Pageant survey responses

There have been 9 responses to my survey for Pageant, which means that there are probably enough results to post about. This is a pretty small sample and I don’t think it necessarily generalizes to the probably over 1000(!) people who have tried the game. Here are some of the charts I guess.

The favorite story path was Emily’s by far, with 7/9 responses. Miri is second, at 3/9, followed by Family and Pageant Prep (multiple responses were allowed).

This makes sense to me; Emily’s route was my favorite too, along with the Family route. She was the character with the most effort/screen time invested into her route (50% more than the others by word count!), as well as the one who was the most natural for me to write. If anything she was like the deuteragonist of the whole story. I’m glad that some people liked Miri; she was kind of hard for me to write because I was worried about making her too much of a bland uwu type without much of a personality, if you get what I mean. She’s someone who gets involved in other people’s problems to distract from her own; she’s really interested in helping (or “helping”) people, and kind of runs into a brick wall with Karen. The Family route… well, personally I think that was the best written route. Most of the stories were based on true stories that happened to me. So yeah.

The most disliked routes were Science Olympiad at 3/9 and Pageant Prep at 2/9. No one disliked Emily’s path, while one person disliked Miri’s path.

I’m a little disappointed that no one really liked Science Olympiad. I put a lot of effort into finding and writing the science trivia questions! A lot of them were real science olympiad questions from years past! But I get why people didn’t like it so much. There wasn’t much there besides the science questions and people yelling at Karen to study more. If I had gone into more detail, I would have added more side character interactions and drama. Back in my day, there was a lot of drama in science olympiad. The study party scene, that was based off something that actually happened to me.

Same for Pageant Prep; the individual scenes were too short, too disjointed, and kind of boring. They didn’t really tie together into any coherent arc.

Surprisingly, Aubrey was the most popular relationship path? (this only allowed one choice so I think some people did multiple paths). I was kind of worried that people wouldn’t even find her path, as Aubrey’s path required a pretty specific set of conditions to access.

We have a wide range of completion times, from less than 15 minutes to more than 3 hours (I’m guessing this is over multiple playthroughs). However the average was around 1 hour, which is about what I expected.