Comicon in Bergamo

Last weekend I was at Comicon in Bergamo as a guest of the festival organizers and my Italian publisher, Edizioni Librarsi. Jamie Thomson and I joined in a panel discussion (pictured above) on AI, technology and gamebooks, chaired by Francesco Di Lazzaro, and we sat in on a talk on gamebook design by Marco Zamanni. 

Our colleague on the panel was Gianmario ("The Teacher") Marelli and our superpowered translator was Giulia Brugnetti. Jamie was more sanguine about AI learning to write well, while I and Gianmario think (because good writing is a multi-faceted skill that doesn't lend itself to reinforcement learning, or even particularly well to supervised learning) that it's better used for the grunt work of writing to free the author's time for the actual creative part. Think of yourself as the manager/writer and the AI as your assistant.

For his design lecture, Marco used the interesting example of a gamebook based on Italo Calvino's The Cloven Viscount, a magic realist fable in which a character is literally split into two selves by a cannonball. The choices could emphasize the polarization of attitudes, whether the player wants to be purely "good" or utterly "evil", though when you repress half of your nature it has the habit of surfacing catastrophically. Alternatively you might concentrate on unifying the two selves. Not that Marco was suggesting anybody should actually vandalize Calvino's story by turning it into a gamebook, you understand, but it's an interesting thought experiment.

While at the con I met up with Valentino Sergi, who headed the design team on Blood Sword 5e, and he's hopeful there will be news about a 5.5e version soon. We also got to talk to author Alex Calvi, who translated a couple of my books for Librarsi. We all agreed that nobody could replace Russ Nicholson but that Marco Sada would be a great artist for any future Fabled Lands books. Oh, and on the subject of FL, Jamie blurted out the news that he's begun work on Into the Underworld, the 12th book, so that was a bit of a scoop.

The cosplayers at the convention showed great stamina, walking around in some heavy-looking costumes in temperatures nudging 38°, and Jamie and I signed a lot of books. Flying by RyanAir was hell, given the heatwave and delays of up to three hours each way, but (as Stevenson should have said) it is better to arrive than to travel without hope.