#booknerdlife

I’m Gower, and when I’m not being a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, I’m writing long interactive storygames published by Choice of Games.

Meet some of my characters:

Do you enjoy games where you get involved in terrible scandals, lose your money in ill-conceived wagers, go on foxhunts, solve mysteries and have a torrid affair with your servant, in an alternate 1930s where all shall be quite well in the end?

My games are light-hearted, super-branchy narratives inspired by P.G. Wodehouse's worlds of well-to-do young folks with more money than sense. My games are designed to have the reader's back no matter what choice you make.

Right now, I'm over 3 million words deep into my fourth game. Getting to be closer to 4 million as of this moment.

Here's my past games:

In Tally Ho (620,000 words) you play a servant charged with the welfare of your hapless employer who has managed to tangle themself up in terrible romantic, familial, and master-servant difficulties. Play some of it for free at the above link!

In Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale (1.2 million words) you play the employer! Now, with your own servant, you can create the terrible romantic, familial, and financial, and scandalous, etc., etc., situations and let someone else clean up the mess. Or make it much, much worse. This game was the Winner of three 2020 XYZZY Awards: (Best Writing, Best Setting, Best NPCs). Play some of it for free at the above link!

I've also written a Shakespearean comedy pastiche, called A Midsummer Night's Choice. This one is much shorter and less complex.

My current game is the sequel to Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale, and is called Jolly Good: Tea and Scones. Continue the story of your Jolly Good: Cakes and Ale character, visit your ancestral manor, and deal with both your present servant and the servant who quit your employ out of sheer disgust! (I am somewhat more 3/4 through chapter seven of eight chapters, and this work-in-progress stands at slightly over three million words.)

If you like the sound of a very, very long piece of interactive fiction which is designed to be cozy, funny, and deeply responsive to your choices, check back here--and check out my Patreon for peeks at my work in progress, additional fiction, and musings on what it is like to write long-form, choice-heavy interactive fiction. Each month, you'll be able to see various lengthy tranches of my game. Swing by!

You can play the entire chapter one as a free demo should you care to partake, and all of chapters one and two for patrons.

40% off until Thursday, Feb 26th, 2026!

At our superhero academy, you'll lead a team of teen heroes to battle supervillains! Will you fulfill your heroic legacy or forge your own path?

https://www.choiceofgames.com/heroes-of-tomorrow

Heroes of Tomorrow: Hidden Potential is an interactive superpower novel by Eloy Lasanta, where your choices control the story. It's entirely text-based, 600,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Welcome to Evos Academy! As a member of the next generation of superheroes in a world where comic books record the deeds of real-life heroes, you don’t pass your classes by writing the correct answers on a paper; you do it by defeating a swarm of super-science automatons in front of a stadium full of cheering fans.

Develop your powers, practice working as a team with your classmates, and develop your own distinctive style while you learn from the greatest heroes that Earth has ever seen: valiant Gladiator, super-gadgeteer Gearhead…

…and, oh yeah, your mom.

Hardly anyone knows that you grew up as the sidekick to your mother, the famed hero known as The Cloak, keeping your gritty metropolis safe from the world's worst villains. Some of your classmates are grappling with a legacy of power, too: Paragon's father is the mighty hero Brilliant, and Red Claw's mother is the villain Destroya. Each of you must choose what kind of hero you want to be. Do you want to be like your heroic parents, or do you want to blaze your own trail?

hey besties… currently shelving books and lowkey hiding behind the fiction section so I can sip my peppermint white mocha latte in peace ☕💖 anyone else out here feeling like a teen or tween in a 2000s time capsule but also very much a full-time adult???

today’s uniform: comfy oversized camo hoodie, scrunchie in my hair, and sneakers bc gotta be ready to sprint after the noisy kids 🏃‍♀️💨 also lowkey coloring while were slow bc artistry is life ✏️💞

current mood: 👑📖 whispering dramatic thoughts to myself between the stacks and pretending the overdue notices are just gentle suggestions 😎✨

The standard kind of choice in interactive fiction presents the scenario to the player, and the player navigates the maze of possibilities of the world as the writer has crafted it.

There is another type of choice, though, that a writer might want to sprinkle in, to mix up the feeling of the choice structure and the tone of the narrative.

This is a collaborative choice--one in which the player gets to choose a reality of the world for them to deal with.

Some people hate this. I'm talking about choices like this:

So, here, you and Fitzie have to sneak into a hotel, so you need a uniform. There's only one uniform. Who does it fit?

This kind of choice lets the player make a decision about what's going on--until the player chooses here, the nature of the uniform is an unknown.

Note that this choice includes an option that is clearly worse--you need two uniforms that fit, but you only have one. That's bad. But if you want, you can also have none! Giving the player the option to make things worse for themself works if the player knows that the game is going to *reward* them (with more narrative) for making choices that create interesting dilemmas.

Same here:

Depending on the choice made here, there is either a person at the back of the train to help you, or not, and which person it is changes. The reality of the world morphs to match the choice; here, the reader creates the story along with the writer.

I don't think every choice should be like there, but I do there's there's a lot more room in interactive narrative to create a playful, collaborative relationship between the player and the author.

As a side effect of using this kind of structure, I suspect that the player will be more willing to try things, to not play it safe, or just play towards stat-maximizing, because they feel like they have more agency. It feels more like you're telling a story together. Because you *are*.