Interactive Fiction Forums: What They Actually Are and How to Use Them
I spent about four years hanging around the Choice Of Games forums before realizing most people use them wrong. The community exists primarily for people who want to discuss branching narrative games, share fan content, and occasionally complain about bugs in their downloaded titles. It is not a professional development hub. Most posters are just players who play games on their phones during commutes. The main site you probably want is the official Choice Of Games forum at choiceofgames.com/forum. That is where the developers post patch notes, where power users discuss narrative design, and where people occasionally find people to beta read their own interactive fiction projects.
Getting Started With The Secret World Of Choice Of Games Forum A Deep Dive Into The Interactive Storytelling Community
Create an account. Use a real email because they do not send password resets through some magical backchannel. Once logged in, you will see several subforums: Bug Reports, Technical Support, General Discussion, Writers' Workshop, and a few others that change slightly depending on how active the community is that month. The Writers' Workshop subforum is probably the most valuable section if you actually write interactive fiction. People post their stories there for critique. The quality varies wildly, but the feedback tends to be honest. I posted my first unfinished prototype there in 2019 and got three detailed responses about pacing within forty-eight hours. That was faster than most writing groups I have belonged to. There is also a dedicated area for publishing inquiries if you want to submit your game to Choice Of Games. They have specific requirements about word count and branching structure. The submission guidelines are public on their website, but many people still email them with files attached instead of filling out the actual form. Do not do that.
What The Community Actually Looks Like Day to Day
Most threads are fairly mundane. Someone asks why their game crashed on Android, someone else recommends a similar title from a different publisher, and then three people debate whether a particular romantic subplot in Game X deserved more screen time. The romantic subplot debates can get surprisingly heated. I watched two people go at it over three pages about a character named Sebastian in a fantasy game. I still do not know who won. The regulars tend to recognize each other by username. There is a core group of maybe two hundred people who post weekly across various threads. They help newcomers navigate the forum rules, point out duplicate support requests, and occasionally organize community playthroughs of new releases. These playthrough threads can get massive. One particular fantasy game had a playthrough thread with over eight hundred replies spanning six months. Spoilers are supposed to be tagged. People mostly follow this rule in the main subforums, but the casual discussion threads are a different story. I gave away the ending of a horror game in an offhand reply and got yelled at by three different people within an hour. I learned to use spoiler tags religiously after that.
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Practical Uses Beyond Just Talking About Games
Beta reading is probably the second biggest use case after general discussion. Writers need test readers before they publish. The forums have a dedicated section for this, but there is also a lot of informal beta reading happening in thread replies. If you post a story excerpt and ask for feedback, you might get it. Or you might not. Nobody is obligated to respond. Game recommendations flow constantly through the General Discussion boards. People post what they recently finished, what they are currently playing, and what they want to play next. The algorithm on the website is mediocre at suggesting titles based on your history, so the human recommendations often prove more useful. I found half the games I have enjoyed through forum threads rather than any storefront recommendation engine. There is also a marketplace section, though it is mostly for trading physical copies and discussing print editions. Digital copy trading is against the terms of service, and the moderators enforce that rule pretty strictly. I saw someone banned within an hour for offering to sell aSteam key for a discounted price in the marketplace thread.
Edge Cases and Problems You Should Know About
The biggest issue I have encountered is the stale bot problem. Choice Of Games has automated some of the welcome processes, and occasionally new users get stuck in loops where the system sends them the same registration confirmation email three or four times. I experienced this myself and had to email support directly to get my account properly verified. It took about twenty-four hours to resolve, which is normal for their support turnaround. Another quirk is how the forum handles cross-posting. People frequently cross-post between the Choice Of Games forums and the larger IF community at intfiction.com. This is generally acceptable, but some moderators consider it spam if you post the exact same thread in both places without any indication. I used to do this regularly and got warned twice. Now I either modify the titles or include a brief note pointing to the other discussion. The search function is basically nonexistent. The forum software does not index older threads well, so if you are looking for a specific bug fix from two years ago, you might be better off asking a new question and hoping someone remembers. I spent about an hour searching for a solution to a specific save corruption issue before someone in a reply mentioned the fix had been posted in a thread I could not find through search.
Technical Details That Matter
The forums run on vanilla vBulletin, which means the interface looks like it is from 2014. This is not a bug, just a fact. The mobile experience is tolerable but not great. I primarily browse on my phone and the thread view occasionally breaks on screens smaller than five inches. If you use a tablet, it works better. Email notifications are configurable per thread. You can set them to trigger on replies only, on any activity, or not at all. I recommend starting with "replies only" and adjusting from there, because the default setting sometimes causes notification floods when a popular thread gets active. File uploads are restricted to certain file types. Images, PDFs, and text files generally work. Executables and compressed archives are blocked. This caught me off guard when I tried to upload a zipped demo of my own game and got a generic error message with no explanation about the file type restriction.
Alternatives Worth Considering
If the Choice Of Games forums feel too narrow for your interests, there are broader interactive fiction communities. The intfiction.com forum covers all text adventure platforms, not just Choice Of Games titles. The Interactive Fiction Discord server has channels for various publishers and engines. Tumblr has an active IF community that posts reviews and recommendations, though the discussion depth varies. For writers specifically looking for critique partners, the Writership at choiceofgames.com is their official writer-focused platform, separate from the player forums. It has better organization for tracking work-in-progress projects and connecting with beta readers who understand the specific mechanics of branching narrative structure. I keep coming back to the Choice Of Games forums despite their flaws because the player base is engaged. The developers actually read the forums and sometimes respond to suggestions. The community is small enough that you can develop genuine relationships with other members, but large enough that you will never run out of people to talk to about narrative structure, game balance, or why the romance option in that one particular game felt underdeveloped.
