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Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Evan Peterson, author of Drag Star! and Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION.

Your game Drag Star! (gotta remember that exclamation point!) was both hilarious and impressive in its attention to detail about drag culture. What’s something that someone outside the drag world should know about it that they might not?

It’s an art form found throughout history and around the globe. It is nothing new; what we see on television is just the latest iteration. To some cultures, it was and is a sacred practice of transcending the physical body. To others, it was a high art form that created spaces for queer and trans people to meet and explore. It’s always been messy, it’s always made people uncomfortable, and it’s always been fun. It’s only now that we have the media technology to prove that drag is truly global. Every culture tells stories, every culture makes and wears costumes, and every culture dances and makes music. And most cultures have drag. It’s a human practice, a human art.

Outside of your interactive fiction, you’ve got a truly extraordinary range as a writer, encompassing both nonfiction and fiction in all genres. Your award-winning novel, Better Living Through Alchemy, is a perfect example of that range: a noir detective story with supernatural elements. What drew you to the detective genre? How did your addition of magic affect the way you wrote the mystery?

Thank you! I would say it’s the addition of the mystery that affected the way I wrote the magic! I had the idea for the climax, the big reveal, before any of the rest of the content of Better Living. I imagined an investigator breaking into a seedy lab and finding the shocking, supernatural source from which a certain recreational substance is harvested. My inspiration was the magical substance and the captive bodies undergoing occult experimentation, and the mystery itself was incidental to that. My favorite mysteries and thrillers are often not really “Whodunits,” but rather they ask questions about where and what is the murder weapon, where are captives being held, etc. But now I write mysteries, evidently. Drag Star! and Posthuman both include major mystery subplots, which give players more competing goal paths and more narrative intrigue.

On the nonfiction side, you’ve done a lot of commentary about queerness in the horror genre, especially classic horror writers like William S. Burroughs and Clive Barker. Who are some of your favorite current horror writers who incorporate queer elements into their work?

How much space have we got? I’ve been on a big Hailey Piper kick this year. She’s the trans lesbian horror punk we’ve been waiting for (The Worm and His Kings made me swoon). But so is Hiron Ennes, whose newest book is The Works of Vermin, which I adore. Nadia Bulkin and Priya Sharma have never published a boring story in their lives, and I’ll read anything they write. I also enjoy Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build A Nest In.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

The more I learn about how the world really works, the more I want to disrupt injustice. Representation and inclusion are really low bars to clear. A truly diverse cast is an absolute minimum; I’m acknowledging that people exist. How revolutionary. From there, I can actually do some good and imagine a world that’s kinder and more just than our own. I enjoy busting monoliths and disrupting the comfort of people with too much power over others. A character like Vogue, a Black trans woman, went from supporting cast to team leader as the story of Posthuman evolved. It was natural progress for her character. Her powers make her the most fit to lead, so she does.

Intersectional representation is also essential to me now. Disabled people are queer too, and vice versa; many writers are afraid to explore what that actually looks like. And I try to write the world I see around me, which is more than a cast of seven archetypes.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

I’ll probably go see some queer art and make some donations to causes I care about, but mostly stay home with my husband and our dog. One night of a raucous dance party is certainly on the agenda.

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting games on sale every week of June that showcase and explore that diversity, and we’re featuring interviews with the authors of those games.

This week, we’re featuring two games by Evan Peterson. Drag Star! is now free! And Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION is 30% off until June 15th!

Posthuman: Guardians vs PSION — Choose from 20+ distinct superpowers to battle evil!
Drag Star! (40% off on Steam; free on all other platforms)— Slay the catwalk on TV’s hottest drag competition!

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

They call you Harbinger.

You are a Keeper, a sworn protector of the Realm, mutated by necromancy to keep the monsters that plague the land in check. But you are no ordinary Keeper. You are the most powerful Keeper of your generation. A genetic anomaly: the only living Keeper to survive the mutation with a positive blood type. You possess the physical might of a mutant and the forbidden spell-casting of a mage.

Keeper’s Vigil is 33% off until June 11th!

Now, a new terror has risen. An experiment to resurrect the extinct Elves has failed, unleashing a horde of “Abominations.” They are twisted and infectious creatures that are overrunning the Middle Realm.

Keeper’s Vigil is a 193,000-word interactive dark fantasy novel by Lota Labs. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

As the Abominations claw at the gates of the Inner Realm, you must uncover the conspiracy within your own Order. Traitors seek to bring back the ancient Elves to fight an even greater threat: the Anunnaki. But the price of resurrection may be the death of humanity.

Will you rely on your steel, your wits, or your forbidden magic? Every time you use your necromancy, your mutation advances. If you embrace your power too fully, you may lose your humanity forever and become the very monster from which you were sworn to protect the Realm.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bisexual.
• Romance a rival: Woo the compassionate Royal Heir, the fiery Rebel Leader, or your former best friend, whom you believed to be dead years ago.
• Master the Mutation: Utilize your corrupted blood to unleash devastating and supreme magic, or seek a cure to restore your humanity before you transform into a beast.
• Choose your Faction: Align with the strict Order, the freedom-fighting Rebels, or enter the Lusus Naturae tournament to earn the loyalty of the Beast Clan.
• Define your Legacy: Will you block out the sun to intimidate the Regent, sacrifice a limb to survive, or ascend to godhood to stop an interdimensional invasion?
• Investigate the Outbreak: Use your perception and necromancy to track the source of the Abominations before the Inner Realm falls.

The Anunnaki are gaining entry. The portal is opening. Will you be the Realm’s savior—or its end?

Lota Labs developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Happy Pride! Choice of Games is proud to be gender-inclusive and LGBTQ+-affirming all year round, but during the month of June, we’re featuring writers whose work connects especially closely with those themes.

Today we’re sitting down with Nebula award winner Natalia Theodoridou, author of Rent-A-Vice, An Odyssey: Echoes of War, Vampire: the Masquerade–Sins of the Sires, and Restore, Reflect, Retry.

First, congratulations on being a Nebula finalist again! This time it’s for your debut novel Sour Cherry, which takes on the Bluebeard legend: a story with toxic masculinity, gendered power dynamics, and abusive relationships running through it. There’s also a fascinating theme of silence and namelessness in your adaptation. Can you tell us more about how you wove those themes in with the gender dynamics?

Thank you so much! It’s always so weird to be upbeat about the reception of this dark, dark book, but I’m really touched and humbled that it seems to be resonating with readers. Much of the violence in Sour Cherry is male violence, but my hope was to capture some of the complexity of gender dynamics beyond a clear-cut “men have power and are bad, women have no power and are silent victims.” The patriarchy hurts us all; having the range of the stories your mouth can speak and your mind can conceive reduced down to this single story is a kind of silencing. It is a kind of violence.

Losing one’s name is a kind of silencing, too. People caught in webs of oppression can lose their names in so many ways: by not having their true names accepted; by having names palatable to authority or cultural lines imposed on them; by having their names struck from the record of history; by becoming known not by the individuality of a name but by a function—a Cook, a Shopkeeper, a Nurse. At the same time, there can be power found in that flattening; names can be shackles, too, and sometimes, when people shed them, they are finally free to sit in the power of their voice (think Anonymous, who was, as Virginia Woolf would have it, a woman). Namelessness can also birth a kind of solidarity: we can become one in our namelessness and so, like the chorus of ghosts in Sour Cherry, negate silence.

Turning to last year’s Nebula win, A Death in Hyperspace: you were one of a large team of authors on that. How did you find working in a large group? What distinctive elements did a team effort bring to this project?

It was delightful. I’m constantly amazed by how differently people can come at the same creative question, and I think the project was so much fun because of the diversity of voices and approaches that were woven through it. This is also what made the characters feel and sound so authentically different. I particularly loved (and this is where Stewart C Baker’s genius clearly shone through, because he was the one who made the project cohere) the way the creative process of putting the project together as a puzzle—each of us writing for one character and slotting clues into someone else’s piece—mirrored the playing of the game-puzzle for the reader. In a sense, writing the game and playing the game are the same process, except in reverse.

Of all your many short stories, the one I just have to ask about is “Cursed Moon Queers”, which first posits a queer colony on the moon and then asks “What if those TikTok witches who cursed the moon actually had an effect?” What was it about that pop culture moment that sparked your imagination?

(I mean, are we sure they didn’t? Look at the state of things.)

It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly what it was that did it because there are always so many disparate elements that come together for me to make a story; it’s never just one thing. But I guess it was something about the anxiety and pain behind an idea like cursing the moon. To me, it speaks to the desperation of the most powerless. A struggle to claim some agency, impossibly, when everything feels out of control. Except it’s usually other marginalised folks who feel the consequences of grand-scale things first. So the story was in a sense saying, okay guys, you’ve done it; now what? What exactly did you hope to accomplish? As if we weren’t all cursed enough already.

We’re asking all of our authors this: How has your representation of LGBTQ+ themes in your writing evolved over the course of your career?

I used to be very anxious about representing LGBTQ+ themes and characters because I worried I would inadvertently cause offence, say the wrong thing, fail to include absolutely every queer point of view, and end up hurting my community. Now, more than a decade later, I know this is not only an impossible task, but the wrong task altogether. LGBTQ+ people are not a monolith, and we do not agree on everything (maybe even most things). Nor should we want to. I have no intention of flattening us all into an inert, non-threatening, smooth mass. I think it’s healthy to disagree, and it’s desirable to have loudly different opinions on things, including on what constitutes harm. Writing defensively to avoid what I imagine might cause someone discomfort simply results in writing inauthentically and not saying much. Now I aim to write truthfully and courageously about things that matter to me. Of course not everything will land with everyone, and their response will be their response, just as my thinking is my thinking. I cannot claim to represent anyone but myself, my context, and my own understanding of things. Or actually, my current understanding of things. I hope that my understanding has and will keep evolving; I hope to keep changing my mind, or to keep being able to. Of course I have made mistakes, and I will make more. Failing and failing again is the only way to grow. Mistakes are how we learn. All I hope is that, when I make my next one, it will be in a space and time where we can afford to listen to each other. Listening when you’re in pain is the hardest thing. But we can work at it. Like Kai Cheng Thom said, I hope we choose love, you know? And that we keep choosing it.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

By surviving in the face of blatant, widespread, normalised transphobia.

Pride isn’t just for a month! All year, we work to bring you games that offer a diverse and expansive view of love, family, and identity. But we’ll take any excuse to celebrate, and so we’re putting games on sale every week of June that showcase and explore that diversity, and we’re featuring interviews with the authors of those games.

These four Choice of Games titles by Natalia Theodoridou are up to 40% off until June 8th!

Vampire: The Masquerade—Sins of the Sires — In this elegy of blood, Athens is burning!
An Odyssey: Echoes of War — Fight Poseidon’s wrath to reclaim the throne!
Rent-A-Vice — What doesn’t kill you…kills someone else.
Restore, Reflect, Retry — This haunted game remembers you. Play again?

Hosted Games has a new game for you to play!

Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6 is the spine-tingling sequel to the interactive tale you know all too well. Or do you? Prepare for a role reversal (to put it mildly) as our favorite ronin faces perils unlike any before—including homework, final exams, and love confessions after class, too!

And don’t get me started on the extracurriculars.

Samurai of Hyuga is 30% off until May 28th!

Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6 is a 300,000-word interactive novel by Devon Connell, where your choices control the story. It’s text-based—without animation or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Prepare to enroll in the prestigious Academy for young and gifted shugenja. Unfortunately, you’re none of those things. To survive, you’ll need to fake your way through a life that isn’t yours—all while hunting down a demon and uncovering the school’s dark secrets!

• Infiltrate a shugenja academy held captive by a sinister demon!
• Balance duty and deception while juggling a chaotic social life!
• Join club activities ranging from kendo duels to tea ceremonies!

It’s time to learn the truth behind the Emperor’s quest—not to mention, the source of magic itself. I suggest you start taking notes, because the sixth book of this epic series will put you to the test!

Devon developed this game using ChoiceScript, a simple programming language for writing multiple-choice interactive novels like these. Writing games with ChoiceScript is easy and fun, even for authors with no programming experience. Write your own game and Hosted Games will publish it for you, giving you a share of the revenue your game produces.

Today is the 15th annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day!

The idea for Global Accessibility Awareness Day was conceived in 2011 by web developer Joe Devon and accessibility expert Jennison Asuncion, to call attention to the importance of creating digital spaces accessible to all users.

At Choice of Games, we’re proud to create accessible games. There are no sound effects, no complicated motor controls, and our apps are fully compatible with screenreaders such as VoiceOver. This year, we also added support for OpenDyslexic font in all our apps.

Gaming should be for everyone, and we’re constantly working to ensure that as many people as possible can play ours.

Samurai of Hyuga: Book 6 is the spine-tingling sequel to the interactive tale you know all too well. Or do you? Prepare for a role reversal (to put it mildly) as our favorite ronin faces perils unlike any before—including homework, final exams, and love confessions after class, too!

And don’t get me started on the extracurriculars.

Samurai of Hyuga Book 6 releases this Thursday, May 21st. You can try the first four chapters today for free and wishlist it on Steam!

We’re proud to announce that Wizard Confidential, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app. It’s 34% off until May 21st!

Sling spells and crack the case in a city full of bootleggers, corrupt cops, and vampires. Can you save your partner before a wizard dooms Seattle?

Wizard Confidential is an interactive urban fantasy noir novel by Anthony Eichenlaub, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 210,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, fueled by the vast unstoppable power of your imagination.

Seattle, 1927. You’re a private eye in a city drenched in secrets. Bootleggers run speedboats over the border to supply speakeasies and jazz clubs; gangs shoot it out in dark alleys; and the coppers are even more crooked than the crooks. Crime isn’t the only thing lurking in Seattle’s misty streets: there are werewolves, vampires, and wizards. The wise citizen avoids the dark.

Too bad for them that you’re not wise enough to back down – and that you’re a darn good wizard yourself. You crack the cases that nobody else can, and right now, you’ve got some big ones. City Hall wants you to investigate an out-of-town union leader who’s much more than meets the eye. The Dry Squad wants you to help track down a notorious gang of bootleggers before the Feds move in. And you? You want to find your partner, who’s gone missing under circumstances more mysterious than any of your other cases.

But bigger than all those other problems put together is the rogue wizard who’s been popping up around town. Who is he? Why does he always appear just when something major is going down? What does he want? And most importantly, what does he know that you don’t? The city’s future is at stake, and you’re the only one who can save it.

• Play as male, female, or nonbinary; gay, straight, or bi
• Solve cases with brains, fists, charm, magic, or good old-fashioned gumshoe work.
• Romance a sultry jazz singer with a family full of secrets; a charismatic rabble-rousing union organizer, or a sharp-dressing smooth-talking City Hall staffer
• Use magic to control the elements, craft illusions, or divine the future.
• Build your detective agency into the biggest one in town – if you can save your partner!
• Bring a labor organizer’s message to the people as a champion of the working class, or bust the unions and ally yourself with the city’s elite.
• Trade bullets and wisecracks with Seattle’s most notorious gangs, bust up a bootlegging ring, or stay above the fray and come out smelling like roses.
• Battle a dangerous wizard for the fate of the city.

On these mean streets, the only thing tougher than the vampires is you.

We hope you enjoy playing Wizard Confidential. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Sling spells and crack the case in a city full of bootleggers, corrupt cops, and vampires. Can you save your partner before a wizard dooms Seattle? Wizard Confidential is a 210,000-word interactive urban fantasy noir novel by Anthony Eichenlaub; I sat down with Anthony to walk about his upcoming game and the rest of his oeuvre.

Wizard Confidential releases this Thursday, May 14th. You can try the first three chapters today for free and also wishlist it on Steam—even if you don’t plan to purchase it there, it really helps!

Wizard Confidential is your first game with us, and it really fits into what I think of as your brand of fiction: a blend of noir and fantasy. Tell our readers about your other novels and what attracted you to this genre.

Noir has always fascinated me, both in books and movies, so I do tend to pull from it in my stories, whether it’s overt or not. I just finished a reread of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, and I’m still finding that the way subtle aspects of the stories weave together in the end are truly masterful. I love how it’s never a simple good versus evil, but instead a messy struggle of order versus chaos where order doesn’t always win and even when it does chaos is right around the corner.

My previous novel series started with The Man Who Walked in the Dark, and it’s a sci-fi noir about a man who literally walks in the dark because the station’s automated lights don’t respond to him. Don’t worry, he’s figuratively walking in the shadows, too. It’s a story that wraps in an art heist, bitter power struggles between crime lords, and a corrupt church into one big tangled mess of a story. Before that I wrote a series called Grandfather Anonymous about an elderly hacker thrown back into action because he needs to keep his family safe. It leans more into crime and mystery than straight noir, but the ambiguity of the characters lends itself to the noir vibe.

What gaming experiences drew you to taking on the challenge of writing interactive fiction?

I’ve been gaming since the beginning of time, both tabletop and on screen. My first experience with interactive storytelling was probably DMing 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons as a teen. I’d build wildly elaborate worlds populated with interesting, nuanced characters only for my players to stomp all over everything and murder the wrong NPCs. What I loved most about it was transforming that mess into a compelling story no matter what they did, and more times than not I think I succeeded. It wasn’t until 4th Edition that I started getting material published in Kobold Quarterly, which is really what got me into writing.

On the video game side, I think the flexible storytelling of games like Fallout inspire a lot of what I do, but I also draw from things like Grim Fandango and Dishonored. It wasn’t until I read The Bread Must Rise that I really understood how amazing Choice of Games titles could be, and I knew right then that I had to write one.

Instead of a traditional novelistic protagonist, writing a PC so that the players’ experience is customizable is sometimes a challenge. I notice our authors often have extremely vibrant NPCs as a result. Did you find you had a favorite one, in the writing of the game?

One of the things I love about noir is that the romance can often be more bittersweet than it is happily ever after. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade has very real feelings for Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but he (spoilers) gives her up to the police so she can account for her crimes. That hard choice is at the center of the story and it’s critical to the character of Sam Spade. Would I have made that same choice if this were interactive fiction? I honestly don’t know. That’s what makes that story so compelling.

I’m not sure I can pick a favorite, but I think Kai Mason was the potential love interest I enjoyed writing the most. There’s so much variability in how things can go, and their story ties directly into the interaction between the union and the budding airplane industry. Every time I wrote a section with Mason, I got to delve into real-life union history, enjoy creating the variable alternate histories, and spend time with a character that I genuinely enjoyed spending time with.

Folks from the wider fandom and literary world may know you as being part of SFWA leadership and from seeing you at sci-fi centered cons—tell me a little about that.

I’m currently Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and I’ve been a volunteer with the organization for many years. I’m a big fan of how SFWA helps authors at all levels of their careers and I’m a huge advocate for its work in the game writing space. Anyone looking at getting into writing would do well to check out their Constellation series of virtual weekend mini-conventions or their big virtual conference, the Quasars, which is held in the fall. Also, the Nebulas Conference is fully hybrid and has a huge virtual offering, so it’s definitely worth a look even if you can’t get to Chicago in June.

I go to several cons each year. The writer-focused ones I typically go to are The Nebula Conference and 4th Street Fantasy, which is in Minnesota where I live. I also sometimes panel at the Gencon Writers Symposium, but I’m missing this year. I’ll be at World Fantasy Con for the first time this year and ConFusion early next year. I’m a huge fan of panels and have had all kinds of good conversations with other authors. If you ever see me at a conference, please do not hesitate to give me a high five. If I have time to stop and chat, I definitely will.

What are you working on next?

I’m currently writing short stories while I brainstorm some ideas for the next interactive fiction. Short stories let me experiment with different styles, settings, and characters. My short stories range from sword and sorcery to cyberpunk to cli-fi. It’s nice having a breather to write whatever I want when I wake up in the morning.

I had a blast writing Wizard Confidential and definitely want to dive into another big project, but also writing one of these things is a huge commitment. I need to make sure I have an idea that’s going to keep me interested for the next year at least. Fortunately, I don’t have a problem coming up with such ideas. The problem right now is picking which one to write next.