News flashes

A grab-bag of news today. First there's my interview with Riccardo Scaringi above, in which we talk about Vulcanverse, Lovecraft, Buffy, Rifkin's Festival, The Seventh Seal, Captain America: Civil War, robotics, post-scarcity, the simulation hypothesis, Whispers Beyond the Stars, and a few other matters.

(The "OK, boomer" moment: at 6m59s I say that Alex Dragan, the protagonist, could be male or female. What I should have said is they can be any gender. Consider me corrected.)

Other news: James Desborough's Stray Crows is currently on Kickstarter. This is a roleplaying game set in the Japan of the Sengoku and early Edo periods. Unlike most Japan-set RPGs, it isn't populated with 21st century Westerners cosplaying at being ronin and ninja. Mr Desborough believes in striving for authenticity, as do I. We may not be able to fully recreate the mindset of a 16th century samurai, but we can surely do better than James Clavell and Justin Marks, at least. Back Stray Crows now if you care at all about real roleplaying. I also think it's the most elegant and dramatic set of rules designed yet for such a setting, and the proof of that is in this sample combat.

One of my favourite podcasts is Fantastic Fights. Hieronymous (sic) J Doom's reviews of gamebooks are excellent and his insights into gamebook design are useful even to a forty-year veteran of the field like me. Mr (or maybe Doctor?) Doom mostly covers Fighting Fantasy books, which I'll confess aren't my cup of tea, but this month he's taken a look at Mark Smith's Coils of Hate. That was one of the books in the Virtual Reality series, my own titles from which have been resurrected as Critical IF, but Mark's Coils of Hate and Green Blood are hard to find in print these days.

Coils is a particularly tricky one, so here are some tips on how to survive it. Listening to HJD's very smart analysis of the book's problems was a bit triggering for me. I did make a half-hearted effort to get it into vaguely playable shape, given that some of the handwritten pages just ended with lines like: "Various options here, turn to ?" I was at my desk at 7am every day for a fortnight to devote a couple of pre-breakfast hours to trying to make sense of it while also facing a deadline for a book of my own. The published version of Coils of Hate was an appalling mess even so, and I'd rather have been hired as official editor and been given a month to fix it properly, but the publisher wasn't paying anything for that and they refused to wait, hence the botched version that still makes me want to hide in a storm cellar every time it's mentioned. Here's an account of my very minimal involvement in the book and how I'd have advised Mark to restructure it if there'd been more time.

What I do think is that Coils has some of the best writing, best characterization, and best worldbuilding you'll see in any gamebook even to this day. And Mark had the courage to tackle a serious issue -- not just intolerance, but the way that hatred and tribalism are auto-immune diseases of society that eventually harm not just the scapegoated target group but everybody else, even the haters. It's a long, long way from the old man in the tavern who tells you to collect five items so you can beat the evil guy who wants to take over the world.

Now that we're talking about Coils, there's something I ought to clear up. I sometimes get credited with being Mark's co-author, so just to be clear: I had no hand in the writing. I didn't even rewrite any of the sections I was given in hand-written form; I just typed them up and tried to figure out how to connect one to another when all I had to go on was "turn to ?" It's all Mark's work. The flashes of real genius are his. If only he'd written it as a novel instead of a gamebook! Luckily Stuart Lloyd has rescued the book, doing all the editing work I didn't have time for thirty years ago, and he has made his version available free on DriveThruRPG. Without him, Coils of Hate would probably have been forgotten. Stuart, you are a star.

In other news, the chapbook series from Fabled Lands Publishing now has over a dozen titles, as illustrated above, so if you suffer from the collecting bug those might be worth a look, either on Amazon or DriveThruRPG.

Lastly, a new Casket of Fays is always a treat, and the latest issue features the usual fine selection of articles including an in-depth look at Gully's Inn by Shaun Hately. It's a useful location for any medieval fantasy setting, whether or not you use the Dragon Warriors or Jewelspider rules. There's even a map. What are you waiting for?

Books that you explore

I'm not sure about the term "ergodic" literature. It's derived from ergon (= work) + hodos (= path) and supposedly refers to a book for which "nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text". But that's true of a lot of academic textbooks and some novels. I'd certainly have to exert nontrivial effort to make it through a Lee Child or Harlan Coben book. Ergodicity already had a meaning before it was appropriated for tricky books, and it doesn't help anyone if terms end up with multiple meanings (see also: confabulate) so, if we're looking for a fancy-sounding term for gamebooks and other lean-forward texts what about polyhodal?

Whatever term we use, "Lost in the Labyrinth" on the Beautiful Books website provides a very comprehensive guide to such books, from Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler to Edward Powys Mathers' Cain's Jawbone by way of Choose Your Own Adventure, Fabled Lands, and even Tristram Shandy. There are titles here I'd never heard of, presented in a form that's an exploration in itself. Set off (no need for a map) and see where the journey takes you.

In related news, Riccardo Scaringi, host of the podcast Il Gioco in Tavolo, has just released a book of interviews with such gaming stalwarts as Ken St. Andre, Sandy Petersen, Kenneth Hite, and Shane Hensley. I'm in there too. Narrative at the Crossroads is on sale now.

Also on the subject of gamebooks, Paul Gresty was writing the eighth Fabled Lands book, The Lone & Level Sands, but had to abandon it because of other commitments. That was a shame, The Serpent King's Domain being regarded as perhaps the best in the series, but the good news is that Paul handed over around 750 finished sections. By the standards of most books that's almost finished. We're now looking at bringing in writers to help complete it. The book should eventually round out around 900 sections and will hopefully be the basis of new add-on content for the Prime Games CRPG. To whet your interest, here's the flowchart.

How our new gamebook came to be

My Whispers Beyond The Stars co-creator Paweł Dziemski sat down with podcast host Riccardo Scaringi recently for an in-depth discussion of the print gamebook, the app, the story, and the Storm Weavers online shop where you can buy it and other gamebooks. I found their discussion amazingly informative -- and I was one of the authors!

Theatre of the artificial mind

Picking up from last time, another entertainment use for AI will be in staging plays that we otherwise wouldn't get to see. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, for instance, which Coleridge regarded as one of the three "most perfect" plots in all of fiction. (If you're anything like me you'll immediately need to know that the others were Fielding's Tom Jones and Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus.) You can find amateur versions online like the one above, but no fully staged production. Likewise for many plays of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Stoppard, Coward... The list is endless. 

To illustrate: lately I've had a hankering for the plays of Martin McDonagh, but just reading them isn't enough. I want to see them performed. Until now, if all you had was a script or audio file, the only way you could see a performance was if somebody went to the trouble of animating the whole thing by hand, the way the BBC did with "The Power of the Daleks" having (curse them) wiped the original videotapes.

With AI, animation of a play no longer need take a dozen-strong team working for months on end. It can be improvised on the fly using the script. With a little set-up the AI could even base the performances on digital twins of famous actors from history. It could also help to make movies that are considered too niche or too expensive for traditional production.

If the last couple of posts haven't exhausted your interest in AI, it's one of the topics I recently discussed with Riccardo Scaringi on his podcast. We also talked about Blood Sword, Fabled Lands, Dragon Warriors, Elon Musk, Vulcanverse, Cthulhu 2050, Shadow King, Jewelspider and the films of Woody Allen, so there's plenty there for the non-AI buffs:

I appreciate that using AI for entertainment is mere frippery compared to the applications in healthcare, environmental measures, materials science, energy technology, and pure science. And beyond that, and far more important, is the eventual role of strong AI not merely as a new human tool but a whole new companion species. But on the way there a little digital alchemy won't hurt.