Punch drunk

"Fifteen years since I had to take out a Green Beret..." Oh, just fuck right off, Frank Miller. Why stop there? How about: "It's been fifteen years since I had to take out a Terminator" or "It's been fifteen years since I had to take out a Chitauri attack fleet"?

In Batman: Year One we've been wondering up till that point how little Jim Gordon is going to deal with Flass and the other corrupt cops in the Gotham police department. He'll have to be wily and determined. Seek out some allies with mutual interests. Get leverage over his enemies, maybe dig the dirt on them. Dissemble so that they don't suspect what he's up to. Judge who he can trust and who he can get on his side.

But no, none of that happens, because it would call for some very smart plotting. Instead let's have him be the very pinnacle of ex-special forces. Then he can just beat up Flass and that'll solve everything.

Same for Alfred the butler, who used to be an interesting contrast with his employer, like C-3PO and Luke, but has morphed into the young Bruce Wayne's sensei. Nowadays Galadriel has to be Hit Girl and Dalby in The Ipcress File is a Bond-level killer. Talking of Bond, M now has to have a background in the SAS (probably he joined the regiment at the same time as Alfred Pennyworth). Even Wednesday Addams, who should be so terrifyingly cool that she never needs to resort to combat, now has to be a martial arts whizz.

Making every supporting character ex-SAS or a SEAL is the same mentality that bungs all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters into one universe and expects a round of applause. It's the colour-by-numbers approach to imagination. When writers can’t think of clever ways for their heroes to deal with the problems they’ve given them, they use the cop-out that they are super-tough brawlers – as if that ever really solved anything. 

As an antidote to all this, look instead at Lizzie Bennet tackling Catherine de Bourgh with just a keen mind and moral courage. Or reflect on why Odysseus is a more interesting adventure hero because he overcomes problems with his wits rather than brute strength. That's why I liked The Penguin TV show. Oz Cobb is tough, but not Steve Rogers tough. He's only one man in a ruthless criminal world where there are plenty of stronger and faster adversaries. Outnumbered and despised, an outsider among Gotham's established crime families, faced with an ever-changing crisis where plans are constantly going awry, he has to be cunning and think on his feet.

It's a storytelling lesson I learned at the age of seven watching Goldfinger. Back in those early days 007 wasn't harder than a UFC champion. He was just ultra-resourceful. And when he takes out Oddjob, that was the moment that shows what it takes to tell a good story.

The personal touch

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.

Does interactive fiction need randomness?

I've made no bones (ha ha) about not liking dice in digital gamebooks. I’m not talking here about randomness in general (we’ll get onto that) but yer actual spotted cubes. When I’m playing a print gamebook – or, as is far more likely, playing an RPG – I don’t find the action of rolling dice especially disruptive. It’s tolerable, anyway. But when the book is on a screen, interrupting the flow of the story to show some animated dice clattering around just strikes me as inflicting brutal and unnecessary harm to any sense of immersion.

This is a personal view, however. As a designer, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be dice. Some gamebook nostalgia buffs like having them, and if the implementation isn’t going to cost too much then why not offer the option? But it should be an option. Someone who has never played a print gamebook will, quite rightly, find the use of dice to make no sense whatsoever. It’s like having animated turning pages and rustling paper sounds. Only worse.

But if not dice – if we want to move onto a new generation of gamebooks without dice – what are our options? (And incidentally this is a good point to mention that the evolution of gamebooks is also the subject of a series of very interesting posts on the Mysterious Path blog.)

That opens up the whole question of randomness. In a face to face RPG, typically when I hit a foe with a sword I might do 2-12 points of damage or whatever. In a computer RPG, on the other hand, the amount of damage is usually fixed for a given weapon, opponent and combat manoeuvre. Here’s why. If I can see my lucky or unlucky dice roll on a tabletop, and feel (utterly unsuperstitious though I am) that I was in some way responsible for that roll, I can accept it. But if I get into the same fight in a CRPG and lose because lousy numbers are generated, I’m not going to keep playing. It’s the device that made the roll, not me. I want victory in a videogame to be about tactics, reaction speed and choice of weapon, not blind luck.

In a digital gamebook it’s not likely to come down to reaction speed, nor indeed to the simple stabbing at controller buttons that satisfies us in most videogames. How do we play to the strengths of the medium? One way is to reason that, reading a gamebook being a cerebral sort of activity, maybe the fights can have a more cunning rule mechanic. This is what Inkle and Steve Jackson (the UK one) have done in the Sorcery app. You pick an attack strength, so does the opponent. The higher number inflicts damage, but also fatigues the attacker so that he can’t put as high a number next round.

This fits with the sense you get when playing a digital gamebook that you are laying a story behind you as you go. In the case of Sorcery (or Frankenstein) that’s explicit in that the sections of text are stitched together. You could show that text to somebody else and they could read it as if it were the novelization of your adventure.

I like this because it’s how we perceive time. The future is fizzing with all these quantum possibilities, the past is fixed in one shape. But hold on. If we are indeed creating a novel-like experience as we play, doesn’t that beg the question of how much prominence should be given to fights and other tests of skills, whether randomly or strategically decided? I’ve blogged before about how fights are tricky in fiction. I can’t actually remember the last novel I read that had a fight in it, and I’m willing to bet that even in A Song of Fire and Ice you don’t get very many – and that they aren’t ever described blow by blow unless (a) a lot hangs on the outcome and (b) there’s something clever, dramatic and unexpected about how it plays out.

The thing is, how much fun is it to read, “You strike at the goblin, but he parries. He ripostes and you react too slowly. His sword lays open a long gash in your arm.” It doesn’t matter if, instead of generating this stuff procedurally, you have Jeanette Winterson writing it for you. It’s just not interesting. Which makes me suspect that, in the context of a digital gamebook, it isn’t interesting to play either.

Some will say at this point, “But I like picking my main weapon, my armour, deciding when to drink the healing potion, selecting a combat stance.” Then, honestly, you need to play The Witcher, which does all that stuff with a lot more excitement and eye candy than you’re going to get in a medium that is principally prose.

That’s not to say gamebooks have to drop the gameplay aspect. You can have “interesting choices” in stories. 007 games his showdown with Oddjob – much to the delight of my eight-year-old self. And do you know how Conan defeats the peerless swordsman Mikhal Oglu? Pure gameplay. The tactic is so surprising and brilliant, in fact, that Roy Thomas doesn’t even need to show the ensuing fight. There’s no randomness there, of course. The smart choice trumps all others.

But how much do we want the gameplay to be visible? If the Game of Thrones TV show had on-screen bars showing characters’ declining political influence stats, would that make us more engaged, or less? One of the reasons that role-playing isn’t more popular is that most people don’t have the kind of mind that can see “Strength 14” on a sheet and turn that into an intuitive feel for the character. Storytelling has rules, as anyone who has done improvised storytelling will know. It’s just that those rules are a lot more implicit, interesting and subtle than THAC0.

In short, if we want more people to read gamebooks, we need to de-geek the mechanics. Mostly that means hiding them altogether, as in Frankenstein, where I do have stats (Trust, Empathy, and so on) but the reader never gets to see them, only their effects. And, if you can’t see the stats being applied, there’s no point in randomness. It’s simply no longer relevant to creating an engrossing interactive story.

Thanks to Farrin N. Abbott of CopyCatFilms for the intertitle card.

Land of the free

I can't for the life of me guess what triggered it, but Fabled Lands has been enjoying a bit of a sales surge in America this week. Jamie and I always felt FL had the potential to succeed over the Pond where other British gamebooks had failed, given - in our opinion - a slightly less derivative fantasy setting and a hopefully superior level of gameplay. But our only official release in the USA was as "Quest", and those books received worse distribution than the 1918 'flu vaccine.

The higher a book gets in the charts, the more chance it will get noticed by new readers. Books either get into a positive feedback loop where they climb up and up, or they bob briefly and then sink again. So my appeal today is that if you're in the US and you've been thinking of buying a Fabled Lands book, this is the time when it would do the most good.

I'm assuming that, having taken a look, a new reader would want the series to continue. A lot of people do say that, and believe me it warms the cockles of my and Jamie's hearts to hear it, but it could be that I just don't get to hear from the ones who hate the whole idea and are glad the series ended halfway through. I can see why FL may not appeal to some gamebook fans. Instead of a single quest, issued to you at the start as though you'd just tossed your hat onto a stand outside M's office, in Fabled Lands you are a completely free agent and you have to define your own objectives. That's how I like to roleplay. I hate hate hate when the "Games Master" (or umpire, as I prefer to say) tries to steamroller us with a predesignated plotline. So FL really just reflects that style of play. But if you prefer a dictatorship, as some gamers do, then you may find yourself wandering aimlessly hoping that somebody will tell you what to do - or at least give you your motivation.

Given all that, it does make me wonder why FL was reasonably successful in Britain (one of the least free of all Western democracies) but struggled to find readers in the USA. Maybe the new wave of interest will pick up and we can turn that around. If you're in the US, you can find the books right here.