Gamebook store

Friday 24 October 2014

Arcana Agency: the app version


Remember Arcana Agency: The Thief of Memories? It was a gamebook by Paul Gresty, published a couple of years ago by by Megara Entertainment using funds raised on Kickstarter. Well, now it's returning as an app, which is currently in review at Apple and should be on sale within a week for iOS, with an Android version not far behind. I'll run a guest post by Paul Gresty when the app actually launches, but to warm things up here's my foreword from the 2013 print edition. 

(Where I got it wrong: gamebooks on Kickstarter are mostly not innovating; they look more '80s than the '80s! But in the digital space there is real innovation in the form of projects like 80 Days from Inkle/Meg Jayanth and Frankenstein by - modest cough - me. So quality gamebooks like The Thief of Memories do have a future, only it'll be as apps rather than expensive KS hardbacks.)

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It's generally thought that the boom time for gamebooks was the 1980s. Back then, every publisher wanted at least one gamebook series and it was hard for the small pool of authors willing to wrangle with flowcharts and rules systems to keep up with demand. But who could have imagined that, thirty years on, a first-time gamebook writer would raise the staggering sum of $130,000 – and not as advance against royalties, as publishers pay for new work, but in the form of pure patronage? For that is Kickstarter, today’s answer to François I.

The genius of Mikael Louys, founder of Megara Entertainment, has been in seeing that crowdfunding could point the way to an entirely new funding paradigm for specialist interest publications. Role-playing games and gamebooks, which would have struggled to find a market on the shelves of a bookstore, at one stroke become a very viable proposition when backed by a devoted core of aficionados.

Of course, there is rarely a new thing even in the third millennium, and Kickstarter book ventures in fact represent a return to the 18th century model of publishing whereby a subscription would be raised to pay for the writing and printing of a new work. So gamebooks may have left their ‘80s heyday behind, but reports of their extinction have been wildly exaggerated. Instead they could, alongside other hobby and genre interests, spearhead a whole new evolution in publishing.

It’s not just the financial side of gamebook publishing that’s changing. We are starting to see innovations in content too. Back in the 1980s, it was hard to convince publishers to try anything new because the standard Dungeons-and-Dragons-influenced fantasy gamebooks were selling so well. Now, that whole genre of gaming has been claimed by videogames, which will win hands down when it comes to dungeon crawls and monster bashing. Gamebooks have to get smarter. They have to evolve into new genres and styles. They must thrive by identifying the things they can do better than videogames. More complex characterization. A greater variety of situations. Deeper exploration of themes. That level of moral and emotional richness that prose can do better than any other medium.

Arcana Agency is just one such work and it can only do so much. But I’m interested in the mold-breaking aspects that Paul Gresty is trying out here. The usual second-person, present tense that has been the standard register of gamebooks since Steve Jackson’s Death Test has gone, throwing us into a medium that feels grown-up, intriguing, and full of properly differentiated characters. I’m not even sure that I’d use the label ‘gamebook’ anymore. That seems to imply something to read on the bus home from school, something to fit in after homework. Mr Gresty is writing interactive literature here, making full use of the medium at his disposal to provoke, stimulate and challenge the reader in interesting ways, and I’m sure we’ll look back on Arcana Agency as a pioneer of a whole new phase in the ongoing evolution of the interactive novel.


15 comments:

  1. A first time gamebook writer can get $130000 on Kickstarter. I'm sure you can guess where I'm going here (and I wouldn't be the first one to mention it)? You know you want to!

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    1. Well.... that "first time gamebook writer" was Zach Weiner, so he did have a tiny little bit of fame going for him already.

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    2. Celebrity counts. I'm pretty sure that Levar Burton (aka Geordi La Forge) isn't an expert on paediatric pedagogy. That didn't stop his Rainbow Reading project Kickstarter from raising over five million dollars.

      Hmm. You think Brent Spiner is a gamebook fan?

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    3. I know Wil Wheaton is a dyed-in-the-wool gamer. Has he done a Kickstarter yet? Truth is, Ryan North and Zach Weiner raised money entirely because of their fame and probably in spite of the fact that their projects were gamebooks, which I've come to think of as the Real Tennis of modern gaming.

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  2. I agree with what Stuart Lloyd was implying. You happily post about other people's kickstarters (even promoting a few). Yet you seem too modest to start your own for Fabled Lands 7-12. Your name is well known to gamebook fans. Why wouldn't you have the success that a 'first time gamebook writer' has achieved?

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    1. Kickstarter wouldn't work for funding a print gamebook - well, maybe it would if I had Zach Weiner's 99,000-strong following on Twitter. But let's say you ask $50 (! btw) for a full color hardback. Leaving aside that a hardback doesn't fit with books 1-6, the print costs and shipping will eat up say $30. Say we get 200 pledges. So that means we raised $4000 to pay for writing, editing, typesetting, interior full-color illustrations, a map, and a cover. The numbers just don't work. That's why, if I were to do a KS, I'd make it for a digital product - no manufacture or shipping costs means every penny goes into the work itself. As it happens, I am currently writing a digital gamebook, though I doubt if I'll KS it because running the campaign is a month that I can more usefully put into designing it.

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    2. PS: It's Dragon Warriors, not Fabled Lands btw!

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    3. That's an exciting little snippet you dropped in at the end there Dave! I suspect it flew under the radar of most blog readers given the scarcity (nay, absence) of comments.

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    4. That, and not many visitors to the blog are aware of Dragon Warriors as it seems to have dropped out of print since the glory days when James Wallis was publishing it. Hopefully when I've got this new work finished ( which may be quite a while - it's massively ambitious) then DW will reach a whole new audience.

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    5. Picture me hitting 'Like' about 100 times Dave. :)

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  3. Dave! Long time no comment. Hope this finds you well. What on Earth are you talking about? Is it a DW game book or a new digital version of the game? You know, I´m still, after all these years, one of the constant players of DW and we´re currently playing an online campaign with people from Australia, Sweden, Great Britain and Hong Kong! As always: Keep up your your Great Work!

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    1. Thanks, Joakim. To answer your question, I started designing an interactive story app set in Ellesland. This was to be kind of a gamebook, only with the considerably greater scope and freedom of action allowed by an app rather than a printed book. Art was to be by Leo Hartas and coding by Royston Harwood, and the adventure would be set in real down-n-dirty Legend, not the cartoony high-fantasy version in the Blood Sword books.

      I'm using the past tense because it doesn't look like either Leo or Royston have the time they expected to invest in the project. I've shelved it while I look around for a development team. So not dead, only sleeping... but of course they said that about Fabled Lands.

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  4. Sounds like an excellent way of getting kids right into the setting! I hope you manage to wake it from its sleep eventually. We need it badly. BTW: Looking forward playing Necklace of skulls. It made my heart leap realising it was released on Android already!

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    1. Oh, it wasn't going to be for kids. Being "real" Legend it was going to be 15-rated at the very least. Hope you enjoy Necklace of Skulls!

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