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Google has banned “Choice of Games” from Google AdSense, which means that, for now, we can no longer display Google advertisements on our website.

There’s a lot to say here, so I’m going to publish a series of blog posts on the topic. In this first blog post, I’ll explain what Google did. In the second blog post, I’ll give our best guess as to why Google banned us. In the third post, I’ll discuss my personal opinion of what happened, and in the fourth blog post, I’ll talk about what it means for the future of Choice of Games and our business.

Google pays us when people click on ads on our website; typically anywhere from $0.05 to $0.25 on every click. As you can imagine, this provides an opportunity for nefarious people who want to get money from the advertisers that buy Google ads: we could just click on the ads on our own website and get the money for free. This is called “click fraud,” and Google bans website owners who do this or who hire outside services to do this.

It’s surprisingly easy for Google to automatically detect click fraud. How many times have you ever clicked on an ad in the last year? In your entire life? Most people click on ads less than once a year; many people click much less frequently than that. So if Google detects a user clicking on even one ad a month on the same website, that user is already ten times more likely to be committing click fraud than an ordinary user. It’s a little more complicated than that because some people legitimately click on more ads than other people, but with large amounts of data, it’s still pretty easy.

What Google can’t do is tell the difference between malicious click fraud and “supportive clicks.” Supportive clicks come from users like you, people who like our website and click on our advertisements a few times just out of the kindness of your own heart. From Google’s perspective, supportive clicks are no better than click fraud. A site with many supportive users forces Google to pay money without providing the advertiser any benefit.

Therefore, Google’s policy is to aggressively monitor for possible click fraud and to ban account holders who may have invalid AdSense activity.

No one at Choice of Games has ever committed click fraud. Google’s terms of service explicitly forbid inciting users to click on ads; we have never done so. But a lot of people really love our little website, so it wouldn’t be surprising if we had a few “helpful” users who thought they’d help us out by clicking on ads on our behalf.

We’ll never know for sure, because as soon as Google disables your AdSense account for invalid activity, they also deny you access to your AdSense dashboard, so you can no longer see any of the evidence that Google used to identify you as a fraudster.

Google has an appeal process: you can send Google one email, asking to be reinstated. But, without seeing the evidence against you, it’s impossible to say anything meaningful in an AdSense appeal.

In fact, that’s the first question in Google’s Disabled Account FAQ:

Why was my account disabled? Can you tell me more about the invalid click activity you detected?

Because we have a need to protect our proprietary detection system, we’re unable to provide our publishers with any information about their account activity, including any web pages, users, or third-party services that may have been involved.

That has to be everyone’s first question, right? “Can I see the evidence against me?” “No, you may not see the evidence against you.”

We sent in our appeals email last week; a week later, our appeal was denied.

There’s a lot more to say about this, but that’s plenty for now. In part 2, I’ll talk about why (we think) Google banned us from AdSense.

I received this email from a player yesterday:

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Dear everyone involved,

I love the Choice-of-Games games you offer, but I’m a little irked at the blatant Catholic bashing in Choice of the Vampire. Please keep in mind that the Catholic clergy did *not* torture natives into conversion. The majority of natives who did suffer torture suffered at the hands of the Conquistadors, the men who came searching for gold and glory, while the Spanish (and French Jesuit) clergy offered protection, reading, writing, medical treatment, etc. to the displaced natives. There have even been visitations to the natives by saints, martyrs, and the Virgin Mary (the Virgin of Guadeloupe [a place in Spain, for the record] visited one native who was named a saint under Pope John Paul II, for example).

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Choice of the Vampire, by Jason Stevan Hill! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

Begin your two-hundred year journey as a vampire in New Orleans, 1814; choose whether you will seek love, power
or redemption as you negotiate the growing-pains of the young Republic.

We hope you enjoy playing “Choice of the Vampire” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Choice of the Vampire” will rank.

I am thrilled to announce that Choice of the Vampire is currently undergoing review by the App Store; barring unforeseen problems, it will be released in the next few days!

As many of you are aware, to date, Choice of Games has published a series of fantasy multiple-choice games. Being a relatively progressive lot, and unconstrained by market research or corporate interests, we’ve been free to be politically progressive (specifically with regards to gender and sexual orientation). Because these games have historical themes, they have had to be situated in fictional realities, realities in which, for example, women crew ships or same-sex couples can produce children.

Yet, when I started thinking about writing this game, the possibility of locating it in a fictional reality never crossed my mind. It is a fictionalized world–I do not believe that vampires exist–but it tries to hew as closely as possible to actual people, places and events. Having decided to make a historical game, then, I found myself confronted immediately with a variety of questions regarding our politics. Specifically, how do I address issues of race, gender and sexual orientation?

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Choice of Romance, by Heather Albano and Adam Strong-Morse! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

Play as a young aristocrat who comes to court looking for love… and catches the monarch’s eye. Will you find true love? Gain a crown? Lose your head? Choice of Romance is a text-based multiple choice game of romance, deception and court intrigue.

We hope you enjoy playing “Choice of Romance” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Choice of Romance” will rank.

Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Paranoia, by Kie Brooks! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

When you think your doctor may be trying to kill you, life gets complicated. Survive this multiple choice game, if you can.

We hope you enjoy playing “Paranoia” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “Paranoia” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “Paranoia” is the fourth game available as part of our hosted games plan. If you’d like to write a multiple-choice game of your own, give it a try! If you host our game with us, we’ll share 75% of the revenue your game produces.

One of the hardest tasks in learning to write a ChoiceScript game is figuring out a process for writing vignettes that works.  We all have experience writing stories, essays, and other prose forms.  And many of us have written computer programs before.  But a ChoiceScript game isn’t like a normal story, although it needs to tell an effective story, and it depends far more on text and storytelling than a normal computer program, although it is a computer program.  So how do we go about writing a vignette?

In previous posts, I’ve talked about how we plan a ChoiceScript game and how to pick a vignette to start writing.  Today’s installment in our series on game design discusses ways to write an individual vignette.  Unlike the previous two topics, I don’t have any clear choice to advocate as the way that I think is “best.”  But I can describe several different approaches that I’ve seen used, and talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of What Happened Last Night?, by Kie Brooks! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

“What Happened Last Night?” is a dark but occasionally humorous action murder mystery multiple-choice text-based game.

We hope you enjoy playing “What Happened Last Night?” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “What Happened Last Night?” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “What Happened Last Night?” is the third game available as part of our hosted games plan. If you’d like to write a multiple-choice game of your own, give it a try! If you host our game with us, we’ll share 75% of the revenue your game produces.

Based on number of comments on this topic, clearly the next game should be Choice of Romance. 😛 – Jake Forbes

Yeah, the thought crossed our minds, too. The Great Villeneuve Debate, aka TGVN (thank you, Jake, for coining a term that will make me grin for the rest of my life) demonstrated among other things that there was room in the Choice of Games stable for something that relied more heavily on personal interactions and less heavily on hitting things with swords or crunching them with your dragon teeth. (Don’t worry, we haven’t given up on those games. We’ll be doing those, too.)

While I of course cannot comment on what we might be working on next, setting a romance plot in a world we built ourselves would remove many of the aforementioned constraints. It would be much easier to code said plot to work equally well for male-courting-female, male-courting-male, female-courting-male, and female-courting-female. – Me, on April 5th

Looking at our market research data confirmed the impression. I was genuinely surprised at the number of votes (via the blog and via the AdWords test) for Choice of the Consort. Okay then! Adam and I settled down to write a game based on the concept, “As a lovely young courtier who has caught the monarch’s eye, will you gain a crown or lose your head?”

Henry VIII’s love life provided a reasonable starting point for our research, since the six wives and three-at-least mistresses of that unstable ruler demonstrated a variety of paths a lovely young courtier might take to a monarch’s bed… and/or the throne… and/or the executioner’s block. We figured that if we could achieve something partway between a Tudor court intrigue and a drawing-room comedy of manners, we’d have the right atmosphere.

Except we also knew we wanted to set the story in a gender-equal world where it was equally possible and equally interesting to play male or female, straight or gay.

Which meant we had just deprived ourselves of all the usual building blocks of a Tudoresque court intrigue or an Austenesque comedy of manners.

A gender-equal world eliminates the tension around needing to have a male heir… the tension around a woman needing to marry at all. A gender-equal and same-sex-friendly world makes unusable the rituals of courtship that impart the flavor of a late medieval or early modern romance. How do the formalized roles of suitor and courted work now? What would make a relationship ‘scandalous’? How does a same-sex couple have a legal heir in a world without modern technology?

How do you impart the flavor without using any of the traditional ingredients?

It struck me as not unlike adapting traditional recipes for a vegetarian audience. After all, a lot of things taste like chicken. More to the point, a lot of things have the texture of chicken, serving just as well in the role of “protein thing that absorbs the flavors it is cooked with.” There need to be rules of courtship that the player can choose to obey or flout; there need to be obstacles to a happy union; there need to be markings other than gender that indicate who is the courted and who the suitor in any given encounter; there need to be constraints on what sort of person the monarch may take as a consort; none of these things need to match their counterparts of this world as long as they serve the purpose equally well.

So we went back to the very beginning, made the building blocks, and then used them to create an Austenesque romance within a Tudoresque court intrigue. Or, at least, we hope we did. The initial feedback is promising. In a about a month, we figure, you’ll be able to tell us if we pulled it off.

In the meantime, we could use your help! In Broadsides, if you recall, we were at a loss for titles in the gender-flipped universe. In the game-currently-known-as-Consort (we may change the working title before release) we’re struggling with the title for the monarch’s spouse. The monarch can be a reigning King or a reigning Queen, and his/her spouse can be male or female.

Help us title the spouse! Choices beneath the cut!

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of The Nightmare Maze, by Alex Livingston! Play it on the web, or download the iPhone version or the Android version.

“The Nightmare Maze” is the story of a 19th-century Bostonian plagued by strange nightmares. Lose yourself in the depths of a tormented psyche and try to find the logic to the night terrors in this haunting text-based multiple-choice game. It’s part of the Waking Cassandra series.

We hope you enjoy playing “The Nightmare Maze,” and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better “The Nightmare Maze” will rank.

Finally, a shameless plug: “The Nightmare Maze” is the second game available as part of our hosted games plan. If you’d like to write a multiple-choice game of your own, give it a try! If you host our game with us, we’ll share 75% of the revenue your game produces.