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https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/dystopian-game-ideas/22434/9

Hopeful Author: "genderless option will be a robot that has gained sentience"

CoGite: "That has kind of a derogatory connotation, that nonbinary or agender people are not human and are not normal to the human mind."

*Facepalm*

Send the author a link to CYS before they ban him.

Doesn't seem too bright, though. I mean, he posted a story idea on the CoG forum. When will people learn?

That sounds fun. I should do that sometime.

Isn't COG just a bunch of SJW's

Basically.

SJW? What does that mean?

Some Jackoff Whining

XD I understand everything now! Thanks.

So be it. This gives me a slight urge to make a game with a genderless, robot protagonist just to see how many people will get offended over something so petty.

Well, not many people here. Post a link at CoG when you're done though and you'll get a few.

About the biggest complaint you might get for a genderless robot story here is that they couldn't properly screw the maintenance man that would routinely oil them.

Wow.

Pretty sure nonliving objects don't have a gender. I mean, my chair has never tried to get frisky with me when I sit at the computer in any way or manner whatsoever.

They only do if you assign them one. Or in some languages, like Spanish, they do.

That's just a masculine, feminine or neutral tag for word patterns/endings. Go to CoG and tell them that masculine things are definitely male. Send us a link too. ^_^

I'm tempted to. So verbatim, "Masculine things are male."

Right?

You'll make them even more upset if you put "always" in there. But if you just put that with nothing else, they'll probably see through your trolling.

What do you suggest, Professor?

Oh no, I'm not going to stir up the CoGites. Last thing I want is to be responsible for is them crying over here. You'll have to devise the rest yourself.

EDIT: Ask Malk, he likes poking them with sticks.

@Malkalack

What do you propose, Professor?

Dagnabit, don't tempt me...

You're drunk and a month late to the party. Someone take this guy home.

If you look down, you'll see I'm only 2 days late, occifer. But seriously, You've got me itching to troll the place...

Choice of Games.

Have fun.

Alright lads. Shot them an invite. Get ready for a new guest.

Lol it got flagged super fast, and they removed the link.

Damn them and their moderation tools!

Sounds like they're trying to shepherd the sheep so none wander off.

North Korea tactics, always a good sign. Can he be PMed?

Damn, I missed everything, what happened exactly?

Anyway, assuming nobody has been banned, yeah you can PM people on there. I've done that before when the group think brigade were trying to shame an author into writing something and I provided encouragement to write what they wanted. The person thanked me and said they were going to follow my advice.

Good man.

More gems from the same person.

http://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/preferability-of-non-gender-segregation-world-in-cog/22688

“You know what I don't like? Games that use casual sexism/racism/transphobia etc. to make their worlds look more "gritty" and "dark" like man I did not waste my money on this for you to have an outlet to be disgusting.”

“When there is discriminaton, it should only exist to be overcome or proven wrong, whether by the player, characters, narrative, or world-building. Otherwise the writer is advocating the existence of discrimination as realistic or natural or god forbid, deserved.”

“If your game is not going to handle depicting discrimination with grace, it is better not to at all. If you include discrimination, and are not going to go out of your way to prove discrimination wrong as a writer, you are only contributing to the discomfort of readers and validation of bigots.”

“If I want something with people making it all about my genitals, I will go outside and talk to a cis.”

Lol.

Lol indeed.

lol

Don't get me wrong, I hate bigots as much as the next guy, but what kind of "ideal" world allows men and women to be put in the same prison? Gender-neutral prisons. Gender-neutral prisons. Gender-neutral prisons?

The best kind of world, apparently.

Arkham Asylum I guess?

Well at least one of them seems to get the point.

"In a truly realistic scenario, I think prison is the absolute last place somebody of an opposite sex or gender should expect to receive any sort of positive treatment.

People in prison tend not to receive positive treatment anyway, but if the criminal populace were allowed access to the opposite sex or gender, that wouldn't be fun scenario for anybody. Even with the same sex or gender in the prison population, acts such as sexual assault or straight-up murder are pretty damn high. Introducing people of the opposite sex or gender would in all likelihood increase that statistic from an already uncomfortable level to an inhumane one, given the not very nice nature of a great deal of prisoners.

Personally, I would have to say that I prefer it when jail population is divided by sex, because inclusivity and playing as the person you want to play as is pretty important at CoG, and a lack of gender segregation in a realistically-set prison would probably make minority-related sexual assault or regular assault, which is quite a large statistic already a great deal higher, which some people may not be okay with.

But I'm approaching this from an uber-realistic perspective, and I don't recall any literature that gives evidence to the contrary for what I'm suggesting. And this is also assuming that you're approaching it from the regular prison system, but a truly realistic jail perspective would be tricky to master. But again, this is me; I'd be interested in playing said realistic scenario if handled properly."

But seriously - the very idea of a man and woman sharing a prison cell is kind of a turn-on just plain wrong. Like, are they going to prison to not have sex with their cellmate? A world that optimistic doesn't even need a correctional facility. Next thing you know there are games where people are losing their genitals to go to prison as part of a correctional method to make them more gender-neutral and more accepting. But of course, the sterilizations would be gender-neutral ones.

EDIT: And about that whole genderless robots thing, does this mean that all their sci-fi stories have to have a combination of cis  and non-cis male aliens, cis and non-cis female aliens, and gender-fluid robots that can change their gender identity at the switch of a knob?

In the ideal world, every man who commits a crime is immediately castrated, because men are evil.

Someone needs to go copy paste this on one of their threads. AHEM.

I find the term "cis" to be incredibly disparaging and discriminatory against people of my beliefs. I prefer the term "normal," thank you very much.

Oh that would get hidden and then deleted by the gestapo over there with a blink of an eye.

And I've seen the other side refer to the "cis" folks as "cissies" before. Lol.

It'd be interesting to time the lapse between post, deletion, and banning.

I'd prefer to replace Cis with "Gay for their own genitals, the fucking freaks".

Well, I tried to be understanding and see what was up with the whole spectrum of gender identities, which is great and all, until I ran into this on Wikipedia:

"  Third gender or third sex is a concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither man nor woman. It also describes a social category present in those societies that recognize three or more genders. The term third is usually understood to mean "other"; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth,[1] fifth,[2] and "some"[3] genders.  "

I don't even know. Health class taught me two things: Dicks and tits. Gays are cool and all. Transgenders I don't mind. But since when was there a 3rd, 4th, 5th gender? I'm lost. Why? What compels people to decide that man/woman wasn't good enough for them? I mean, I don't mind, I just find it baffling is all.

In many cases, the third gender arose to "Other" the LGBT groups. In England in the 1700s "Male Sodomites" were suggested to be a third gender, as were M-F Transpeople in South Asia, such as India, for around 2000 years. Since at least their discovery by the West Native Americans had "Two Spirits", although that held quite a common spiritual meaning, and was more an attempt to bring spirituality in to explain this unnatural behaviour. Hell, you can see it with Thailand's Ladyboys, known their as kathoeys and treated as a third sex.

Mainly, it arose because of an attempt to distance the LGBT from gender, and because of spiritual reasons. In modern days its become different seeing as there's atheist people who identify as a third sex willinginly, but who the fuck knows about that.

Hillariously though, in parts of Latin America, man and woman were never the two genders. It was Man and Not Man, with women, gays and trans people falling into the latter category.

So, so, so many things here are just ??

More CoG hillarity to ring in the new year. Talk about eating their own on this one, all this guy wanted to do was write a drag queen protagonist!

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/the-drag-queens-and-the-wallflower-interest-check/22910

Well at least Malk now has the proper incentive to will himself to live for another 200 years.

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/users/malkalack/activity

Amazing.

What the actual hell was that? It hurt my head just reading those damn posts

Lol, Jesus fucking Christ, even with as many trolling assholes as we have on here, we still managed to have at least a relatively more civil back and forth debate recently.

Fun starts here:

http://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/gender-locking-ros-and-importance-of-gender-in-relationships/23002/38

Not sure why anyone takes anything Laguz seriously, since she turns every thread into an exercise of oppression olympics and shouts PATRIARCHY EVUL WHYTE CISSIES I HATES DEM RAGH and just flails on the keyboard until everyone gets tired of arguing with her.

Still, it is pretty entertaining to watch. Lol

EDIT: Gotta love how Zassuen’s post was flagged and hidden when he DARED to post dissenting opinion. Nothing like an echo chamber to reinforce delusional thoughts. Lol.

I didn't see a post by a Zassuen. All  saw were poisonmara and razgriz telling her she's wrong (I think).

Zas got flagged and hidden, but apparently Zas had to re-edit the post so it didn't "offend" anyone so now it's okay I guess.

Poisonmara and razgriz were actually somewhat on the same side, it's basically Laguz that's being a whining fucktard with everyone there as usual. Even the mods were trying to calm her down. Lol.

I'm falling asleep so I'm not really thinking straight (no pun intended) but I just flagged the "all hets are bigots" comment and not even a minute later a moderator responded.

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/gender-locking-ros-and-importance-of-gender-in-relationships/23002/67

"In my mind as a writer, and honestly just as a person, spirit/personality are more important than gender identity and sexual orientation (or other characteristics) as far as RO go."

Huh, who'da thunk it, right?

Okay, now I know something is wrong with them if they suspended Seto.

I mean, you can't suspend a ghost.

Forget it Seto, it's Triggered Town.

Lol.

I can't see the photo at the moment. Don't tell me you got banned.

He got banned for 200 years.

A little more than 200 

Strangely, T-Count didn't get banned.

Though the fact he said he was a furry and had two dads might have helped.

And he was very pro-gay xD

This is very ironic to me since I am gay. And do I count as a furry? I have a dog as a profile picture. Does that count? XD

I think some people thought you were a furry when you first showed up here due to your avatar at the time.

Boris? He is one of my OCs, and I do love the Cheshire Cat's personality. :P

Though, I think he might be one of my only OCs that count as a furry. Do people with bird wings count?

I'm sorry CoG decided to banish you, Seto. You did good. A place in Valhalla will be reserved for you.

Thank you, Bucky.

This slight against me will not be forgotten though. In 200 or so years, I will return to COG and wreck havoc. :P

Have fun in Valhalla. Say hi to Grandpa for me. I'll visit you there. (Granted it'd be at the time of the apocalypse so you might not be too happy to see me.)

The worst part was that I was purposely an overblown cancerous fucktard that exuded stupidity through my pores and the worst I got was a warning for spamming. Good lord, these people.

Well, at least, I'm friends with Laguz, so that might help my odds.

How sad :( 

That sucks, Seto.

*Stumbles on this post somehow.*

While the main discussions on this thread (mounting rescue operations on CoG Matrix 1 style, supporting honest authors, and more) are fascinating in their own right, correct me if my eyes are failing me, but do CoG forums have a variable called... TRUST LEVEL?!?!?! What's that even supposed to mean?!

It's to keep out bad types like Seto. Lol.

Basically it's just a way to try to weed out people that don't agree with the company line. You have to be there for a certain period of time, post, get likes, give likes, play nice, etc. in order to rise up in trust level.

Do they hand out free Kool-Aid packets to new members?! They seem to have a damn fine cult-making system in place, an institutionalized one at that...

And who in the world bans someone for 290 years?! Why not make it an even 300, what sort of a madhouse are they running there >_<

It's worse than cultism. Cults can be constructive to the communities around them. Like Jehova's Witnesses. You can ask them to "Help" do your yardwork while they tell you about their religion, and they'll do it because they're religions built more or less by kind but uber-Christian folks in colonial days, so communal yardwork is like nothing.

CoG is political corporatism. In an effort to make sure sales are never hurt ever for any respectable demographic, they've endeavored to never offend anyone ever in even the slightest way. This has lead to oversensitive, condescending, and impulsive moderators and bred a site of volatile, oppressive lies pretending to be tolerance. Which I guess is only to be expected, the site has to make money, and they have hundreds of internet randos helping them, so you can't have users saying controversial things to anyone. Since this is the internet, and hostile modding builds only an echo chamber, this will of course be taken to its logical extreme, and you get trash like the CoG community, who clamps down on other people's ideas and comes down hard and violent on people's thoughts that rub them the wrong way on virtue of not being their own.

CoG is far from political corporatism. That tries to never offend any potential clients and to avoid voicing cocerns. CoG makes bringing up these divisive issues a primary goal and happily goes ahead and offends and insults those who don't go with their views on things.

You're probably much more of an expert on how CoG works than I am, so you're probably right. In that case, someone on Tumblr or another artsy little nook with a subculture of particularly 'vocal' advocates for 'acceptance', like Deviantart, Wattpad, Fanfiction, etc. and, as people who yell at others because they need to feel accepted do, they migrated on over to CoG, a smaller, potentially more accepting community, and spawned a cult of tolerance hatesmanship.

Or assholes break Newton's Laws of thermodynamics and arise from nothing.

The point on cults makes a ton of sense, nice insight. 

Won't they fall prey to their own madness one day, when they can't sell a game without offending everyone twice? If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything, and it seems like they're setting new lows. Genderless robots. Seriously.

Their regulars are probably the ones that run around dictating what's offensive anyway, so that may be where their revenue shows up out of.

That's fair, but you can't monetize to take advantage of whales in a CYOA format, unlike say Free To Play / Gatcha madness where you can get people to spend like crazy. Sane business sense would go that they clamp down on errant keyboard spammers viciously, it's strange to see they've someone not gone down that route and still seem fairly profitable.

Like I said above, their community is probably highly connected to people who think the same way. SJWs, while they are a vocal minority, are still a pretty big social demographic. That's how they can sort of spring up like a mob when publicly provoked in corners of the web big and small. Tumblr users, etc. all probably have a hand in visitor circulation, and some pretty big games, like the browser game sunless sea is based off, are based in choicescript iirc.

Quick analysis of their Steam sales data (via SteamSpy and Steamdb)

Total games copies sold on Steam: ~253,000

Highest Rated Game: Choice of Robots, $5, Max Discount: 40%

Max Sold game: Choice of Robots, ~43,000 copies

Average game rating (not weighted), 67%

Sales till date assuming 60% sales were at 40% discount (assumption mine): $800,000. Of that Steam takes a 30% cut, I'm guessing CoG takes between 40-50% as well.

At the same time, they sell DLC to their games. Only 6 games have >10,000 units sold, of which 4 > 20,000 units

In that context, it's entirely feasible that they do indeed have a small and rabid fanbase, which does give them regular business but at the same time probably prevents newcomers from joining the game.

For reference, Sekai project (which translates Jap Visual novels into English) has >100,000 copies sold for 9 of its products. CoG is still a small fish in the bigger text heavy game market.

This is off topic, but I saw the words "whales" and "gatcha". Ugh. On DP, one of my friends recently spent over 109k on the game, and earned a top 10 spot. It would have been hilarious if it wasn't my spot he'd claimed.

... and how much did you spend (or is that a question best left unanswered?)

I have literally spent only the total of 5$ on the game, and that was for the Christmas lucky bags(95% off for a Legendary hero was just too good of a deal, but of course RNGesus hates me and gave me a rare...). I just mat. grind a lot during events (which are really infrequent on the game) and I made a bot to help me money grind. Sadly, I can't EXP grind with it, since I can't just click on the exact spot over and over for exp...

Honestly the only reason why I joined years ago is because I was Googling my own name one day and found that someone made a thread about me over there so I decided to see what was going on. It wasn’t quite as bad back then as it is now over there.

Nowadays the standard thing is an author comes up with an idea, some people say it sounds good or okay, then the usual triggered brigade comes in calling the author a bigot/Nazi/etc, telling them to change their story and either the author just gives up or they completely cave to the mob over there. (Last one was the guy wanting to write a CYOA based on Andrew Jackson, didn't go over well. Lol)

But yeah it’s a pretty toxic environment that doesn’t really allow for any opposing argument. Their concept of “civil” discourse is pretty one sided because there are more than a few people over there that just flail about on the keyboard being angry assholes about everything and never get flagged/banned and do whatever they like over there.

Personally I mainly stick to PMs to directly speak with the few normal people there most of the time. No point in posting and  getting into forum arguments with people who are largely delusional and aren’t going to listen in the first place.

Well, thank heavens that CYS is a safe harbor for reasonable (if often hilariously eccentric) discussion and on focusing on the games themselves.

What surprises me about CYS is that more people haven't gone commercial (or I in my brief presence haven't noticed many). Barring tsmpaul and maybe another few people I haven't seen anyone mentioned having gone commercial. CoG for what it's worth set up in '09 and seem to atleast be paying their bills for now. Where did the roads fork?

Well you have to remember CoG was ALWAYS a business and had a set agenda from the start. So it makes sense that the writers there are more profit oriented.

CYS was primarily made for fun in mind. Alex actually has other businesses he runs so this was more like a hobby. Presumably most other people here are here for likewise reasons. (We’re foolishly in it for the art, not the money. Lol)

Yeah you get a few people here with profit in mind, but if you’re going to do that, well you might as well have gone to CoG in the first place, or if they’re too restrictive, publish it yourself or use one of those companies that produces hentai VNs or something.

I mean personally, there have been the occasional folks who have PMed me here and over at Infinite Story about stuff like making a flash game of Eternal (How the hell would that even work?), or making a comic of Necromancer and whatnot, but I’ve always found such offers to be rather suspicious most of the time and usually I’ll request more information and it’s either really sketchy or they just disappear.

But, as I've always said it's mainly a hobby for me, so I'm not selling drugs or dressing up like a ninja and killing people. (Or some combination of the two)

Would you be interested in a very lucrative deal for a Necromancer cereal for kids?

Show me enough money, and I'll personally endorse Necromancer Kitty backpacks in Japan. Lol.

I would totally buy that. 

How about an action figure set based off of Eternal?

Definitely would need that 80s toy commercial feel to advertise those.

Would you like to sponsor our "Eternal Enhancer" brand? 

What's being enhanced, hmm?

Do you truly want to know? XD

I already know... I-I was just testing you to see if you knew.

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Are you spending your lonely nights telling sad Tales from the Basement on the internet about your waning libido instead of taking your Suzy on a Strange sexual Saga?

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I say we commend this post.

Also, you forgot to find a way to cleverly include Suzy's Strange Saga and Tales from the Basement.

There, added the other two.

Buy NOW, you dashing Rogues!

Noise from offscreen

Wait, that one's not out yet? D'oh!

I'm laughing so hard right now xD

This honestly needs to be commended.

Are you this funny in real life?

This is the best thing I've ever read! If such a product existed, it would all be sold in less than a day.

So that's where the roads forked, they intentionally walked down the profit path. Though my experience of CoG games is limited to their demos (and that they ruined Alter Ego by making it pay/burn time to play), I'd wager that CYS has far more high quality stories, and in a beatdown over quality, CYS would win. 

Personally, I'm in it to learn the art, but will need to make games for profit at a later date, can only burn cash till it lasts.

@Endmaster, I'd honestly expected some of your work to have made the transition to software by now, especially something like Eternal, the thing's longer than the LotR trilogy for heaven's sakes. 

I'm not quite so sure we'd win the belt in Quality Smackdown 2017. We have less members and less traffic, where they have a fair bit more content producers. Since they are a monetised medium, they can really get their quality/content moderation caps on and bump off/sanction any games that aren't quite up to snuff, where we, as a free site for hobbyists, only delete things for being really, really bad. We have some greats, but I'm not sure how they stack up against their greats. I'm also not sure we have more above-average games than they do.

They only have 5 games selling > 20k copies. An average John Doe game (and I include all the trash of Steam, of which there is metric TONS) on Steam sold around 13,655 copies last year. For all their monetization, marketing, logo and whatnot they don't have the numbers to show for it. Take CYS's best, games rated 6.5 and above (I don't know how many they are but pull a normal bell curve over 1000 games and there should easily be 30), and I wager they'll beat their entire 30 game catalog on Steam. Should CYS ever decide to go to war, and its members intentionally polish the top games already here (say add graphics / cool pictures / kittens / whatever), it would be a one sided slaughterfest

Good enthusiasm.

The day it happens, if it happens, I'll be sitting around calmly listening to the music that played when the Ents went to war against Isengard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTFP9QQzEL4

For the lazy people, click this.

Their games do have the obstacle of a price tag, though. Given that people are probably initially skeptical of how much fun they can have with a Text Game anyway, it's kind of reasonable that they'd only have a few big hits since those seem to be the more "Tried and True" games and hidden gems remain hidden. Here, everything's free, so we're free to try everything. Then again, that can also be skewing my views, because I've only been able to read reasonably good CoGs and I've been free to try shit CYS games. Our mediocre may well be their above average, but I'm not willing to pay the thousands it'd take to read their every game.

First, you can play the first act of most of their games online, so no one usually feels like they're going in blind.

Second, they charge at max $5 for their games, which is the super low segment on Steam, you'd get a lot of random interest at that price point.

Third, if they were say a normal bell curved company, they should have had some hits, one or so superhit, and a long tail. Their only positive outlier was 45K copies, and their tail was way below average - their offer is not attractive is an easier summary.

Fourth, they've been selling there for 2 years now, they should have SOME brand rapport, i.e. selling behind their shield should mean something.

Fifth - Yep, recency effect. Plus the bundling problem. Adding bad games to CYS does in no way decrease the quality of the best, the same way adding a damaged spork to a collection of perfectly fine sporks would not impair their good sporks but would decrease your valuation of the package (this is a real thing in human psychology). Our mediocre need not be above their average, as long as we have enough high quality ones to overwhelm their entire force.

Sixth: Wow  I sound like an annoying business analyst, someone prescribe a good storygame, stat!

To be fair, I was trolling them XD though the things I posted, were not the sort of things a normal mod would ban anyone over, nor did they seem troll-ish XD

On another unrelated note, COG's maze thingy in the corner is the dumbest fucking thing. I went in expecting an engaging and challenging puzzle, only to find that it may as well be a swiss cheese for all the resistance it puts up to the aspiring mazewalker. You could go down any given hole and get to all three points in the middle in less than 5 seconds.

I KNOW, RIGHT?!

I thought I was the only one to try that stupid maze logo!

Here, enjoy this.

Jesus Ch-

Well. I'm going to waste my time wondering where to start xD

There's 4 dots on the bottom. I think that's a gate. Though, this does represent the journey of Theseus, so you probly start out on the little island.

Try to get from one end of the dash to the other one, though. I'm the only one who knows how.

Just start from the middle~