Going for gold

When Vulcanverse was first published, Emmanuel Quaireau said to me, "It's easy to see this is a work written with love." It's really nice when somebody notices that. Jamie and I put years of work into Vulcanverse, and gamebooks are not such a vibrant market that we can expect George R.R. Martin scale rewards, or even George Costanza rewards. When you're wrestling with plot twists and story logic and the flowchart looks like all those notebooks the guy has in Memento, you'd better really love what you're doing.

So I was grateful and flattered to see that in his roundup of the top narrative games of the year, Juan Pablo Fernández del Río awarded Vulcanverse the number one slot for the second year running. And that's especially gratifying when you see the stiff competition we were up against. I particularly like the look of Pentiment (a stylish-looking whodunit set in a 16th century monastery) and Chants of Sennaar (Piranesi meets the Biblical Tower of Babel, with elements that made me think of the legendary Chris Crawford's Legacy of Siboot). But they're all enticing and have been crafted with obvious love, which makes Vulcanverse's position at #1 all the more a thrill and a privilege.

Juan has written extensively on all forms of interactive narrative, so I'll just recommend his website Mundo Iludico -- which, thanks to the magic of AI translation (see Tower of Babel reference above), is a treasure trove now unlocked for us all -- and say that a great place to start is his essay on open worlds.