That old serpent

We were just talking last month about how the fantasy adventure gamebook has evolved into (among other things) CRPGs, so no need to go into all that again. This is Inkle's latest gamebook app in the Sorcery series, and it's interesting that 80 Days seems to have steered them more towards the go-anywhere open world gameplay of Fabled Lands.

Good thing too, though I'll admit to a heartsink when I saw a piece of simulated text-on-paper flip up onto the screen - only because the rest of it looks so good, particularly Mike Schley's maps, that those old connections to gamebooks' past seem as out of place as wisdom teeth or a burst appendix. (I know, I know - text is inexpensive; I'm not faulting Inkle for using it, just saying that the rest of their banquet looks so appetizing that the paper napkins are bound to come as a slight disappointment.)

What particularly impresses me is that all this is built on the foundations of Inklewriter, a markup language, rather than the object-oriented database structure you'd use in a CRPG. But that's the bit of the iceberg you don't see. The important thing is that Sorcery 3 is here, it looks great, and if Games Workshop style goblin-bashing is what floats your boat, you're going to be spending the next few months in Analand. (Don't look at me; it's what Steve Jackson called it.)

Hot and cold about interactive literature

I was talking to James Wallis about Powell and Pressburger and how one of my favourite movies – my “hang out” movie, as Tarantino would have it – is A Canterbury Tale. I mentioned that the Pilgrim’s Way passed near my old school and how I’d always wanted to walk it. Possibly I was thinking of cross-country runs around Newland’s Corner with the sleet in my teeth , and the operative word was walk. Anyway, it made an impression on James. The following year he got engaged to the beautiful Cat Muir, asked me to be his best man, and suggested that I and Martin McKenna make ready with him to wenden on pilgrymage.

To my everlasting regret, I wasn’t able to tread the whole route from Winchester to Canterbury. Elixir Studios had just closed down and I was too busy looking for a job to clear two weeks for the simple pleasure of wayfaring with good friends. I should have done. You can’t bunk off halfway through a pilgrimage, not even if you’re an agnostic like me.

Anyway, you'll be glad to know there is a point. James decided that a good angle for charity fundraising would be to do the whole 146 miles without a map. Instead, he brought along a written description of the landmarks we should be steering by: a track beside a field, turn left at the second farm, etc.

Remind you of anything? It’s like Fabled Lands, where you find yourself in deep countryside with something like this to guide you:

The irony there is that Jamie Thomson and I didn’t originally intend the player to navigate using the text. Our first thought was that you’d move a counter around the map, with the usual allowance for terrain type. Regions would be marked with different encounter tables and each city and town would have a number that pointed to the text in the book.

Why did we change our minds? Because navigating by map would have required a little more work on the part of the player, and gamebook readers in the ‘90s weren’t as accustomed to that kind of thing as role-players. Yet when Jamie and I were working at Eidos, and we talked to Ian Livingstone about turning FL into a computer game, we enthusiastically returned to the idea of using the map as the main armature around which you’d build your character’s story. Here’s the first part of our pitch document:

A scrolling map of the world. Key figures (players and powerful NPCs) appear on this map, but you can only tell the profession of characters if they're in the same country as you are (ie, those characters will be differentiated into Warriors, Mages, etc; those in other countries are just shown as a generic character sprite).

That was 1996. Almost twenty years on, gamebook apps like Sorcery and 80 Days made the long-overdue step of having the top layer be the map – just simple common sense because, as James and Martin and I soon discovered on the North Downs Way, trying to find your way around the Home Counties from just a text description is sheer insanity. This is so much better:

But when you switch in the map layer, is that still a gamebook? Leaving aside the question of the “game” part (there is dice-rolling but little or no actual gameplay in almost all the gamebooks I’ve seen), the distinguishing feature of gamebooks is that they are like novels. So let’s go back to basics with what a novel is. You are presented with prose that functions as a kind of blueprint or program for what is going on in the story, and when you run that program in your mind, you construct an imaginary reality. The whole shebang may seem to be in the control of the author, but in fact you are lucidly dreaming your own version of the world with just occasional nudges from the text. (It’s actually the basic mechanism of human awareness too, incidentally, but let’s not get sidetracked.)

That lucid dreaming process is very different from watching a movie or playing a videogame. There the world you’re experiencing is already rendered for you. (And when I say that, you realize I’m not only talking about the graphics, right?) This is why it is easy to interact with any visual or even aural story, but in the case of prose we have to disengage the part of the brain that’s modelling the world around us in order to decide what choice to make. How can we make that easier? Well, there’s a world of difference between parsing this:

and this:

The square is empty. To the north is a river. You do not see a key here.

All this is not exactly new. Marshall McLuhan wrote about hot and cold media (he said “cool” but, y’know). A hot medium is doing the work for you. A firework display, for example, or a blockbuster action movie. A cold medium (comics, say, or novels) requires your conscious participation in the process. It’s a continuum, so the short example of text-adventure prose above is hotter than the novel-like one involving the Gargan twins.

The confounding factor here is interactivity. It’s very easy to interact with a hot medium. A ball flies at me; I swipe it away. But interactivity with a story is more of a conscious process. Do you want the princess to marry the prince or to spend her days singing MOR show tunes? Let me think… Yet as I spin the cogs to decide that, the entire world of the novel must grind to a halt, even begin to fray around the edges, as I’m not consciously sustaining it. So, the more you want the reader to interact – in fact, the more you want them to be a player – the less you must make them a reader.

Arguably the text in an app like Sorcery is crying out to be severely de-novelized, reduced from this:

to this:

or preferably replaced altogether with animated characters. It’s evolving into a game anyway, and in doing so is proving far more popular than a straight “book-like” interactive story app. So why retain features that gamebooks only had originally by reason of historical circumstance, because the only mobile devices in those days were paperbacks and because artwork was too expensive?

Or is there a valid reason for interactive stories to hang onto their gamebook roots and even to play up the novelistic elements? What do you think?

No dice: rules mechanics for non-random combat

I’m often having a go at dice in digital gamebooks. It's a legacy feature, like having section numbers displayed. Might as well have the reader rub out text with their thumb. (Hey, that might actually be a cool thing on an iPad. Not in e-gamebooks, though, thank you all the same.)

Assuming a gamebook has skill checks and combats (and that’s an assumption worth challenging) the question remains: if not dice then what?

In an earlier post I talked about the combat mechanic in Inkle’s digital adaptation of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery books. This is similar to the system used in classic boardgame Apocalypse – and seeing as Steve is a hardcover boardgamer, and such a fan of Apocalypse (née The Warlord) that he published it in 1980, I wouldn’t mind betting that he came up with that.

The way it works in Apocalypse was that one territory attacks another. The attacker hides a number from 1 to 6 (not exceeding the number of units in the attacking territory) and the defender makes a guess. If the defender guesses the number right, the attacker loses that number of units from his territory. If the defender guesses wrong, he loses one unit from his territory and the attacker gains a reward (a segment of missile) for use later in the game. Also, if the defender’s territory is now vacant – that is, if he just removed his last unit there – the number the attacker selected is how many units he gets to move in and take the territory. A high number is good for holding the territory, but the defender knows that so it’s a will-he-won’t-he puzzle.

Nick Henfrey and I used a similar mechanic in our Lord of Light boardgame for Games Workshop. Oh, you don’t remember that one? That’s only because Workshop lost interest in it a few minutes after our first meeting. Nick and I didn’t get the memo, so we completed a rather good boardgame and if anyone would like to publish it (perhaps with Kirby concept art) the email address is right there in the sidebar.

Rather than waste a neat game mechanic, I recycled it as the Spiral of Gold, a pastime of the Magi in The Battlepits of Krarth. Here’s Grandmaster Klef explaining how it works:

The being spreads his hands over the surface of the table. As he draws them back, fourteen gleaming gold coins are revealed - seven in a line in front of him, seven on your side of the table. Beside each line of coins rests a six-sided die. All the coins are showing heads.

‘I am called Kief,’ says the mysterious being. ‘I am Grandmaster of this game, which the True Magi called the Spiral of Gold. Pay close attention as I explain it to you.

‘We play in Rounds, called Spirals. In the first Spiral I shall secretly select a number on my die, placing it under my hand with the number I have chosen uppermost. You do the same. Then we reveal and compare our chosen numbers. Suppose that I have the higher number. In this case you would lose some of your coins - equal to the difference between our two chosen numbers. I do not get the coins you lose; they just vanish. All right, so in our example you’ve lost some of your coins. I wouldn’t lose any, but the number I displayed on my die is the number of coins I have to flip over from heads to tails. So if I displayed a 4 and you displayed a 3, you’d lose one coin and I’d have to flip over four of my coins from heads to tails. 

‘We then start the next Spiral by recovering – that is, if either player has any coins showing tails, he can flip one of them over to heads again. Then we select numbers as before, and play proceeds until one player has no heads showing at the end of a Spiral. Then he’s lost.

‘There are three other rules you must remember. You cannot choose a number on your die that is equal to or greater than the number of heads you have showing. That means that we can each put any number from 1 to 6 on the first Spiral, since we start with seven coins, all heads up. But if at some later point in the game I had only five heads showing, I’d have to choose a number from 1 to 4. Secondly, if we both choose the same number then that Spiral is a draw and neither player loses anything. Lastly, when you have to lose a number of coins you must take them from the heads, not the tails, among the coins you have left.'

All of which goes to show you can have a combat system (or any conflicting skill resolution) without going to the fuss of having virtual dice rattle around on the screen of the phone, tablet or PC you’re running your digital gamebook on. If Jamie and I get around to doing digital versions of the Blood Sword books, that's how we'll work it.

That's my monster

Nice to see my digital retelling of Frankenstein getting some love at the Publish! conference today. I started designing Frankenstein over two years ago and it's still getting cited as an innovation in interactive storytelling. Jon Ingold of Inkle Studios (whose technology powered the app) pointed out that a single read-through of Frankenstein is upwards of 80,000 words and that the work "draws out the themes of Shelley’s work in new and unusual ways. Just as Doctor Frankenstein tries to understand his monster empathetically, so we as readers attempt to understand Victor for ourselves."

It's quite a happy accident that Frankenstein fits so well with the philiosophy behind Inkle's own projects, as they had no input into the design or writing. But it is the interesting way forward for interactive stories right now, as games like The Walking Dead are proving. As Jon Ingold explains in a thought-provoking piece on The Literary Platform this week:

"Our stories tend not be about choosing what happens. Instead, the idea is to place readers in a conversation with the narrative."

Not literally as a conversation, of course. Though in the case of Frankenstein that is exactly what I did (most of the book consists of Victor Frankenstein's conversation with you, the reader) Jon is referring to the more general concept of interacting with the narrative to create a kind of back-and-forth. Doing something that causes other characters to distrust you, for example, alters the story in a profound, reactive way that picking the left-hand door doesn't.

This "conversation with the narrative" is a design ethic we may see creeping into Steve Jackson's Sorcery series, the second of which is due for release shortly. Meanwhile, Frankenstein is still available for iOS and Android. Here's a little bit from Victor's pursuit of his creature into the frozen north:

The stuffy, noxious air of the cabin affects me badly after the dry chill outside. My head sinks onto my arms and waves of feverish weakness shake my body. I have pushed myself beyond endurance these last weeks – but I cannot falter now, not when I am so close to my quarry.

The old woman shakes me and leads the way to a box room with a cot where I can lie down. Young goats peer in through beams that separate this from the next room. A thin icy draft makes its way in under the rafters, reviving me slightly. Thanking the old woman, I pull the furs around me and wait for sleep to come.

How hateful life has become to me. To endure each day I have to force the bitter memories away, and build a wall that stops me thinking of those I have lost. It’s only in sleep that I can recall what it is to be happy. Oh, why can’t I banish this turmoil of thoughts? Let me sink into sleep. Where are the dreams I need that will give me a respite from the darkness?

I can hear my father’s voice. William is with him, and – yes – there are Elizabeth’s silver tones. Henri too. All of my friends, gather me to your arms, give me strength for what is to come.

They emerge out of a fog. The fog of reality is lifting as dreams come roiling up, and the light that hangs around them is dazzling. I am familiar with that light. It is the celestial exhalation of the spirits that guide me.

But why is Elizabeth’s face so contorted with anguish? Come closer, dear cousin. Speak to me.

‘Destroy the monster, Victor. You must sunder him in pieces. Burn him. Cut out his eyes, torture him, make him pay for the suffering he inflicted on us.’

‘Pour acid in his veins,’ says my father.

‘Let his screams echo across the plain,’ says Henri. ‘Smash in his skull. Let him feel what it is to have life brutally taken away.’

‘Give him a slow death,’ says little William. ‘Let him crawl in agony all the way to the gates of hell.’

And all of them, as they urge me thus, are smiling like cherubs before the throne of God.

Do gamebooks need text?

The sweet spot for a gamebook app is the perfect balance between graphics and text - which maps, at a deeper level, to the balance between "game" and "book". I said in the last post that Inkle's Sorcery app achieves that, but there may be other sweet spots too. That's really just a guess. I'm basing it on the principle that a gamebook in print form can work perfectly well if there are no pictures, and a CRPG is fine with no words. (The way I play them, anyway - I can never be bothered to stop and read all those tedious parchmenty scrolls, much to Jamie's annoyance.)

But that's just the limiting cases. How about places in between? Inkle found one - are there others? And what about the medium itself? How much of a difference does that make? Reading a gamebook in print is not very different from reading a novel. On the first run-through, at least, you'll probably take time to enjoy the prose. But put the same book onto a phone, and there's a strong impulse to flip through all the jaw-jaw to get to the next set of choices.

I spent the last eight months converting four Virtual Reality titles and the first two books in the Way of the Tiger series into ebook format. Yes, not apps, ebooks. Will readers respond to these as they would to a print gamebook? I hope so; I've kept the print reading experience pretty much unchanged, as you can see from the screenshot above. But is that a valid assumption? If you're reading the books on an ereader, you presumably don't expect graphical bells and whistles. On a tablet or phone, though, you could go straight from playing The Shamutanti Hills or An Assassin in Orlandes to Heart of Ice. Absorbing a story in the form of prose requires a different mental gear, in fact a whole other mind-set, from reacting to hybrid input comprising graphics, text and audio.

To sum up: it is not obvious whether people can read a gamebook like a regular book when it is transplanted from the page to the screen.

If I were writing new interactive books, there are two obvious ways I might go. One is to dispense with the gameplay aspect so that the book is "interactive literature" - that is, it's all about the reading experience. That's what I did with Frankenstein and Jon Ingold did with Flaws. This is the interesting direction for interactive fiction if it wants to grow up.

The other route is to stick with solve-the-plot interactivity but do something with much less text - either as a Fabled Lands type experience with very short descriptive passages and a lot of freedom of choice, or by making it more of an interactive motion comic and dropping text altogether. Of the two latter options, the first tends towards CRPGs - in fact, is really just a CRPG on the cheap - so will not thrive long as a distinct species, I think. The other is just how to arrive back at adventure games by means of a ten-year detour. Which is no bad thing; adventure games have always been waiting for the equivalent of a Wii to bring them to the mass market, and maybe the iPad or iPhone is it.

What do you think is the next step in the evolution of gamebooks? Don't all shout at once.

What sorcery is this?

The strain of fantasy represented by Dungeons and Dragons and the subdivision of same that is Fighting Fantasy are not my cup of tea, but I always had a bit of a soft spot for Steve Jackson's Sorcery gamebooks. I remember actually playing through a couple of them - and bear in mind that Jamie and I spent most of our working days back in the '80s writing gamebooks, so reading other people's wasn't usually the leisure activity we'd pick to while away an evening.

The Sorcery books benefited from Steve Jackson's innovative gameplay ideas (most notably the magic system, based on 3-letter spells that the reader had to cast from memory) and a world that was a bit more interesting than the usual DnD-flavoured setting. Apparently Steve was inspired by his travels in Nepal and, while we're not talking Tekumel here or even Jorune, there is a genuine sense of the exotic that moves it away from being sort-of Tolkien, sort-of medieval. It was also possibly the first time that a series of gamebooks built into one single epic quest. Oh, and it wasn't just room after room in a big old dungeon. In 1985, something new like Sorcery really stood out.

It's fitting, then, that now that gamebooks are enjoying an Indian summer thanks to digital media, the Sorcery series is getting a retool from the Rolls-Royce Ltd of interactive book apps, Inkle Studios. The first of their Sorcery adaptations for iPad, The Shamutanti Hills, was released this week and, as Kotaku's reviewer commented, it "takes the genre to a whole new level".

Full disclosure: Inkle were the developers of my Frankenstein app, and were responsible for its gorgeous look and feel as well as providing the smoothest set of tools for writing I could have wished for - so you may need to correct for a slight bias here. But even allowing for that, I've already spent three or four hours playing Sorcery and it was only released a couple of days ago. So trust me, it's going to be a gamebook-changer.

We were recently discussing the clattery old dice-based combat systems in gamebooks of yore, so I'll start with that. Inkle have dispensed with the random rolls in favour of a streamlined tactical system that allows for an element of skill. Combats are now really rather fun, as strong attacks temporarily sap your energy and, if the opponent attacks more strongly (as in the screenshot below), will also result in you taking a more serious wound. You'll sit judiciously weighing up your choice each round and wincing when a wrong move has you stumbling into the path of the enemy's sword.

As you'd expect from Inkle, the imagery and visual design are glorious. Even something as simple as selecting the three letters of a spell is evocative and tactile, and navigating on the 3D map feels almost like dropping into the title sequence of Game of Thrones. (Okay, maybe I'm overstating it a bit there, but it's a safe bet that's where Inkle are headed in future. Give 'em time.)

So, that map. I expected to find myself skimming the text and just playing the game like an '80s top-down CRPG, but in fact the transition between map and text is pretty seamless. The more visually enhanced and videogame-like a gamebook becomes, in theory, the less patience the player will have for prose. That's not to say that long sections of text can't work in digital gamebooks, just that you have to decide where to set the slider: book or game? Sorcery's specific balance is probably not the only right answer, but it's certainly one of them.

I didn't keep my copies of the original books, so it's hard to say how much of the text is Steve Jackson's and how much has been added by Jon Ingold, but the end result certainly feels fresh and vigorously fast-paced. There are also elegant turns of phrase and sophisticated storytelling techniques like the opening flashforward that I think must have come from Jon. Either way, it's a nice read with most of the traditional DnD campaign tropes given a shiny new trim thanks to the finer and more immediate writing style.

Quibbles there are a few. The map navigation occasionally leads you to expect more freedom than the original structure of the adventure allows. So, for example, you'll venture into a tavern only to find that the option to visit a nearby waterfall disappears for good. Now, if only this had been a Fabled Lands book instead of... Ah, but now I'm dreaming.

The monsters let the setting down a bit. Ratbears. Goblins. Manticores. Trolls. Giant bats. We certainly can't blame Inkle for that. They had to work with the books they were given, and I expect those were originally populated from a Monster Manual for the sake of an afternoon's gaming. The only reason I draw attention to it is that there's that little hint of something special in the world and the religion, and then we get the usual thudding parade of DnD creatures, which is a shame.

Oh, and another legacy from the books is the flip-of-a-coin flippancy with which you may get killed. A witch is casting a spell. Do you leap left or right? Make the wrong choice and you're fried. Gamebook readers of thirty years ago may have stood for that but, alongside all the genuine innovations Inkle has put into this, the old cavalier style of gamebook "GMing" is kind of fusty.

I don't want to make too much of the quibbles, though. Make no mistake, this is a revolutionary app that has for the most part completely rejuvenated its source material. In every sense - graphics, writing, animation, music - Sorcery is a deluxe product worth hours of entertainment for the absurdly low price of £2.99. No, I can't believe that either. Snap it up while you can and count the days until Inkle release the second book, Cityport of Traps. Me, I'm standing outside the walls of Khare even as we speak.

Inkle's digital Sorcery

If you're a longtime gamebook fan then you'll be aware of Steve Jackson's Sorcery series of linked gamebooks with a blend of unusual game mechanics and puzzles set in a world that was part Nepal, part Middle Earth. Tekumel it wasn't, but it was streets ahead of the competition back in the '80s.

I don't know if the Sorcery books ever explicitly connected with the Fighting Fantasy world of Alan, but in the minds of the readers I'm sure it was an easy glide between the two. (And in fact Wizard Books's new edition explicitly places them in the FF series, which clinches it.)

But that was then. It was a time when trees had to die so that we could read. Now dawns the age of backlit glass and pixels, a world in which gamebooks stand blinking like a cosily familiar but hopelessly befuddled elderly relative. So I've been curious to see what Inkle Studios would do with the iPad adaptation of Sorcery.

Inkle, as you may know, supplied the luscious visual design that burnished the iOS version of my Frankenstein interactive novel. The expectation for Sorcery, then, was that we'd see a graphically enhanced port of the books onto iPad. Now that Inkle are unveiling some details, it looks to be much more interesting than that. Sure, there's a lovely drawn 3D map by Mike Schley and dynamic character animation for the combats by Eddie Sharam. But instead of just a gamebook on a tablet, what we're seeing here is an evolution of gamebooks into something new.

On the surface it looks like a top-down CRPG (which is something much more likely to get a few hours of my time than a Fighting Fantasy book) but the truth is more complex and more interesting. You can go back and forth around the world Fabled Lands style, which I don't think was a feature of the original Sorcery books. More importantly, look what they've done with the text. It develops as you go - not in a simple old-style gamebook way, where the text you read depends on whether you take the money or open the box. Oh no. The style of the narrative - the way things are described, the way you speak - is shaped by the way you're playing.

Say you stride boldly into every battle. The system learns that and gives you text that portrays you as fearless. The things you say will be forthright and challenging. It's the original concept of Fable, only here it looks like it might go deeper than the colour of armour you wear over your Union Jack underpants. And the text that is being written aggregates a complete story, right down to the level of having procedurally-generated descriptions of the fights you get into. You could give the end result to a friend and it's the novel of your imaginary life. This is sounding a lot cooler than "roll two dice and add your Skill", isn't it?

The first Sorcery book/game is coming out in May, with the sequel due by the autumn. In my view it's a game changer, and the best hope for traditional "D&D-style" adventure gamebooks to find a niche along CRPGs in the 21st century. However, don't think for a moment that I'm giving up on my forthcoming Infinite IF gamebooks. They have something going for them that FF has never been renowned for: the quality of the writing, the story and the characters. That's why we're releasing them as ebooks, not apps, and have purposely kept them free of animated frills. But more on that next time.