Gamebook store

Tuesday 7 May 2013

Do gamebooks need text?

The sweet spot for a gamebook app is the perfect balance between graphics and text - which maps, at a deeper level, to the balance between "game" and "book". I said in the last post that Inkle's Sorcery app achieves that, but there may be other sweet spots too. That's really just a guess. I'm basing it on the principle that a gamebook in print form can work perfectly well if there are no pictures, and a CRPG is fine with no words. (The way I play them, anyway - I can never be bothered to stop and read all those tedious parchmenty scrolls, much to Jamie's annoyance.)

But that's just the limiting cases. How about places in between? Inkle found one - are there others? And what about the medium itself? How much of a difference does that make? Reading a gamebook in print is not very different from reading a novel. On the first run-through, at least, you'll probably take time to enjoy the prose. But put the same book onto a phone, and there's a strong impulse to flip through all the jaw-jaw to get to the next set of choices.

I spent the last eight months converting four Virtual Reality titles and the first two books in the Way of the Tiger series into ebook format. Yes, not apps, ebooks. Will readers respond to these as they would to a print gamebook? I hope so; I've kept the print reading experience pretty much unchanged, as you can see from the screenshot above. But is that a valid assumption? If you're reading the books on an ereader, you presumably don't expect graphical bells and whistles. On a tablet or phone, though, you could go straight from playing The Shamutanti Hills or An Assassin in Orlandes to Heart of Ice. Absorbing a story in the form of prose requires a different mental gear, in fact a whole other mind-set, from reacting to hybrid input comprising graphics, text and audio.

To sum up: it is not obvious whether people can read a gamebook like a regular book when it is transplanted from the page to the screen.

If I were writing new interactive books, there are two obvious ways I might go. One is to dispense with the gameplay aspect so that the book is "interactive literature" - that is, it's all about the reading experience. That's what I did with Frankenstein and Jon Ingold did with Flaws. This is the interesting direction for interactive fiction if it wants to grow up.

The other route is to stick with solve-the-plot interactivity but do something with much less text - either as a Fabled Lands type experience with very short descriptive passages and a lot of freedom of choice, or by making it more of an interactive motion comic and dropping text altogether. Of the two latter options, the first tends towards CRPGs - in fact, is really just a CRPG on the cheap - so will not thrive long as a distinct species, I think. The other is just how to arrive back at adventure games by means of a ten-year detour. Which is no bad thing; adventure games have always been waiting for the equivalent of a Wii to bring them to the mass market, and maybe the iPad or iPhone is it.

What do you think is the next step in the evolution of gamebooks? Don't all shout at once.

36 comments:

  1. Either as interactive fiction or as gamebook and as totally uneducated layman my "In year 2001 we will all have robot maids" style prediction I would say individual gamebooks might grow really fat. Printed gamebook becomes ankward if you slap 3 or 4 FF style books together but with electronic medium there is no real problem with length of text. Also because it is not about competing with CRPG's prose can grow as flowery as the author wants and the public can take it.

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    1. That's not just gamebooks, Jonas. The novel has evolved its typical length to fit the economics of selling printed books in stores. Ebooks make both short stories and very long novels more viable than before.

      It's true that it's a lot cheaper to add scenes in text than to get lots of 2D or 3D artwork done. Frankenstein was nearly four times the length of a typical gamebook and, though I hope nobody would call it flowery, the prose was surely of a higher standard than Blood of the Zombies. (If it wasn't, I apologize and will perform seppuku immediately!)

      There is still a cost, though - I was probably working at Frankenstein for about 7 months all told, full time, and that was with Mary Shelley's original novel as a template. Gamebook authors may not be too eager to invest all that time in a single title.

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    2. Someone might be able to come up with a gamebook 'serial' where a few paragraphs are printed regularly. Of course that would still mean that all or most of it would need to be planned from the beginning.

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    3. Maybe not, Stuart. Didn't Fallen London start out about half the length of a Fabled Lands book? And it must be several whole series' worth of material by now.

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    4. At Christmas on a gaming forum I moderate, we play a game where a story is created either one word at a time, or one full sentence at a time by all the forum members. It can result in nonsense, or be extremely funny.

      One year we made a short gamebook using the same approach: each forum member wrote a paragraph and added choices. The next person then wrote a new post for one of the choices. Again, it made for a nonsense story, but it was bloody good fun regardless.

      We proved that a nonsensical serialised gamebook could be written by a group of people. I imagine therefore it would be possible to write a *sensible* story in serialised form, regardless of whether the author knows at the start how it will end.

      By the way, you can play the "gamebook" that we wrote at the link below. Bear in mind it was written for fun and by a bunch of people who know each other very well, so some in-jokes may be unfathomable... also note, that since the gaming forum is about the very old game "Dungeon Master", the story is also about same...

      http://dungeon-master.com/interactivestory/

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    5. I have fond memories of Dungeon Master, Matt, so I'll check it out. Thanks for the link.

      As for whether a group of players can create a coherent story on the fly - well, yep, that's why I like role-playing :)

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    6. Thanks for the link, Matt. Maybe a serialised gamebook is something that I will attempt with my blog posts.

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  2. My total lack of experience with ebooks/apps leaves me largely unqualified to offer much insight to this question, though of course I still have opinions. My personal bias is towards text, though I accept that text may be enhanced by artwork and “gameplay” elements if they create a greater sense of immersion for the reader (my interest in graphic novels and traditional gamebooks would otherwise seem strange). Then again, I am only ever likely to be attracted towards the ebook format if there are electronic features offered that are relevant to the telling of an interactive story but that would be difficult or impossible to achieve in print, for example some particular complexity in the underlying mechanics, or an interactive graphical element. One possible *text*-based direction for development could be the command-driven adventure-game format, as you suggest, but then perhaps that would be stretching the definition of “gamebook” too far for it remain meaningful. So, my initial answer is: yes, gamebooks need (some) text. However, I can see that someone with a different set of interests might give the opposite answer.

    I have tried to think of what a largely graphics-based “gamebook” of the Fabled Lands-style (i.e., multiple quests, with freedom to explore) would be like, and I keep coming back to the old ZX Spectrum classic “The Lords of Midnight”:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hG0xk6g-b8

    which is essentially a chess-like strategy wargame (turn-based, rather than real time) played out across a landscape, but into which one could imagine instead inserting various distinctive storylines and quests.

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    1. That's been one of the attractor points in this text-game-graphics space before, so maybe could be again. Possibly with a little better graphics and a less egregiously unreadable font :)

      Trouble is, why would I play a new Lords of Midnight when I can play The Witcher? What I'm driving at is it's like photography has just been invented (by "just" I mean in the last decade or so). Painting is dead - in the form it used to take. Nobody paints like Alma-Tadema any more. That doesn't necessarily mean that 1980s-style gamebooks can't still work, but we should surely see a few more attractor points being colonized?

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    2. I can’t really argue against that. It’s a matter of personal taste. The attraction, for me, of a game like LoM was that while it was largely unrestricted in certain dimensions (i.e., you could just “wander off”), in others there were quite limited options, in terms of the actions you could take to interact with the environment and with npcs. The simplistic but stylistically appealing graphics complemented the sense of a structured game, and that lent it something of a gamebook-feel, which is why I would advocate a similar format for a Fabled Lands-type *graphical* gamebook. The storytelling aspect could be enhanced by dropping in chunks of text along the way, like cement between the images. Those are just my preferences, however, and I don’t pretend to assume that anyone else should share them (and as you point out, there’s good reason to suppose they wouldn’t).

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    3. The biggest single influence on Fabled Lands was Might & Magic, where you had the same kind of freedom to strike out in any direction and uncover lots of different adventures. It'd be interesting if that process came full circle to gamebooks that are like M&M or LoM. But having said that, I'm not sure if any other gamebooks followed the FL pattern - the favorite template seems to be the "here's your mission" structure established by Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

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  3. Okay, I just finished playing the Sorcery app, and managed to get to a steady internet connection...

    Until lately, I've been leaning towards the view that gamebooks should be quite Frankenstein-y - the imagination and quality of writing should rival that of classic prose, but they should also have the plus point of interactivity as well.

    Now I'm seeing that, as you mentioned in the last post, that needn't necessarily be the case. The app that's changed my mind is 'Life of a Wizard', written by Mike Walter and released by Choice of Games. The level of the text is short, reporting-style descriptions - quite Fabled Lands-y, in fact. You can blast through 80 or so years of your character's life in two or three hours of gameplay. And it's stat-heavy. You have about 40 stats to keep track of - classics such as 'good/evil' and 'personality', but also stats that govern your skills, your magical aptitudes, the power level of your adventuring buddies, your popularity with the different orc/elf/dwarf factions in the game, etc. Essentially, the game is all about trying to max out your stats, and get to an interesting endgame position.

    And it works really, really well. It's an immensely replayable game. I've played through, start to finish, maybe 20 or more times already. That's two euros well spent.

    Plus it's a gamebook written in the past tense, and in the first person. That alone makes it worth a look.

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    1. Past tense, first person and the reader is asked to make choices? Okay, that's... counter-intuitive. The narrator is asking you to tell him what he already did? I guess I should take a look.

      Jamie and I wanted to use something like that accelerated life-playthrough for an series of history gamebooks we were planning in the '90s. You would drop into ancient Rome, say, with your social class determined statistically and you'd ge faced with the life-choices allowed by that.

      Kim Newman also did something similar (though less gamey, more character-driven) with his book Life's Lottery in 1999.

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  4. The fact there are so many ways to go, and no clear direction makes this it an exciting time for gamebook pioneers.

    I personally find it difficult to develop and maintain a single view on what the future of the gamebook should be. Always flip-flopping between my abstracted ideals and my creative instinct.

    The duality of the gamebook is what causes this ambiguity. Not game, not book but both at once. This is a common problem with hybrids. Neither one thing or another.

    But... some hybrids work. Comics are the combination of words and pictures but have emerged a distinctly unique 'thing'. RPGs are mash of wargaming and improv acting. Gamebooks (and interactive fiction in general) need to find this sweetspot too. Where the whole is more than the some of the parts.

    Audience will be key in figuring this out. Where do gamebooks sit in the spectrum of entertainment? Are we looking to entice new ebook readers or lure tweenagers away from Plants vs Zombies? These experience will be quite different. There's definitely room for various gamebook flavours to co-exist.

    Here's to all the creative minds prepared to invest time, take risks and generally mess about.

    Have really enjoyed your last run of posts... keep 'em coming.

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    1. That's a cool thing about game development in general right now - we are seeing lots more innovation, not just at the level of inexpensive projects like Thomas Was Alone, but right up to things like Journey. I'm hoping we'll see a similar Cambrian explosion in what gamebooks can become when freed of print. Although, judging by gamebook projects on Kickstarter, we may be stuck at the single-cell stage for a while yet!

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  5. I agree with Grey Wiz that there are many ways to go. The term gamebook seems to refer to a spectrum of distinct experiences which are influenced by the amout of text, the amount of graphics, how random the rules system is, whether the text revolves around interaction with characters or exploration, whether you are a nameless genderless ageless entity or have an identity thrust upon you or whether the stats are upfront or hidden behind 'real life' statuses (e.g. you could say that getting a black belt in karate gives you a combat value of 5. You could make it apparent so the player can see that they have a combat value of 5 or they could just have an achievements list where they write that they have a black belt in karate. If they come across a combat, what they see is being asked if they have a black belt in karate but what the game is checking is whether you have a combat value of 5).

    There was demand for various points on the spectrum in the past (Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and Choose Your Own Adventure were all very different) and digital media will be offering us more options.

    There are also lots of new gamebook authors taking advantage of it so hopefully in the near future, we might see lots of different gamebook genres turn up, each with their own followings.

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    1. That's that "Cambrian explosion" I was talking about, Stuart. And in the same way we'll see lots of failed experiments until we settle down at the entertainment attrator points, or sweet spots - one of which may be old-style gamebooks, another may be point-n-click adventures, who knows?

      I'm not sure we saw much of a spectrum in the past, though. Lone Wolf and FF are so close as to be indistinguishable to the untrained eye, and even CYOA was still solve-the-plot interactivity, albeit with more puzzles to replace the dice-rolling.

      Now we have tablets/smartphones and we have Kickstarter - two factors that really ought to stimulate some innovation. It will be exciting to see what the next couple of years bring.

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  6. Btw when I made that comment about FF-style prose, I have to include my own example from Down Among the Dead Men above. I read that now and I think the whole book needs rewriting. But Ray Bradbury always said a writer shouldn't go down that route or they'd spend their whole life polishing one short story. Better to let the world see your old work as originally published, and save your time to write new (and hopefully much better) things. That's my excuse, anyway.

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    1. While I've not read Blood of the Zombies yet (which could be unforgivably bad for all I know), I'm not sure that FF-style prose is an issue here. The style did exactly what it needed to, namely immerse teenage boys so deeply in a fantasy world that they eagerly snapped up each new book because they were intoxicated by the atmosphere.

      From a technical perspective, we can probably make reasonable criticisms of writing and gameplay in 80s gamebooks, but the truth is they worked, and they worked phenomenally well. Like polishing ornate silver or brass, when you try to remove time's tarnish there's a risk you rub away what made something special in the first place.

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    2. You've got to look at the context, Robin. I made an offhand remark to Jonas in response to his mention of "flowery" writing styles, then figured I'd better not leave it there as it sounded arrogant, so pointed out that I've written my own fair share of leaden prose. Nobody complained at the time, though, you're right. They were 11 years old and they just wanted to kill the goblins!

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    3. Oh, don't worry, I appreciate you were following up your earlier comment. I just wanted to make the point that the FF style worked, and that better may not necessarily be more or even as successful. I'm an admirer of H.P. Lovecraft, and while I can understand that his style puts off many people, it's precisely what immerses me in his settings.

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    4. I admire HPL's work too. I just can't read it :)

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    5. Just found this article in the LA Review of Books on why HPL *is* great:
      http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1646&fulltext=1

      The conclusion is much what I was saying here a while back: despite not being as great a storyteller as Robert E Howard, and despite the cumbersome prose style, Lovecraft's was a truly original imagination. And originality trumps everything else.

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    6. Robin, you make a good point that the FF style worked at the time, but I just want to add in that that doesn't necessarily mean it's right for this time, for today's audience. Part of the reason those books worked was because it filled a solo gaming niche that there wasn't another option for. Once video games took off, that early style of gamebook all but died out.

      I don't think that anyone's trying to say that FF was wrong--it was well-beloved for it's time--but the same formula won't work today, because Halo, World of Warcraft and Diablo do the same thing but better. For gamebooks to thrive, they need to find a niche that isn't filled already. Personally, I think that'll be in the area of immersive, interactive literature, but who knows what clever ideas are just around the corner?

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    7. Ashton, I quite agree that gamebooks were a product of their time. However, I think we need to dig deep to figure out why they worked as well as they did. Also, I'm not convinced that computer games do things better. The only computer game that has come close to providing me with the sort of thrill gamebooks did when I was a teenager is Planescape: Torment. Both Morrowind and Oblivion lost their appeal very quickly (although the latter was very pretty). I play LOTRO, but I think that only appeals to the obsessive compulsive in me. I tried Fallen London/Echo Bazaar, but even though it was created by a former GM of mine, I couldn't get into it despite a lot of goodwill towards it.

      I do hope there are some clever ideas just around the corner, because I haven't seen any for years. Interestingly though, I'm watching more television than ever before. It's the same format it's always been in, just better. Not sure what, if anything, to take from that. Possibly I'm just getting lazier.

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  7. I want to experience stories/games in all those formats.

    While McLuhan’s famous saying grates on my nerves, I do think that there are stories/games to be told/played that fit each of the myriad options. The question isn’t: Which of the formats makes sense in today’s landscape? It is: Which format makes sense for the story/game at hand? The effect of the technological landscape is simply to make options that were less practical before more practical now.

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    1. Robert, it's good that there are all these new opportunities, but it's not the only question. I could conceive of a story that would be best told as an epic interactive poem. I did, in fact, pitch exactly that to the publishers of Frankenstein, but they rejected it on the grounds that only a couple of dozen people would buy the thing, which would be difficult for me to dispute. All blends of text, graphics, audio and interactivity are possible, but only some of those will prove to be the sweet spots we're talking about.

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  8. First you pondered about ditching dice. Then you mused on the merits of randomised mechanics. Finally you question the need for any text at all. Is there anything left at this point, or have we just killed off gamebooks for good in three interesting blog posts?

    I jest of course. :-)

    These discussions are extremely interesting, and along with Grey Wiz's thoughts on broken gamebooks, it's really got me thinking about *what is the essence of a gamebook*. As you know Dave, I've started my own attempt at a gamebook engine, but with these new discussions I'm no longer sure my original plan is worthwhile. The intention was simply to build an engine for rendering FF and Lone Wolf style books, but now I'm not even sure if that is a logical place to invest my time, given that gamebooks appear to be changing into...something else.

    Surely removing text entirely and creating graphical gamebooks would result in something that can't be termed a gamebook? In trying to innovate the "game" part of gamebooks to be more compelling than text alone, aren't we in danger of losing the heart of what people enjoy?

    I think the other route is preferable, as you mentioned: Write better stories with more compelling prose and streamline the game mechanics to the point where they are hardly apparent to the player.

    Both approaches have merits, but I personally favour better (and more) text, and less of the whizz-bang gameplay. To me a gamebook has always been more book than game, and so losing or reducing the text doesn't seem to me to be the right course of action.

    I'm new to all aspects of this: I've done no writing since my school days, but I'm eager to try writing gamebooks. The question for me personally is: do I start with a classical style gamebook, or instead try something a little different? I suspect the latter is too tricky for a newbie like me, but I worry that doing the former could be like turning up to the party a little too late.

    Either way, I have a lot to learn and I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and experience Dave: there's gold in them there hills.

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    1. You're kind to say that, Matt. The truth is, I don't really have the temperament for deep analytical examination of the medium. I'd always rather write interactive fiction than talk about it, and I prefer to tackle a specific project than to work out general principles. But as I have been doing it for rather a long time, hopefully some of these musings will come in handy to others. If you are interested in the philosophy of interactive fiction (really what we're talking about here should be termed interactive literature, I guess) then it's worth looking at some of the writings of Chris Crawford, Emily Short, and folks like that - all much more patient with abstract thought than I. Me, I just like solving problems :)

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  9. There's a real contradiction in the fact that, like Matt, I prefer the "interactive novel" variety of immersive storytelling in gamebooks--but at the exact same time I feel, as you so eloquently put it, "a strong impulse to flip through all the jaw-jaw to get to the next set of choices."

    Once you introduce choices, the focus necessarily shifts to those choices. In order to inspire the reader to actually pay attention the text, it must be constructed so that the text is relevant to the choice being made. If the choices are nuanced and interwoven into the story well, then it will be important to pay attention to the text in order to have a good sense the choices you're making. On the other hand, if the choices are simplistic or not tied well to the text, the impulse to skip the text will become much stronger.

    But is this really so different from a novel? Don't we find our eyes blurring and the yawns coming on when the author drones on with pages and pages of description that aren't relevant to the story?

    I think readers just like action--no, action isn't the right word... they like meaning. If text isn't meaningful, the reader's eye starts wanting to wander. I think this is just as true in novels as it is in gamebooks, it's just that in gamebooks you have a clear marker just up ahead to skip to if you start to get bored.

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    1. I have no empirical evidence to offer either way, but my instinct is that the reader's willingness to persevere with the text and not merely to skip ahead to the "next set of choices" will depend at least in part upon the quality of the prose and of the story that is being told. Good writing and gripping storytelling should, of course, be central to any form of fiction, as you have noted, but perhaps they are even more important for retaining the reader's engagement with a gamebook, and so, despite my attempts above to envisage the form of a graphics-based gamebook, maybe that is the reason for my own gut feeling that for a gamebook to *be* a gamebook, the bulk component should be textual (otherwise it should be called something else, such as, say, "a game").

      I should qualify those arguments by admitting that I find any attempt (like the one I've just made) to delineate such clear categories ultimately unsatisfying, since I don't think it's possible to draw a sharp distinction between storytelling and gameplaying.

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  10. Hi Dave,

    can you say when the first 4 Virtual Reality books and the 2 Way of the Tiger books will be released?

    Thanks! :-)

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    1. It's hard to say. I am no longer employed day-to-day at Fabled Lands LLP, so I haven't been involved in the negotiations. Possibly the print editions could take years, in fact, because of a "perverse incentive" in the contract. The epub3 editions were well under way when I left the project, but there were no plans for iOS or Android versions. I'll do an update with everything I know - will probably post that up next week. All in all, we should have gone to Specsavers - which in this case is pronounced T-I-N-M-A-N ;-)

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  11. The thing I'd be most pleased to give up in gamebooks are the combats. I'm not sure if that's a heretical notion (they were called *fighting* fantasy, after all), but quite often these days I'll play a gamebook and just skip the combats. I don't cheat in terms of claiming to possess items that I don't, but combats bore me, particularly when they're used ad nauseum like Jonathan Green does (honestly, don't even get me started on Temple of the Spider God!).

    Often these are simply used as a lazy proxy for a more interesting incident (ie. need to fill a few paragraphs on the 'wrong' path, so here's a bunch of wandering ogres). And frankly all the monsters sound the same anyway (tooth-filled maw, wickedly sharp talons etc. - yeah yeah, read it all before).

    The quest component of gamebooks is what interests me - solving a mystery, unraveling clues and discovering things. Not hack and slash. If combat needs to be maintained somehow, then I'd rather it be handled like the VR series did, where the player needs to make judgements about their ability to fight and likelihood of success, without having to go through the tedium of the Skill 12 Stamina 36 fight.

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    1. To be fair to Jonathan, Mike, that's probably the kind of gamebook his readers are expecting. We authors have to please our audience! But I agree that combats aren't very interesting - and endless dice-rolling even less so. Right back in Blood Sword book 3 I was advising readers to ignore the dice rolls and just get on with the story. And, when the author can't fall back on the monster manual line-up, they have to craft a better story. I recommend Paul Gresty's The Thief of Memories for a gamebook with mystery and story to the fore.

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  12. thanks it helps me a lot !

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