Has gaming got a secret storytelling sauce?

You know those get-to-know meetings where everybody is invited to say a little bit about who they are. Like when the heroes exchange boasts in the Trojan War, only without the spear-throwing as a chaser. When I mention that I’m a game designer as well as a writer, a publisher or a network exec will nod and say, ‘Yes, that’s what we like about your writing. The gaming feel.’

I expect Michelangelo heard the same sort of thing. ‘What we love about your painting, Mike, is the sculptural look.’ And a compliment is a compliment. You don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, even when it’s a camel. But it irks because it’s too facile to be true or even useful. When you’re a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work. Whatever quality those network execs think they’re seeing, it’s as likely that I got it from reading Elric of Melniboné as from playing The Witcher.

Why it matters: publishers and old TV networks alike are looking at their shrinking audience and, perceiving that young people especially are eagerly consuming games, they feel sure that an injection from those glands could surely perk up their own medium.

Is that true? When I was getting started as a writer, back in the mid-'80s, all the publishers wanted Fighting Fantasy style gamebooks. Those went a long way beyond mixing a game sensibility (whatever that is) into the narrative. They were stories with gameplay. And on one level it was a massive success, but only in the same way that the US surge in Iraq was a massive success. Reluctant readers, especially boys, took to the books in their millions. But fast forward 35 years and I don’t think you’ll find many of them became regular readers. If it didn’t have a tunnel with an orc at the end they could kill, they just weren’t interested.

Should we worry? After all, most people are not regular readers. It can be a misperception to see all those kids’ faces wide-eyed and screen-lit and to think, gosh, if we could just bottle that gaming juice we’d soon have them just as addicted to books.

@Porter_Anderson well I would say the answer I offered was that they want the same 10 positive emotions. Not game like interaction.

— Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) May 29, 2015

Back in the late sixties, what got me and another 400,000 kids out of bed without needing to be called twice was the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. You think my parents and teachers approved? ‘Why can’t you read proper books?’ they asked. The answer, of course, is that it’s not either/or. Maybe most of those other Spidey fans didn’t become regular readers in later life. Others did. Some became writers and game designers and now rarely put in a day’s work that doesn’t owe something to Stan Lee’s storytelling. We didn’t look at the page and see a 3 by 3 panel grid, or four-colour pictures with word balloons. We saw how original characters, sparkling humour, a gazillion personal problems, and a spectacular fight scene or two added up to a don’t-miss monthly saga.

When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning. Yet tread carefully on these deceptive sands. It’s not necessarily about grafting gameplay into novels. Nor is anything gained by mere apery, such as renaming chapters ‘levels’. You could sell truckloads of books, after all, if you made them in the shape of a football somebody could kick around a park. Game elements, when only sutured onto other media like an experiment by Dr Moreau, have their limits.

The really valuable takeaways here require us to dig deeper. When Quentin Tarantino brought a little grindhouse vibe to CSI with his episode ‘Grave Danger’, the show’s producers acknowledged that he’d jolted them back to the realization, half forgotten after five seasons, that their stories needed to grab and excite the audience, not just fill an hour’s gap in their lives. A decade and half ago, Russell T Davies regenerated Doctor Who with a transfusion of soap opera sensibility which relegated the SF plot shenanigans almost to MacGuffins in order to foreground the characters’ personal journey. Opinions remain divided, but there’s no denying that it gave a direction to a show that seemed to have nowhere left to go.

Putting the ‘pop’ back into art is a trick that goes back a long way before one pixel dashed across a screen to devour another. Patricia Highsmith understood the same affect of compulsion: writing emotionally on the edge of your seat so as to put the reader on theirs. Dickens grabs you by the lapels; even his narrative prose has the vim and urgency of the spoken word. Coleridge too: ‘There was a ship...’ I defy you to stop there and start texting. Or how about three witches, a blasted heath, and a bloody man – you’re not going to be popping off to the loo for the next couple of hours, are you? And the Bard couldn’t have picked up those tricks from the games industry. Gadzooks, they’d only just invented cricket.

How do we make people want to read? Bring them up in a household full of books, or (next best) with free access to books. But also recognize that the human race reinvents itself. That’s its trademark turn. So we could ask, why aren’t the youth of today painting mammoths on the walls of caves? Why aren’t they going to the opera? Where are the Oscars for epic poetry?

Humans love stories, and we always will, but media evolve, speciate and go extinct. And so it goes.

The road more traveled by

Following on from the previous post, I don't want to give the impression that all of my collaborations with Jamie consist of me writing something and then him taking over and cutting out half of it. They do say murder your darlings and, as Hitchcock and Highsmith pointed out (above), it helps to get a friend to do it for you.

Here's a case where it went a little differently. We were talking to the Fabled Lands agent, Piers Blofeld, about digital gamebooks. I mentioned time travel and how for it to really grip as a story it has to be personal. We talked about the old Falcon gamebooks that Jamie wrote with Mark Smith in the 1980s, and how those were very much in the 2000AD adventure style, but how maybe they could be rebooted with a little more relatability for a wider audience.

So I wrote this as a possible new way in to the story of a protagonist who gets to "fix" mistakes in time:

You always had a sixth sense. And people laughed at you for trusting it. But you knew better. The time your friends at high school piled into Billy’s older brother’s car to drive out for a picnic, and Billy had only had one beer but you felt something like a physical dread. Couldn’t get in the car. You watched them drive off and six hours later you watched the crane haul the car out of the west river.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” the cop asked.

“I had to study.”

Because you’d already learned not to talk about your glimpses of the future, even then. When people thought you could see what was coming up, they blamed you if it went bad. Best to say nothing. Keep the sixth sense – or whatever it was – to yourself.

But you learned to trust that sense. Right up till the last day of your life.

Okay, so then there's an elision to a scene in which you are in a plane crash...

A bang. It just sounded like a tyre blowout until the gravity switched off.

You wake up in the wreckage. Not too badly hurt, as far as you can tell, but you’re completely trapped in a cage of twisted seats and crushed fuselage. A liquid drips on you, causing an icy stab of panic until you realize it’s not aviation fuel but some kind of air con coolant. Even so, you can dully hear screams through the wreckage, and the smell of burning.

An overhead locker pops open and a bald man in a neat dark suit and grey trilby hat drops into the crumpled seat beside you. “You’re thinking you should’ve trusted your instincts,” he says.

“What? Who are you?” You strain to look past him into the locker. Is there a way out?

“I’m just guessing,” he goes on. “I can’t read minds or anything. Though I know what you’ll do now.”

You strain as far as the vice-like grip of your crushed seat rest will allow. The locker is empty, no escape route through to the outside. “Where did you come from? What happened? Was it a bomb on the plane?”

“A bomb?” He’s amused. “Like a terrorist incident? That’s ego talking, my friend. No, no terrorists. The universe has plenty of ways to kill you all on its own.”

He drones on and you listen with half your mind. He's telling you that many pasts and futures exist. Likens it to driving along a motorway. Spacetime can drift like a driver who’s nodding off, and that’s okay as long as the driver gets jolted awake when the tyres hit the hard shoulder. But if not he can go right off the road. And then there’s no getting back.

“Romulus can kill Remus, or vice versa, and you’re still on the blacktop. But if the wolf eats them both – that’s what we call a train wreck for time.”

“I thought we were talking about cars?”

“Ha! You see, right there, that’s what I’m looking for. You keep your wits about you. And then there are your premonitions, of course, where you see a few tracks over, what might happen or what could have been… That’s why we want you to join us.”

“Join you? Who the hell are you?” You struggle in the seat, but a wave of pain tells you there are at least a few broken bones. To think, you’re going to bleed to death or burn in the wreckage and your last conversation is with a madman.

He takes out an old-style fob watch with too many dials. “I’ll need your answer within 32 seconds. The fire hits the tanks then. To answer your question: we are the Curators. We locate the precious key moments of time, and if there’s an instability – a crack, if you like – we fix it.”

“And you want me to do that? But I have a marketing meeting in Seattle in four hours.”

“No you don’t. You don’t have a future. You don’t have a life. And you most certainly don’t have four hours. You have – “ he consults the watch “ – fifteen seconds. Yes or no? In or out? Life or death?”

Either way, this is the last day of your old life. But you could have a new life. If you agree to his offer, turn to 1. Just don’t take fifteen seconds to think about it.

We didn't use it. Why? Because we realized that the folks buying those old gamebooks aren't looking for a reboot. They want the untouched text. The classic edition, if you like. That's why we eventually released Blood Sword without completely overhauling the baroque tactical combat rules that I loathed. And similarly, Falcon came back to life exactly as if the intervening 30 years had never happened. And that's real time travel, I guess.



POSTSCRIPT: The time repair agency concept is one that's often explored in classic SF. To take one example: Philip K Dick's characteristically paranoid  "Adjustment Team", which inspired the movie The Adjustment Bureau. A rather more successful film adaptation was Predestination, based on Robert A Heinlein's short story "All You Zombies".