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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 Charli Battersby, author of Kidnapped: A Royal Birthday and Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit.

Cheerleading is an environment that can sometimes be very heteronormative, but can also play with ideas about gender. How did you approach those issues when you were writing Cheerleader’s Choice?

Female cheerleading is definitely heteronormative. Even on LGBT teams. And male cheerleading used to be heteronormative too. In fact the first cheerleaders were all-male teams, and it was very manly to put on your school colors and cheer for your fellow manly heterosexual men.

Now there’s a stereotype that all male cheerleaders are gay; which was pretty much true on the teams that I was on. I knew one straight male cheerleader and a handful of bisexuals. The rest were gay, but many of them are big, burly athletes who definitely refute the stereotype of effeminate gay men. I’ve known a couple who are built like football players. In Cheerleader’s Choice some of the men are real bruisers, and they are partially based on real people. The Pink Titan is based on a seven foot tall drag queen who performed at a cheer fundraiser I attended at The Stonewall. He’s a really nice guy, but I wouldn’t want to go up against him in the Thunderdome.

For my fictional team, I made it a little more diverse than you’d see in the real world. Even on LGBT cheer teams the straight female “Allies” vastly outnumber the lesbians. And there’s always been a problem with LGBT organizations, in that bisexuals are tolerated but often unwelcome. Especially bi men who are currently dating a woman.

So my fictional team, New York Spirit, has a couple of prominent characters who are canonically bisexual, and one character who’s canonically a lesbian. Many of the other characters don’t directly state their sexuality, so the player can imagine what they like.

As for gender and cheerleading… That’s a bigger issue for me. And it’s something that is hard to have an honest conversation about. When I started cheerleading in 2017, I was the only trans person on my LGBT team. They’d been around for 15 years before I showed up (Uninvited) to try outs.

There are often gay male cheerleaders who dress up in women’s uniforms as a joke, but trans cheerleaders were extremely rare until recently. After I quit my first team, they rapidly acquired a replacement token trans person, who was kicked off the team two years later. This year they forgot to make a post about Trans Day of Visibility, so I’m not optimistic about them learning any lessons.

“Trans Rights” is a less fashionable cause these days. I think a lot of politicians and athletic organizations will flip-flop about allowing transwomen on them. And many trans people will stop publicly identifying as trans once the backstabbers start sharpening their knives. I do know a few athletic organizations that are on the vanguard of the fight, so I think there will always be a place for trans athletes, if we look hard enough.

The character Rikki in my game represents all of the rage and resentment that I have towards the hypocrisy of certain former-teammates. And, the character Olivia is a composite of all the fake allies I knew. There is a very cathartic scene near the end of the game…

You’ve played a lot in dystopian settings: not only does Cheerleader’s Choice have a surprisingly dark sense of humor and a dystopian setting, you’ve also written a stage play set in a bunker after a nuclear apocalypse, and you co-created an animated series set in the Fallout world. What draws you to dystopia? What kinds of stories can you tell there that you can’t in other settings?

At a glance it might look like “Heated Rivalry with cheerleaders.” But it’s more like “Watchmen meets The Warriors.”

If you like dystopian comedy in the vein of Terry Gilliam, Paul Verhoeven, or Kurt Vonnegut, you’ll be able to appreciate the game as social satire. The cheerleaders are trying to be optimistic as the world burns around them. Look close at the game’s cover art, and that’s literally what’s happening.

It’s written so that you can come into it with no preexisting knowledge of cheerleading. You can even play a character who hates cheerleaders.

But it’s also a personal love letter to the sport of cheerleading. Probably not appropriate for your tween daughter… but cheer moms and cheer dads will love it!

I’m a lifelong fan of dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories. Sometimes these dystopias inadvertently seem better than the real world. That was a problem with this game; the real New York was getting increasingly absurd over the years the game was in development. I couldn’t make up political scandals fast enough to outpace the real ones!

My play That Cute Radioactive Couple is a very dark comedy about a married couple trapped in a “Bachelor Bunker” built for one person. And it was written several years before the COVID pandemic. The lockdowns forced a lot of real couples into that exact situation. The characters are a loving couple trying to accept their deaths, and specifically how they want their spouse to die too. Do they starve to death together in the bunker? Should one of them commit suicide so the other can live a little longer? Would you want to die first in your marriage, and leave your spouse alone, or would it be more selfless to be the one who lives?

Also, I assure you, it IS a comedy.

That play got me the job at Shoddycast. I’m the writer and co-creator of their The Storyteller: Fallout series. Which is a project I dearly love. I still run into people who watch it ten years after it was released. I love meeting the fans in random places!

And I was delighted that some of the voice cast from the Fallout games agreed to reprise their characters for us. Hearing Courtenay Taylor, and Wes Johnson, and Erik Dellums performing dialog that I wrote, that was a dream come true for me as a fan!

I’ll smugly boast that Shoddycast’s Fallout show has a higher rating on IMDB than Amazon’s Fallout show. And that’s because it was made with love by fans, for fans.

As for stories that I can tell in a dystopian settings… These are great for stories where the protagonist is the only sane person in the world. Like Winston Smith in 1984, where he seems like the only person who understands that this is not how the world is supposed to be. The thing that keeps the real world from genuinely becoming a sci-fi stories is that lots of people understand that this is not how it’s supposed to be.

When we blindly accept “The New Normal” that’s when we’re on the fast track to Soylent Green.

So I like to write comedies about living in a dystopia. You can either laugh about it, or you can run amok with an ax.

In addition to being a writer and game designer, you’re also an actor! Your blog about being a background actor is wonderfully informative and hilarious. What’s one thing that you think would surprise people about being a background actor?

On the blog I constantly talk about the food on a movie set! It can be a very glamorous experience portraying the role of “Nondescript Pedestrian #78.” Even when you’re an extra, you can get the movie star treatment. Catered meals, a glam squad doing your hair and makeup. I even had my own trailer once, just because I had ONE LINE on a TV show.

And since this is a Pride Month piece, here’s a bonus surprise. You’d be astonished how hard it is for transwomen to get cast as extras. At least as anything besides “LGBT type,” and “Trans Hooker.”

My blog chronicles how I’ve taken multiple casting companies to court just so I can play “Blurry Pedestrian #200.” I have had to file seven different human rights cases over this. The industry likes to have high-profile trans representation as guest stars, and principal cast. But they don’t care about trans extras and Stand Ins.

G.L.A.A.D. doesn’t hand out awards for having trans extras in a big blurry crowd.

And no, the casting company that casts the Fallout TV series wouldn’t let me work on that show. I’ve also never been cast as a cheerleader. But it’s gotten a little better since I started taking people to court over this issue. I’ll be cast as “Cheerleader #6” or “Vault Dweller #21” eventually.

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’ve been openly trans since the 1990s and working as a writer for that long too. Back then you did not get a medal for being the first openly trans person at your job. You got fired.

Writing a single trans character in a project was controversial. I’d constantly hear, “That’s denying a role to a real woman” or “This isn’t a drag show.”

I’d sneak around that by including a female character who could be trans, and then I’d play the role myself.

Nowadays, everyone’s shoehorning trans characters into their stories, so I try to be the irreverent court jester and say things that I don’t think a cis-gender person could say. In Cheerleader’s Choice the trans cheerleader, Rikki, goes berserk several times and engages in violence towards gay men and fake allies.

The “Violent Trans” stereotype is something that’s hard for anyone to talk about; the game came out right in the middle of a series of shootings and stabbings committed by trans people, so I think other writers are afraid to address the fact that a lot of trans people, including me, have intense rage.

Again, we can laugh about it, or we can run amok with axes.

There’s also a scene in my game where a villain disguises himself as a drag queen, then the heroes chase him through the West Village and get in a brutal fight, while constantly screaming “We’re not committing a hate crime!”

A lot of writers would never write something like that. But I haven’t heard any complaints about that scene.

There is another scene that I debated removing from the game because it tackles a very serious issue that trans people aren’t supposed to talk about. One of my fictional cheerleaders has an unstable gender identity; it’s never directly stated if she’s trans or not. But there’s a scene where the canonically trans character says, “People like her make people like me look crazy.”

The player has to choose how to address this. It’s one of several scenes involving trans characters where there isn’t a simple solution. There is a lot of division within the LGBT community, and even within the trans community itself, but few writers address it.

From a game mechanics perspective, I include a dialog option early in the game where the player can say that they don’t have “Gaydar” and can never tell when someone’s gay. If you choose this, you’ll have special dialog options where your character doesn’t realize that you’re on an LGBT team. This is intended for laughs, but I suspect some players will use it un-ironically.

And if you’re trans, your character has a “Transponder” instead of Gaydar which gives you special lines of narrative and dialog that even the gay characters won’t see.

Finally: how are you celebrating Pride this year?

I’ll be in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade for sure. And still scrubbing off the glitter in July.

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 Charli Battersby. Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit and Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday are up to 40% off until June 22nd!

Cheerleader’s Choice: New York Spirit — Be heroic! B-E heroic!
Kidnapped! A Royal Birthday – Escape your captors…endure your rescuers!

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!