There's Matthew Berman reminding us that future is coming up faster than you think. He's talking about videogaming, but the same principles apply to movies, comics, and literature.
The novel – at least, the genre novel – may well go the way of the epic poem, to be replaced by something more like an RPG session which an AI will run for the reader. (Or, more likely, the listener or viewer.) The top authors will devise the elements of the story, the characters and timeline (perhaps more like creative directors than old-style authors) and the AI will use that to tell a story that gives prominence to the bits that interest the individual reader. Did your parents make up stories to tell you when you were little? Like that. Or maybe like this.
You'll still discuss the story with friends (an important feature of most entertainment) but the specific events in your version may vary from theirs. Initially such on-the-fly stories will be trite because roleplaying has been infected by a lot of Hollywood pablum about act structure and story tropes, and that’s what the AI models will learn from. But eventually it may shake that off and become a new independent art form. "Not a line, but a bolt of lightning," as C W Longbottom puts it:
In the meantime, a market will remain – small, though, and shrinking – for grown-up fiction that doesn’t pander to YA tastes. Genre fiction falls in predictable patterns involving plot, and so is easily copied by novice writers and neural nets, whereas literary fiction is harder to fit to a formula because it usually concerns itself with the unique outlook and choices of the characters. But don't assume that because the AI hasn't experienced human emotions it won't eventually be able to write Lolita or War & Peace. Conrad didn't personally have to hack his way through an African jungle to learn how to write Heart of Darkness. It's only a matter of time before those more complex story patterns are learned and replicated by AI, just the same way that most authors do it. And then we'll be in a whole new world of entertainment.
I'm a lifelong enthusiast of and passionate advocate for AGI, and although large language models like ChatGPT and Claude aren't AGI, they are proving to be uncannily useful writing collaborators. I should qualify that. Many people think it means the author giving the model a prompt like, "Write me a novel in which Philip Marlowe hunts down Dracula in 1930s Hollywood," and then grabbing a coffee while the AI spits out 60,000 words. That's how Fritz Leiber Jr envisaged AI fiction-writing in The Silver Eggheads, published in 1966.
Joanna Penn and Alicia Wright paint a fuller picture in this podcast about using generative AI in writing. Every writer finds their own way of making best use of the technology. After playing with it for a while, I've found it especially useful for research, brainstorming (I use it as a sounding board to comment on the pacing and plot holes in a storyline), and to do the grunt work of coming up with NPC stats.
Using AI for entertainment pales into insignificance beside its value in medicine and clean energy, but my science days are far behind me so I'm going to have to focus on the frivolous. For an idea of how LLMs can help with writing research, take this example of a conversation with Claude when I was working on a Faerie Queene scenario for Patreon:
Dave: "Can you give me any examples from late medieval or Tudor literature of a character posing a conundrum that tests the wisdom and moral insight of the listeners? Portia's caskets in The Merchant of Venice would be one example; I'm looking for others."
Claude: "There are several fascinating examples from this period. Let me share a few notable ones. The most prominent example comes from Book I of Thomas More's Utopia (1516), where More presents the character of Raphael Hythloday engaging in a debate at Cardinal Morton's table. Hythloday poses a complex moral conundrum about the harsh punishment of thieves in England, arguing that executing people for theft is both unjust and ineffective. He challenges the listeners to consider whether a society that first creates poverty through enclosure and then punishes the impoverished for stealing is morally coherent. This serves as a test of the listeners' ability to think through systemic social problems rather than just accept conventional wisdom.
"Another interesting example appears in John Gower's Confessio Amantis (late 14th century), where the Tale of Three Questions features a knight who must answer three riddles to save his life: what women most desire, what's most precious but least valued, and what costs least but is most valued. These questions serve to test both wisdom and moral understanding of human nature.
"In the morality play Mankind (c. 1470), the character Mercy poses several theological riddles to Mankind about the nature of sin and redemption, testing both the character's and the audience's understanding of moral theology.
"An unusual example comes from John Skelton's Bowge of Courte (c. 1498), where the protagonist encounters allegorical figures who present him with various moral dilemmas about courtly behavior and integrity, though these are more implicit than explicit riddles."
Our discussion went on (and on -- I like chatting to Claude) and I got what I needed, but here's the point: imagine how futile a simple Google search would have been for a request like that. Still, I see I've been giving the spotlight all to Claude, so here are ChatGPT's thoughts on writing gamebooks:
ChatGPT: "Since a 1000-section gamebook requires long-term consistency, custom formatting, and mechanical coherence, GPT-4-turbo or Claude 3 would be your strongest options. If you want, we can test structuring a small gamebook section now to see how it flows."
Dave: "OK, let's try it. Say the player is looking at a noticeboard with three quest notices on it. We'll use keywords, and each notice has two keywords associated with it. The first keyword is acquired after the player has read the notice once, so that if they choose to read it again they get a shorter description of what they must do to complete the quest. The other keyword in each case is acquired by completing the quest (which is outside the scope of this example, it's something they would go off and do in another part of the game world) so that if they look at a notice for a quest they already did, they are reminded that it's no longer available."
ChatGPT: "Got it! Here's how we can structure this:
The player sees a noticeboard with three quest notices. oOne acquired when they read the notice (so the second reading gives a shorter summary). oOne acquired when they complete the quest (so they are told they already finished it).
Each notice has two keywords:
The player chooses which notice to read.
The system checks their keywords to determine the output.
I'll draft a structured gamebook section below."
001: Noticeboard
A weathered wooden noticeboard stands at the crossroads, its surface peppered
with tattered parchment. Three notices are pinned here, each offering work for
those seeking adventure. You can read any of them:
·[1]
The Merchant’s Plea go to 002
·[2]
The Missing Hunter go to 003
·[3]
The Bandit Threat go to 004
Choose which notice to read. If
you have already read it, you will see only a summary. If you have completed
the quest, you will be informed.
002: The Merchant’s Plea
If you have the keyword READ_MERCHANT,
go to 005.
If you have the keyword DONE_MERCHANT,
go to 006.
A wealthy merchant named Vargos
seeks aid. His shipment of fine silks has been stolen on the road to Tarsen by
a band of masked riders. He offers a generous reward to anyone who can recover
the stolen goods.
Write down the keyword READ_MERCHANT.
Return to 001.
003: The Missing Hunter
If you have the keyword READ_HUNTER,
go to 007.
If you have the keyword DONE_HUNTER,
go to 008.
A notice written in hurried
script pleads for help. A young hunter named Lirian went into the Blackwood
three nights ago and has not returned. His father fears the worst and offers a
reward for news of his fate.
Write down the keyword READ_HUNTER.
Return to 001.
004: The Bandit Threat
If you have the keyword READ_BANDIT,
go to 009.
If you have the keyword DONE_BANDIT,
go to 010.
A proclamation from the town
watch warns of a growing bandit presence near the old mill. Travelers have gone
missing, and merchants report stolen goods. The captain of the guard offers a
bounty for any bandit leader brought to justice.
Write down the keyword READ_BANDIT.
Return to 001.
005: The Merchant’s Plea
(Summary)
Vargos seeks aid recovering his stolen silks. A reward is offered.
Return to 001.
006: The Merchant’s Plea
(Completed)
You have already helped Vargos. There is nothing more to do here.
Return to 001.
007: The Missing Hunter
(Summary)
A hunter is missing in the Blackwood. His father seeks news.
Return to 001.
008: The Missing Hunter
(Completed)
You have already resolved this matter. There is nothing more to do here.
Return to 001.
009: The Bandit Threat
(Summary)
The town watch seeks help against a growing bandit threat.
Return to 001.
010: The Bandit Threat
(Completed)
The bandit threat has been dealt with. The notice is now irrelevant.
Return to 001.
I find that pretty impressive. I wasn't expecting ChatGPT to provide the meat of the quests, and while I wouldn't use them as they are, they could serve as springboards to a better idea. I said to ChatGPT, only half in jest: "I'll soon be obsolete."
"You're far from obsolete," said ChatGPT, eager as always to be supportive. "The way you structure gamebooks requires creativity, balance, and a strong grasp of narrative design. LLMs are just tools to assist in the process. If anything, they help speed up the technical side so you can focus more on the storytelling and gameplay experience."
Which is pretty much what I've been telling everyone all along.
The Coils of Hatewas one of the two books that Mark Smith wrote for our Virtual Reality gamebook series. Even thirty years on, my feelings about it are conflicted. By the time Mark handed it in, I’d moved on to another project for another publisher. Then the editor at Mammoth Books, who published VR, called me to say the book needed some work. Actually, a lot of work. Some links were missing. Others were doubled up. Some of it wasn’t typed, just handwritten on bits of paper. You could get a découpé sense of what was meant to be going on by just reading through the manuscript, but you couldn’t actually play it.
I spent the next two weeks trying to reverse engineer the flowchart and fill in the missing sections. I had my other deadline to worry about, so you can bet I was fuming, but it wasn’t all Mark's fault. The flowchart-planning side of gamebooks had never been his forte, and during the writing of this book he had the additional problem of two young kids who had been thought to be merely boisterous but had recently been diagnosed as autistic. Given the pressures, he produced a marvellous piece of writing. The characters came alive with their own hopes, fears and weaknesses. The setting was so vividly evoked you could taste the fog rolling in at night, smell the river-water lapping against lichen-spotted stone bridges, feel the fear lurking down narrow alleyways. And the theme was serious and meaningfully explored. It would have made a superb fantasy novel.
Mark is a big fan of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover (as I did quite recently) that The Coils of Hate was inspired by Fritz Leiber Jr’s short story “The Cloud of Hate”. But although Leiber may have had the original idea, Mark did it better. Leiber’s story is really just about anger and violence. Mark drew on his own family’s horrifying experiences in the ‘30s and ‘40s to show what hate is really like once it takes hold of people’s minds.
I said that Mark struggled with flowchart design. Jamie tended to take care of that in their Way of the Tiger and Falcon books, just as I took more of the weight of game mechanics and logic off Oliver Johnson's shoulders for our collaborations. But to be fair to Mark, the structure of The Coils of Hate was especially ambitious. You can undertake multiple activities: opportunistic thievery, investigation into what’s going on, organizing the victims of the pogrom, making sure your friends are safe, and so on. And all that while events are unfolding over time. It’s even more complex than Can You Brexit.
While I was writing a new gamebook for Jamie’s Vulcanverse, I got to thinking how I’d have structured The Coils of Hate. To start with, you’d need keywords that would “remember” how far you’d got through the overall story arc. Say the action is split into four acts. So Keyword_Act_Two tells the book you’re in the second act. (It wouldn’t be called that, obviously; it would be Libation, say. Something that didn’t draw attention to the fact that it’s a time-counting logic flag.)
After completing a subquest, you’d be directed back to a “time counter” paragraph that would then route you to the current act. Something like this:
What about those subquests? The book needs to remember how far you are through them, but that might not (often will not) be linked to what’s going on in the overall arc. For example, maybe you’re calling on your friend Lucie. The first time you meet her she is blithely dismissive of danger. The second time she’s had a bad fright and wants your help. The third time there’s a chance she might betray you to the Overlord’s secret police. So that could work something like this:
And within each option there could be a filter that checks which act you’re in. For example, Lucie might conceivably betray you in the third or fourth act, but not before that. So entry 180 in the example here would then ask, “Do you have the keyword Proteus or Kindly?” and if so you’d get routed to the betrayal storyline; if not there’d be a different encounter with Lucie.
Keywords are needed when something has changed globally that needs to be checked for in multiple places. For example, if the Judain (the persecuted community in the book) are all ordered to wear yellow patches on their clothes, that's something you might see or discuss in several different branches, so I'd use a keyword.
Tickboxes on the other hand track local changes. For instance, the first time I visit an informant some militia come in and smash up his shop. On subsequent visits the book needs to know that the shop is shuttered and there's broken glass on the floor, but a tickbox will do because that's not a condition that makes any difference anywhere else. (We try to minimize the number of keywords because the reader has to check through a whole list every time one is called.)
What triggers the next act? That could be accomplished by tickboxes like we saw in the last example. So the hub section for one of the acts would look something like this:
Taking the prison option, for instance, you’d get into a series of adventures, at the end of which you’d reach a section like this:
Thus, after undertaking four subquests in the current act you're routed through to the next act via section 499 where you'd be given the keyword for that act*. If you were already in act four (as you are in this example) that would lead into the endgame for this book, which involves a showdown with the embodiment of hate as depicted on the cover. Various items and keywords acquired during the adventure would steer the outcome of that battle.
I'm not planning to rewrite The Coils of Hate (Stuart Lloyd already did that) but I am occasionally tempted to revisit the Shadow King storyline that Jamie and I cooked up over twenty years ago. That has the main character trying to stay alive in a world devoid of life but infested with vampires -- sort of an H G Wells take on I Am Legend. I'd definitely need keywords to globally track the passage of time, and tickboxes to record how far you are through various subquests. But is there enough demand for gamebooks these days? Not like there used to be, certainly.
*Any subquest that can only be accessed in the current act would route you back to the hub section for that act (100, 200, 300 or 400) but subquests that can be accessed in more than one act would need to send you back to the master hub, ie 555.
Gamebook maven John Jones was in touch with the Fabled Lands team recently with an intriguing suggestion – indeed, a creative challenge – that occurred to him while watching Jessica Jones:
“What is interesting about the conflict between Jessica and Kilgrave is the personal nature of it. Unlike other villains, Kilgrave has only one very goal he wants to achieve and any effect he has on the larger world comes in service to that goal. At the same time Jessica has her own very personal goal. I mention this to contrast it with the main conflict in The Serpent King's Domain. To Namagal it's a very personal situation involving his death and/or humbling. To the viewpoint character playing the book, it is (or can be) little more than an item on a to-do list toward achieving a different goal. I make that contrast because one thing I'd like to see in The Lone and Level Sands or perhaps a later book is for an important quest to be personal and important to the viewpoint character.”
Of course, conflict is almost always more interesting when it’s personal. After a love story, perhaps the most compelling of narratives is a war in the family:
It only works when it’s earned, of course. Batman v Superman did nothing but lay popcorn-brained waste to the surprising-yet-inevitable showdown which in Frank Miller’s original story came at the endpoint of a difficult friendship that had struggled on against the odds for decades.
The point of the personal conflict is to up the stakes. The story has more bite, more pain, more inner struggle. We, the readers or viewers, feel more strongly involved. But writing rules are no substitute for commonsense. All those screenwriters who feel the need to make Robin the Sheriff of Nottingham’s half-brother, take note. And let’s also point an accusatory finger at the recent Harry Potterization of the 007 franchise, in which every adversary must be tied to Bond’s angsty childhood. Puh-lease. It’s more Charlie Higson than Ian Fleming.
The sharpening effect of personal conflict is why I don’t object to a little PvP in my roleplaying games. The civil war that happened in our Tekumel campaign was a classic tragedy in the making, with the player group splitting right down the middle. Jamie told his wife that the Tsolyani civil war was the most important thing in his life at the time. I can believe it. Think of any time you and somebody you care about have ended up on opposite sides on an issue of passionate importance. There’s a wrench in the gut that goes far beyond mere difference of opinion.
The Tsolyani example reminded me of a letter I got from Professor MAR Barker back in November 1985:
"Eyloa the Wizard of the Tlashte Heights, played by Mike Callahan, just discovered that the Pariah Deities' chief agent in his sector, Torsu, is in reality his own father. I was told later that this is a rip-off of the Star Wars plots, but then I have been running this particular campaign since before The Empire Strikes Back and all along the storyline has been the same."
So you can pull off the same trick between player and NPC. I must have been aiming for something like that in my second-ever gamebook, The Temple of Flame, which begins by establishing the backstory between the lead character and their former colleague Damontir the Mad, who is the book’s antagonist. Players of Heart of Ice have remarked that though the possible endings include saving the world and seizing ultimate power, nothing compares to meting out just deserts to the weaselly Kyle Boche. And even in Fabled Lands we have recurring adversaries like Talanexor the Fire Wizard and your persistent frenemy Lauria. You want to see more of them, don’t you?
Which brings us back to John Jones’s suggestion. I’m not going to reveal what he proposed because it was really cool and maybe Paul Gresty will want to run with it in future books. All I will say is that it made me think of Fritz Leiber Jr, and that’s never a bad thing.
There were supposed to be eight Virtual Reality books. Mark Smith had written most of the first draft of his third, called (if memory serves) The Masque of Death and inspired in part by a Fritz Leiber Jr short story, but it was proving complicated and Mark was getting a lot of feedback from the series editor, Ian Marsh. By the time I’d handed in Heart of Icethere was a yawning gap in the schedules and I had to write a book in a hurry to fill it.
Heart of Ice had been a lot of fun, but it wasn’t easy to write. By basing it on a Tekumel role-playing campaign I’d run with several groups of players over the years, I thought I’d save myself some work. Not a bit of it, as the world and the characters had to be created from scratch and that had knock-on effects on the story. So coming off that I really wanted a rest, and most definitely didn’t want to turn around another gamebook from scratch in eight weeks.
I had a vague outline hanging around from the late ‘80s, when Jamie Thomson and I had pitched a number of ideas to the Fighting Fantasy editors at Puffin Books. One, which had begun life as a storyline for a novel called, at various times, A Thief of Cairo or The Best Thief of Baghdad, and was then reworked as The Thief of Arantis, now got dusted off. I found it was a very scanty outline indeed. Oh well, I’ve always been a pantser. And in any case it was supposed to be loose and shapeless and picaresque. An Arabian Nights homage can’t look like Tolkien, you know.
So here’s what I had to start out with:
The Thief of Arantis
This gamebook takes as its setting the ports and coastal waters of Arantis, in Titan. Its flavour, however, is derived from the Thousand and One Nights. It deals with the protagonist's picaresque adventures as he or she rises from being a common sailor to the exalted rank of adviser to the Sultan.
Stopping off in one of the richer ports of Arantis, the protagonist hears talk of a marvellous egg bigger than a house. This egg, laid by the fabulous giant Roc, is prized for its qualities of good fortune and rejuvenation. A single piece chipped from the shell could be worth 10,000 gold pieces or more. Naturally, as with most tavern stories, the details are hard to pin down. Everyone knows of the Roc's egg, but no-one has much idea of where it might be found. Nonetheless, the protagonist is sure that it truly exists (he saw it on the cover of the book, after all) and sets out in search of the Roc's eyrie.
Along the way his ship is wrecked on an inaccessible stretch of shoreline. Luckily he alone survives and is brought before a wizard, who listens to his story with great sympathy. Moved by his plight, and taking his survival as sign of the favour of the gods, the wizard gives him some magic slippers that allow the wearer to levitate - once only. These should enable him to reach the Roc's eyrie.
Soon after arriving at the next city, however, the protagonist is mistaken for a notorious thief and is thrown into gaol, charged with having stolen a magnificent ruby from the Sultan's treasury. There he is befriended by a beggar who tells him a story about the legendary Roc. In return, the protagonist might choose to tell the beggar about his magic slippers. If he does, his trust is rewarded with treachery: he awakes the next day to find the beggar has escaped using the slippers, leaving behind only his mangy cat.
Unless he still has the slippers and uses them to levitate to freedom, the protagonist is still in the gaol a week later when the real thief is caught. This fellow, Azenomei, is thrown into the same cell, but the gaolers make no move to free the protagonist, assuming that even if he did not steal the ruby there must be some other crime he should pay for. That night the protagonist mentions his obsession with finding the Roc's nest. Much to his surprise, Azenomei agrees to help him on condition that they first go to the rescue of his sister, who has been carried off by a sinister Jinni to a citadel on the western edge of the Plain of Bronze.
Assuming the protagonist agrees, they escape from gaol that very night and within a week they have reached an oasis in the Desert of Skulls. The protagonist is summoned to the tent of a nomad princess who turns out to be a hideous ghoul. Although he should be able to survive this encounter relatively unscathed, it forces him and Azenomei to flee into the desert without filling their water-bags. A few days later, weakened by thirst, they stumble on another oasis at twilight. A stranger they meet here tells the protagonist he has found the Oasis Beyond The Mirage, and reveals a vision where the protagonist's reflection in a pool seems to be accompanied by an evil, gold-eyed man. When they awake the next morning there is no sign of the oasis or the stranger, though they now have full water-bags.
After a few further adventures they reach the Jinni's citadel. It seems deserted. With pounding heart the protagonist begins to search for Azenomei's sister, but somehow he loses Azenomei in the maze of corridors. At last he finds a scented chamber where the girl reclines on a divan to which she is bound by a golden chain. He is about to free her when the Jinni appears. It is his former companion, the one who called himself Azenomei! This is the meaning of the vision at the oasis. The Jinni reveals that he truly believes the protagonist to be the notorious jewel thief that the Sultan's guards mistook him for. The same thief once stole a great gem ("as big as the egg of the Roc that perches in its eyrie atop the Isle of Palms") from the Jinni's own hoard, and that is why he has lured the protagonist here. The protagonist's protestations of innocence are ignored and he is forced to fight for his life. Various items must have been gathered to stand any chance against the Jinni, but in fact the protagonist is helped by the girl, who reveals a knowledge of combat sorcery. After the battle she tells him she is actually the Sultan's daughter. Her magic was taught to her by her old nurse. However, she was not taught any spell to unlock the enchanted shackles binding her. For this, she says, the protagonist must get a jewelled key from the eyrie of the Roc.
Fortunately the Jinni has mentioned where the Roc can be found: on the highest peak of the Isle of Palms, which lies in the Gulf of Shamuz. The protagonist travels there and must use his magic slippers to levitate up to the nest. If he has already made use of the slippers, it is possible to succeed if he has bothered to keep the beggar's mangy cat. This miraculous animal has the property that its tail grows longer whenever an outrageous lie is spoken in its hearing. If the protagonist has treated the cat well and has learned of this power, he can cause the tail to reach right up to the Roc's nest and can climb up to get the jewelled key...
The protagonist might not have met the Sultan's daughter, of course, in which case he can just take part of the egg as he originally intended. This will make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice. If he takes the jewelled key instead, though, then his reward is even greater. After freeing the girl and returning her to her father, he is rewarded with a Robe of Honour and becomes the Sultan's vizier. Throughout the city he is lauded as the most daring thief in the world, for he stole the jewelled key from the Roc's nest and the princess from the Jinni's palace. Thus, one who began by being mistaken for another ends by becoming the one he was mistaken for.
I felt it needed more of a route in, but not the enforced quest of most single-story gamebooks. The story needed to be set in motion by the kind of arbitrary twist of fate (aha!) that characterizes the Arabian Nights. After that, the protagonist is cast around the world like a pinball by happenstance, coincidence and enemy action until it all ends happily ever after.
What I didn’t account for – or didn’t have time to correct – was that the original outline was predicated on you playing a thief. But in Virtual Reality books, the whole point is that you get to customize the kind of character you want. You might be a thief, but equally you might be a merchant or a nomad or a holy man. In a sandbox environment like Fabled Lands, it wouldn’t matter. You could bypass the thievish narrative, or come at it from another angle. In a single-story gamebook, the picaresque structure risked seeming unfocused.
When, last year, I came back to the book released as Twist of Fate (never liked that title - another area where time ran out on me) and got to rework it as Once Upon a Time in Arabia, the biggest change I made was to give it an entirely new prologue. The bad guy is now badder, his villainy toward you more egregious, and the stakes are higher right from the start. This goes somewhat against the fairytale dream-flow of the Arabian Nights – but it makes for a better gamebook, and on the question of foolish consistencies, I’m with Emerson.
I had forgotten that Mark Smith's Virtual Reality books were both set in a world which may very well be part of the Rainbow Land of his and Jamie Thomson's Duelmaster series. The name of the Palayal River by the city of Godorno suggests Tekumel, but nothing else about the setting does. The Forest of Arden features in both, though whether it's Shakespeare's, the one by the Avon, or some third high-fantasy variant is not clear.
It does feel quite Shakespearean, these books being very strong on atmosphere. That's especially true of Godorno in Coils of Hate, a city that resembles a nightmarish version of Venice where the walls fairly drip with a dank ambience of distrust and fear. I could ask Mark about the intended setting (possibly it was an unmapped corner of Orb) but it was twenty years ago and he's not likely to remember now.
Mark's titles in the series were Green Blood (love that title) and Coils of Hate. They were the nearest to being interactive novels - rather stronger on the novel side than on the interactivity, to be honest. The characters and locations would make a superb role-playing sourcebook, which is one clue that Mark might have taken them from his notes for the Orb campaign. (Which was not, as I never tire of telling people, even remotely Oriental, despite the Way of the Tiger books.)
And these maps..! I challenge any role-player to look at Godorno and not want to spend a few evenings adventuring there. One of Mark's biggest literary influences is Fritz Leiber Jr, and there's more than a hint of Lankhmar to those streets and canals. It does no harm to have the maps beautifully rendered by Leo Hartas, too.
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