The mystery of Story Games

[Britva415]

when you say that you need to write three good complete stories to make a good story game, I wonder if that's a misuse of the medium, and is really just better off being a collection of three stories?

What's the difference?

AND

How does it solve the (writer's) disinterest in writing multiple stories which are mostly not going to be read by a given reader?

AND

How are they really independent stories in a collection when you have to contrive to make them overlap at the choosing points in the "game" or whatever?

This idea seems like it would add unnecessary extra work while taking away storytelling freedom without adding anything rewarding, for the writer or for the reader.

 

[YmaOHyd]

What's the difference?

I think what Penny's saying is that if you approach a CHOO as a series of parallel stories, you're better off just doing the stories separately. Instead of a branching structure where you pick between 18 year old DD+ cheerleader / 18 year old DD+ skater punk / 18 year old DD+ librarian, just do those three stories as stories.

The thing that separates CHOO from standard narrative is the ability for the reader to affect the outcome, right? So what you'd want is to maximize the impacts of the choices the reader makes. That means probably thinking about one story with multiple outcomes, including fail states. In a perfect world, I think, you'd want the reader/player to feel clever when they bag the girl/boy/vending machine/dungeon itself.

 

[Z_TheWriter]

I think what Penny's saying is that if you approach a CHOO as a series of parallel stories, you're better off just doing the stories separately. Instead of a branching structure where you pick between 18 year old DD+ cheerleader / 18 year old DD+ skater punk / 18 year old DD+ librarian, just do those three stories as stories.

The thing that separates CHOO from standard narrative is the ability for the reader to affect the outcome, right? So what you'd want is to maximize the impacts of the choices the reader makes. That means probably thinking about one story with multiple outcomes, including fail states. In a perfect world, I think, you'd want the reader/player to feel clever when they bag the girl/boy/vending machine/dungeon itself.

Part of the appeal of such games is also that you can replay them to see the alternate outcomes. If those alternate outcomes are just entirely different storylines, that feels weird and disconnected. Seeing the same events again, the same people in the same room having the same conversation, but now it's different because you're dating the skater instead of the cheerleader, that's interesting.

 

[PennyThompson]

In a perfect world, I think, you'd want the reader/player to feel clever when they bag the girl/boy/vending machine/dungeon itself.

yes, but once you do that I think you're now making a dating sim, which i feel is a different form of media!

I don't think i'm articulating my thoughts on this very well, i'm going to go away and stew on it longer

 

[Z_TheWriter]

I don't think i'm articulating my thoughts on this very well, i'm going to go away and stew on it longer

Penny for your... sorry

 

[Britva415]

Okay thinking a little more about this because I can't sleep, I think the challenge is using the medium in the ways in which it is unique from other mediums.

[...]

So what is the thing that makes a story game or interactive text a distinct medium?

I don't believe that anyone has found it yet.

Well, that is to say, nobody has succeeded at making it a compelling medium.

I do know that there are sites full of CHYOO's and maybe something closer to what we're thinking of as "story games" (distinct from CHYOO's), but, the works which populate those sites aren't professionally authored and aren't commercially consumed.

I know it's gauche to equate commercial success with artistic success, and maybe it's unforgivable to dismiss this whole genre because there's nobody producing it except for "amateurs," but I'm not remotely convinced that it isn't a good proxy for popularity and appreciation.

I'm also not pooh-poohing the taste, erudition or sophistication of their readers/players. People like what they like. But this "medium" simply hasn't taken off. It's a "distinct medium" in the same sense that

I think what Penny's saying is that if you approach a CHOO as a series of parallel stories, you're better off just doing the stories separately. Instead of a branching structure where you pick between 18 year old DD+ cheerleader / 18 year old DD+ skater punk / 18 year old DD+ librarian, just do those three stories as stories.

The thing that separates CHOO from standard narrative is the ability for the reader to affect the outcome, right? So what you'd want is to maximize the impacts of the choices the reader makes. That means probably thinking about one story with multiple outcomes, including fail states. In a perfect world, I think, you'd want the reader/player to feel clever when they bag the girl/boy/vending machine/dungeon itself.

so, write a collection and don't click them into a contrived format with an illusion of reader interactivity?

I can't imagine completing get behind that.

And "illusion" is why I think these aren't successful/popular. I already said why I think they're unpopular among writers. This gets to why they don't appeal to me as a reader either. The interactivity and agency we keep hearing about are illusions, and readers know it.

 

[YmaOHyd]

yes, but once you do that I think you're now making a dating sim, which i feel is a different form of media!

I don't think i'm articulating my thoughts on this very well, i'm going to go away and stew on it longer

I don't think you're necessarily making a dating sim. I didn't really do choose-your-owns as a kid, but the ones I remember were all, like, horror- or adventure-themed, where there were a few choices where you'd die and a few where you'd live.

so, write a collection and don't click them into a contrived format with an illusion of reader interactivity?

Yeah, basically. Either you find the thing that makes the medium valuable or you shouldn't use the medium. If all ya got is a choice between three palette-swapped Big Boobie Babes, just write three stories, publish them separately as stories, and enjoy the plaudits of people who like that kind of story.

 

[Britva415]

Either you find the thing that makes the medium valuable or

Heh.

Nobody can articulate what that is

 

[YmaOHyd]

Heh.

Nobody can articulate what that is

Agreed.

 

[KimDNier]

Interesting 2025 read about how people here see the story games. My experience with the ones I checked was rather "juvenile".
I’ve been toying with a very focused Story Game concept and would love a sanity check from people who’ve actually played or written them.
Instead of a big branching CYOA where I’m basically intending to write a few full stories, the “game” is a series of found‑footage therapy transcripts that are inspired by my sessions with a therapist.
The idea is for the player to explore a somewhat fixed set of questions asked by the therapist about one aspect of my (published) stories in any order. Questions always appear (or even more), but the answer to them changes in intensity and detail depending on chemistry that rises across the therapy session.
So structurally it’s one core story, 15(ish) questions, and ~3 versions of each answer (neutral → charged → explicit). The goal isn’t lots of endings; it’s to let the reader dig deeper into the same material and see how context changes the answers.
For those of you who’ve played or written Story Games: does this sound like a good use of the format, or would you rather just read those therapy transcripts as a straight story?

 

[nice90sguy]

In answer to the O.P.

I wrote what I think is one of the very few actual games on this site. The rest are VN's (without the visuals) with basic choices, and maybve a stat or two. My game has a very full-featured sandbox stage and hidden quests and minigames.

I stopped workiing on it because Ink is shitty and hard to debug, and Literotica has further restricted it so that even font styling, which is VITAL to make a playable game, has been removed. An Ink game with images and supported font styles can be almost as good as Twine, but not on this site.

My game gets regular fan support (it's very niche, kind of an intense findom exerience), and I get frequent "please can you continue this" messages. When I read them I get a pang of regret, open up my game in Inky and remember the pure hell and frustration of developing it.

I wrote it because there are no games out there that actually get the "conditioning" side of findom right. The "grind" aspect of a lot of HTML games is actually part of the attraction when the goal is to turn the player into a mindless drone

 

[RocketGrunt]

Certainly we can see from the realities of CHYOA that the big branching story is essentially impossible.

If you had ten branch points with just a binary question each time, you would have 1024 end points and 2047 total pages. You're talking about a story that when red is ten pages long, which for CHYOA pages means 10-20k words, but which required someone to actually write between two and four MILLION words of text. It's nearly the entire length of The Wheel of Time series to write, and it's the standard length of a Literotica chapter to read.

Which is why the CHYOA archive has been going for over two decades and there are literally ZERO of the choose your own adventure games that have ever been completed. What people actually do is to write straight stories with a few branch stubs that don't go anywhere.

 

[Djmac1031]

*old man voice* - What the hell is a story game, and why are you kids doing it on my damn lawn?

(This is my humorous attempt to point out part of the problem is a lot of us here have never heard of it.)

 

[nice90sguy]

*old man voice* - What the hell is a story game, and why are you kids doing it on my damn lawn?

(This is my humorous attempt to point out part of the problem is a lot of us here have never heard of it.)

They're sort of like a cross between rock-and-roll and Hula hoops, all the young people are doing it

 

[InvisibleHarvey]

In answer to the O.P.

I wrote what I think is one of the very few actual games on this site.

I'm going to check that out when I get a chance!

I'm the other person here who tried to make an actual game. Decide for yourself whether I succeeded or not.

https://www.literotica.com/g/sexbot-salvage

Some commenters complained about it being a game, and the overall feedback from the site seems to be that it's not really what people want.

I started working on another, but scripting in Ink is a bit of a slog. I might scale back my ambition and try again, but I find it more fulfilling to write stories.

 

[AlinaX]

My two story games are based around game shows with the reader making the player’s choices, but the endings did get exhausting to write.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I wrote what I think is one of the very few actual games on this site.

To be fair, they ARE called story games. But yes, they are mostly just stories, and not many among them have meaningful choices either.

Even on F95zone, where people are supposed to post actual games, not story games, 95% of those are Visual Novels that allow the player to make merely cosmetic choices. True games are few, and good ones are few and far between.

For what it's worth, I had plans of writing a proper game with actual gameplay and a sandbox mode of a sort, but images not being allowed and the limitations of Ink made me reconsider. With the present limitations, I don't think this genre is going anywhere.

 

[HotCosmo]

I cannot talk for the readers, I have read some story games myself and for me the problem is the lack of variety, no all story games are my thing, just the same with regular stories, but that is just my experience.

For the authors part, I have just published 1 story game(I have to say that I receive a warm welcoming for the readers even though it's not a great work in any means), but I've written around fifteen with a total of 90000 words since my first publishings. Trying different perspectives, use of Ink to add mechanics and variety (I have a prototype of a story about a guy with the power to rewind time that I'm very proud of it), and a few settings. A store game requires a lot of work, I have always had problems finishing large stories, and even a short story game is gonna require a lot of planning and time. You can share a part of it to get a little push and feel like keeping writing, so for me is the reason I have not finished story games even though I have a lot with the planing, coding, and a lot of the writing already made.

I love story games and I'd love more discussing and threads in this forum, you know create more community to attract people to this format that has a lot of interesting things to offer.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I've been meaning to start this topic for a while now.

Story games seem to exhibit some unusual patterns compared to regular Lit stories, but also compared to some other websites that have them.

Why is that?

The first thing we notice is that there aren't really that many of them on the site - between 70 and 80 at the moment. They seem to be very unpopular with authors, and I guess that makes sense. Not many authors have coding skills (even if story games require only basic knowledge), and I guess not many are willing to write all the different paths and story threads.

But most of all, maybe the authors just don't like writing them? Out of all the active (was it 169?) AH authors, only @AlinaX, @nice90sguy, and I have written one. Yet, it's the lack of popularity among readers what seems so unusual to me. They seem pretty popular on a few other sites that are more story-game oriented.

So why is that? Is it because Lit's readership is specific, maybe more mature in general? Is it maybe because the story games we have on Lit simply aren't very good? After all, out of 70+ story games, only like five have had the red H at any point. They are clearly not being rewarded by readers.
There's logic behind that theory, as you can easily see that most of the stories are written by newish authors with almost non-existent followings.
But then again, how is it that my story game is easily my most viewed, most favorited, most voted, and most commented work, even if I didn't really do anything different compared to my other work? If anything, it's the simplest story I've written...

This has been bugging me for a while now. I like understanding stuff, and this thing eludes me...

For me, it's that I started messing around with ink, the programming language, and I was like... "this thing sucks." Now, admittedly, I'd been spoiled by doing some stuff in Ren'Py, but even the simplest things that I wanted to do in ink seemed to be like pulling teeth. Add onto that that I'd be writing about five to ten times as much text out for a story that would be seen by maybe a tenth of the people (if I was lucky), AND programming is my day job AND I wouldn't be getting paid for this.... yeah. That was enough for me.

 

[HotCosmo]

I wanted to write one. I didn't for one reason: I didn't rant to be forced to download a software onto my laptop to do it. So, I gave up the idea.

To write in Ink is not necessary to download Inky. It's recommendable because it helps you to catch errors sooner, but it's not necessary. You can write ink in a Google Docs or any text editor, then bring it to Literotica and test that anything works. Technically it's possible to write it all in literotica and save it like a draft until it's ready, but I never try, so I don't know if it's comfortable or has some downside.