventures with a parser.  In a standard book (or a legal document, which is the context in which I’ve had most of my interactions with the concept of authorial intent), it’s usually pretty clear who the author is.  The difficult questions are how do you determine what the author’s intent is and does it matter?  When J.K. Rowling says that a prominent character in the Harry

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… and books are not RPGs. (By the way—hi there! I’m Heather. I joined Choice of Games as writer #3 just as Broadsides development was starting. It’s nice to meet you, too!) This post started as a comment to the “Help Us Switch Gender” thread, but I decided not to post it at the time, both because it got way too long and because I couldn’t make my points without risking spoilers. Now I think I can reasonably assume anyone reading this has played the game (but I put the spoilers under a cut anyway.) The core concept for Broadsides

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As I mentioned in my last post, we’re working on finishing up our next game, Choice of Broadsides, a game set in a fictionalized version of the Napoleonic Wars.   Of course, the real-world Royal Navy was an (essentially) all-male institution at the time.  We wanted to avoid embracing the sexism of both history and of the source materials we draw on, but at the same time, we concluded that having a mixed-sexed Royal Navy would be both too complicated to implement and would also make the Jane Austen inspired bits of the game very strange.  So instead, we let the

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We discussed the treatment of gender extensively as we were planning our first game.  I self-identify as a feminist, and I’ve worked to promote equality for the LGBT community in my non-gaming professional life.  So I started off with a firm commitment to the idea that our games had to be good on gender issues. Many video games assume a male protagonist, and I actively wanted to avoid that presumption.  At the same time, our games require a certain amount of identification between the player and the character.  A game that’s written in the second person runs into problems if

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