Let's be serious

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to literature and drama. One view is that it’s entertainment, it should be fun, and it shouldn’t challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable. That’s a strain that’s developed in Britain and America particularly and used to be known as the Young Lady Standard. The term is particularly unfair seeing as Emily Bronte wrote one of the most uncompromising novels of all time. Nowadays we’re hopefully less sexist and young ladies get the same educational benefits as young gentlemen, so let’s instead call it the Cosy Standard. In TV broadcasting it’s the equivalent of pre-watershed content.

On the other hand, fiction can take you right into the depths of the human soul to confront both the marvellous and the terrible. It can shake you up. Read Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine” or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Nabokov’s – oh, well almost anything by Nabokov, in fact. You’ll face some profound truths. Like all great art, these works can change you. But you’d never say of them, “Oh, it’s entertainment, it’s just a bit of fun.”

That’s even more true of games, where the very name of the medium leads people into assuming it has to be frivolous and jolly. When Profile Books published my interactive version of Frankenstein, one reviewer complained that she didn’t want to be complicit in the creature’s murder of 6-year-old William Frankenstein. Too bad. Every reader of the novel who finds themselves sympathizing with the creature is going to have to face that moment. The game version just really rubs your nose in it. There are games like Papers, Please and This War of Mine that are trying to be L'Armée des Ombres rather than a boys'-own romp like Kelly's Heroes.

This is the point Jim Desborough was making with his widely (and often deliberately) misrepresented article “In Defence of Rape”. If you’re a grown-up, you look to fiction (including games) to tell the truth, not wrap the world up in a comforting nursery blanket.

This exact point came up recently in the case of a motion capture performer who refused to act out a rape scene for a game. That is their right, no question about that. And I have no idea what the game was, so I don’t know if the performer was correctly judging it when they said, "It was just purely gratuitous in my opinion." But it wouldn’t have to be gratuitous. Suppose this is a WW2 game. You’re sneaking into a Nazi-occupied village to plant some explosives or steal the attack plans or whatever. Stealth is the watchword. But you pass a window where you see an enemy soldier raping a villager. (Or torturing a villager. Or even in the act of murdering them, since this isn’t Victorian times and we don’t buy into “the fate worse than death”.)

Now here’s the question. Do I shoot the Nazi soldier? In doing so I’ll save the villager but I’ll give away my presence in the village, jeopardising the mission. Or do I pass by, hardening my heart to the villager’s screams because many lives hinge on the success of the mission and so it’s more important than one innocent person? It’s the Trolley Problem but not presented in the dispassionate context of a philosophy lecture. The decision is brutal and I’m going to have to live with it. The choices that confront you with challenges to your most fundamental moral principles are the ones that fuel the most powerful stories, because they make us think hard about who we really are.

As I said, I don’t know if that’s what the game’s designers were trying to do. But you would expect good literature or cinema to confront you with raw and disturbing situations like that. Games are an art form no less capable than literature or drama of addressing difficult moral questions. Games can be simple uncomplicated fun, of course, and many are. But that’s not all they can be.

Yakety yak

A little while ago, I was asked by my Italian publishers to do an interview for Tom's Hardware. Then it occurred to me that some of the answers might be interesting to readers of this blog, so if you don't speak Italian here's the meat of it:

Dave, in Italy, you’re known especially for the Blood sword series. Since those books were originally published a lot of time has passed. How do you think gamebooks have evolved? What was the market like in the ‘80s and how is it different today?

It was totally different. Gamebooks were a huge craze among what we now call “middle grade” kids (roughly 9-12 years old) and you pretty much only had to walk into a publisher with an idea to get offered a contract. Gamebooks would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. I think it was because kids were ready for videogames but those were still quite expensive and the graphics were quite primitive. So gamebooks filled a gap.

Blood Sword was the first multiplayer gamebook. How did you transform a solitary experience like a gamebook into a shared game?

Oliver Johnson and I always start the planning process for one of our gamebooks by thinking about events we’ve used in our roleplaying games, so multiplayer comes naturally to us. I was also aware when we wrote Blood Sword that a lot of the readers would be people who already played Dragon Warriors (set in the same fantasy universe) which meant that they probably would have gaming friends who they wanted to share the adventure with. We made sure that every character type has a chance to shine, and if you are playing it as a team there are some sections that only one character gets to read. We find that a dash of secrecy and competitiveness adds an edge to any roleplaying game.

Recently you ran a Kickstarter campaign for a new edition of Blood Sword 5 The Walls of Spyte. Why that book in particular?

I’d already edited the rest of the series for re-release in 2014, but when I got to the fifth book I found that the work needed to make it playable was more than the other four books put together. There were parts of the flowchart that simply didn’t link up. If I’d left it till I had time to revise The Walls of Spyte then none of the books would have got back in print, so I published the first four and put book five aside. I kept meaning to return to it but there was so much work involved that I couldn’t justify it as something to do in my spare time. The Kickstarter provided the funds needed to do it properly.

What should a gamebook have today to be current? Do you think that classic forking-path stories are still enough, or should gamebooks dare to try something new?

I’m always interested in something new. In my Frankenstein digital gamebook, the focus is not on solving “the problem of the plot” but on your relationship with Victor Frankenstein, the narrator. The variables are things like Trust, Hubris and Alienation. If you give Victor bad advice, he loses trust in you and that affects whether he’ll listen to your suggestions in future.

Recently I wrote Fright Tonight, which is billed as an interactive drama for the Amazon Echo, but it’s effectively still a branching-path gamebook in terms of structure. I’ll be releasing that as a Kindle book later this year, and one of the things that makes it different is there are no stats, no character sheet, no dice. You just answer yes or no to the characters’ questions. Trust me, it’s as gripping as any gamebook I wrote back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Some say we are living through a renaissance of gamebooks. What do you think about that? In a world dominated by videogames and mobile games, do you think is there any space for gamebooks? What kind of appeal can they have for new, especially young, players?

Fewer people are reading books these days, and on average those people read fewer books per year, so it looks as if gamebooks will have to come up with some new tricks. For one thing, there’s not really a lot of point doing more fantasy quest-style gamebooks. Computer games do the same thing and they do it better. Gamebooks have traditionally tackled stories from a problem-solving angle. That’s natural given the menu of choices structure, but again it’s not enough to entice somebody away from a computer game or a movie, or even playing Fortnite on their phone. So how do we write gamebooks that offer the reader something they can’t get elsewhere?

One clue to the answer comes from looking at how television drama competes with cinema. Even the most lavish TV show can’t match the budget of a Hollywood blockbuster, so it has to play to its strengths. A 13-hour TV drama has a lot more room to explore character complexity than a 2-hour movie, with the result that if you sit down to watch Mission Impossible after The Americans, or Warcraft after Game of Thrones, it’s like going from a novel to a newspaper cartoon. Gamebooks can do something similar, involving the reader in difficult moral choices and options that will change other characters’ opinion of them. Modern audiences in all media expect this emotional depth. As a medium, gamebooks have to grow up.

You have written scores of books; gamebooks, novels, comics, and RPGs in your career. What have been the most difficult things to write? And of which are you particularly proud?

Most difficult was my recent gamebook Can You Brexit? as I had to research all of the details of immigration, free movement, defence, policing, trade, and a dozen other things – and then make them both amusing and comprehensible to the reader. Of all my gamebooks I’m most proud of Heart of Ice, just because it came out exactly how I wanted it. You can’t always count on that as there’s a tension between delivering the sense of real freedom of choice while (in old-style gamebooks) keeping it all down to about 500 sections or less. Heart of Ice was loosely based on an old roleplaying campaign of mine and many of my players’ characters were the inspiration for the player’s rivals in the adventure. To keep myself interested while writing, I changed the setting from the fantasy world of Tekumel, which it had been in my campaign, to 23rd century Earth. That gave me a story structure to work from while still having plenty of scope to improvise details as I worked.

The work I am most pleased with overall, though, is my comic book epic Mirabilis – Year of Wonders. I care passionately about the characters, it’s exactly the blend of funny, scary, mysterious and thrilling that I was aiming for, and I think the artwork (by Leo Hartas, Martin McKenna and Nikos Koutsis) is beautiful. Unfortunately the project ground to a halt about a third of the way through for want of a publisher. In Britain, sadly, there’s not much of a market for comic books.

Is there a book you wish you had written?

I’d like to have done more Dragon Warriors books. There were originally supposed to be twelve books in the series, but the publishers messed up the distribution and then cancelled the series after six books. Oliver and I still use the setting for some of our own roleplaying games, and we’re thinking of releasing the Jewelspider RPG, which is a much more modern, freewheeling set of rules. And instead of all those polyhedral dice it just uses two six-siders.

My biggest regret, though, is not having been able to continue Mirabilis. Leo and I planned it as four seasons, but when I was halfway through season two the money ran out. It costs a lot to pay for all that art! I have the whole story blocked out and I love the characters, so maybe I’ll return to it as a prose novel – but that will be a shame, as I think it really works best as a comic book.

How did you get involved in gaming? What do you like so much about games?

That’s a very good question. I think it’s because I get to exercise my imagination and my analytic mind at the same time. It’s the same reason I design games and write fiction – you’re having to be creative and flexible while at the same time solving problems. And because they are all sorts of different problems I have to think on my feet, which I enjoy. It’s why I prefer real-time strategy games to turn-based, because of the adrenaline. In roleplaying games you’re constantly improvising, whether you’re playing in the game or running it, and I get fired up by that. Also there’s the social aspect of gaming. I like hanging out with my friends, and most of them are gamers. It’s just a shame that my wife isn’t into games, because if she did I’d happily play a boardgame most evenings.

What are your favourite games?

In face-to-face roleplaying: Empire of the Petal Throne, and other rules and spin-offs set in MAR Barker’s world of Tekumel. I like it so much I designed a set of rules myself for it, called Tirikelu, that are available free online. Recently I’ve also enjoyed Gregor Vuga’s Sagas of the Icelanders, which is an Apocalypse World variant.

As for videogames, I like What Remains of Edith Finch, Return of the Obra Din, Inside, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, The Witcher, This War of Mine, The Talos Principle – oh, too many to mention. Lately I’ve been getting into VR games as I’m doing some design work on one. My favourite computer game of all time: Outcast. That’s twenty years old and I still go back to it.

Do you still get time to play? What are you playing at the moment?

I host a roleplaying session every two weeks, and my group also try to fit in four weekend specials each year. It’s not like the old days when we could game several times a week, but everybody used to live nearby back then and none of us had families.

We’re currently playing an investigative campaign set in the 1890s. We use GURPS 4th edition for that, quite a crunchy set of rules but much better than 3rd edition. I recently wrote some chapters for the Lyonesse RPG, which uses a d100 system, but I probably won’t play it – even though Oliver and I are both devoted Jack Vance fans – because tonally the setting isn’t very different from our own world, Legend, and we really need to test out the Jewelspider system for that.

Is there a game (or even a setting) you haven't written yet but you definitely want to try?

I’d like to have a crack at a complete reboot of the world of Tekumel. As originally conceived it belonged to a style of pulp sci-fi of the mid-20th century. That’s not something that today’s players can really get into, yet behind the game lies Professor Barker’s concept of a “real” Tekumel. I think there’s a better way to present it to the current generation of roleplayers that strips away the slightly cheesy pulp style and makes it feel more solid.

Any advice for someone who would like a writing career?

I’d say, “Do you have a Plan B?” Harrison Ford trained as a carpenter, remember, so that he had something to fall back on if the acting didn’t pan out. These days, millions of books are being published every year – most of them self-published – so it’s very hard to get noticed.

If that doesn’t put you off, OK, write your book. Send it out to agents. While they’re looking at it, start writing the next book. If an agent or editor says that something in your story doesn’t work then you should listen to them. On the other hand, if they tell you how to change the book, be more sceptical – other people know if a story doesn’t grab them, but they can’t write the book your way.

Hopefully your agent will get more than one publisher interested. If they do, there may be a bidding war, which is the only way you’ll get a fair price for your work. Pay attention to contracts. What is the publisher agreeing to do, and what happens to your rights if the book isn’t successful?

Read. You already read? Read more. Read really good authors: Hemingway, Calvino, Austen, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Dickens, Eco. Don’t only read your favourite genres or authors. Think about what effect the author was striving for and how they achieved it. Always be learning.

They say, “Never give up,” but I’ll say, “Don’t reinforce failure.” If you try one thing and it doesn’t work, try something else. Short stories, novels, flash fiction, poetry, theatre. Mix genres. Ignore genres. The point is that entertainment is a fashion-driven industry, and there’s no point in plugging away at one thing if the public aren’t buying it. I know a couple of great writers – we’re talking about award winners, best-sellers in their day – whose books are not getting publishing offers these days because fashions have changed and their style of fiction is out of favour. No writer should ever try to chase fashions – you have to give the readers or viewers or players something they didn’t even know they wanted. But, at the same time, be aware of whether you’ve set up your stall in right place to get noticed.

Last question: is there any secret project you’re currently working on and can share with us?

There’s the world of Abraxas that Jamie and I devised for a massively multiplayer game we were set to work on at Eidos Interactive in 1999. Eidos closed down internal development so we never got to do the game, but I like the setting, which is science fantasy in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett. So I’m going to release that as an RPG using a variant of my Tirikelu rules. I’ve commissioned a great cover by Tancred Dyke-Wells, so now it’s just a case of me finding a spare couple of months to write it.

I also want to do a gamebook (probably digital; think 80 Days rather than Tin Man Games) based in the village of Crossgate from my Dragon Warriors campaign. This would be an open world gamebook where you can have various NPC companions and your experience of the adventure is different depending on which of them is with you. There would be multiple side-quests that you can pick up in more than one location using a sort of object-oriented approach to the story rather than the usual procedural gamebook design. (Apologies to my coder friends; I’m using these terms very loosely!) The working title for that is Winter’s Rage, but it’s another project that will have to wait for me to free up some leisure time to work on it.

The Jewelspider RPG is likely to happen much sooner, mainly because it’s very light on rules so most of it will be adventures and background for the world of Legend. And I have a science fiction setting called Earthwrecked that I ran as a roleplaying campaign and that I really should dust off and write up.

Laugh? My head fell off

I was talking last time about Paranoia, "the role-playing game of a darkly humorous future", currently returning in a new edition thanks to Kickstarter. I've never played Paranoia and it has about as much appeal for me as a game of soccer (a bit below root canal work, in other words) but it has got me thinking about how to set a role-playing campaign in a dehumanizing world "designed by Kafka, Stalin, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre and the Marx Brothers", to quote the KS page.

Actually, let's leave the Marx Brothers out of it. For me their movies go straight into Room 101. And also forget about Kafka and Sartre, who after all didn't write about the kind of purposefully malevolent state ruled over by a guy like Stalin, for whom death quotas and torture were part of the apparatus of effective government. The torture of existence in a Kafkaesque society comes from running up against people like this.

Okay, so we're talking about truly unrelenting totalitarian regimes. Is there humour to be found there? Any unchallenged political ideology will soon make paranoia the default mental state of the entire populace. To drive home its beliefs against the flow of common sense, the regime is willing and able to twist logic into unrecognizable Escher-shapes. Law becomes corrupt, identity disintegrates, truth is raped and ruined. Living in such a warped society can eventually push anyone to the kind of hysteric laughter where you want to claw your own face off. Satire may thrive, but this article suggests that it's fuelled by an uncomfortable sense of humour with a distinct smack of sweaty fear.

In North Korea, high-ranking officials would dive into the shrubbery when they saw Kim Jong-il coming. Better to risk a grass-stain than to run into the Supreme Leader in a bad mood.. It was a riot as long as he didn’t spot you. Under the bloody rule of the Khmer Rouge, men and women were beaten to death by screaming guards because they were spotted reading the labels on an orange crate, an act of subversion that showed them up to be dangerous intellectuals. See how easily that could become a gag on Mrs Brown's Boys? I don't even want to get on to the excesses of ISIS, wagging a finger in the air on YouTube as they mansplain why sawing people's heads off is a righteous act. The ghastly comedy there is that apparently one under-35 Briton in seven sympathizes with them. Hydra should be out in London recruiting right now.

And there’s an arsenical lacing of humour in novels like Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Nabokov’s Bend Sinister – even humour of a Milliganesque sort – but that taut grin curdles into a rictus of horror when the characters rebel and the regime exercises its penchant for casual, heart-stopping brutality. It’s Brazil without the comforting zaniness.

So, how to use all this in role-playing? For starters I wouldn't even attempt a sustained campaign, because the players would either have to side with the regime, which will pall pretty quickly, or they oppose it, in which case they will be crushed. (You could allow them to lead a successful revolution, but that would be fake. We all know people like Stalin live to see the good guys buried and then go off to die in their beds.) James Wallis's Alas Vegas provides a good template. There the campaign is planned to run over a set period and to reach a definite conclusion, the way a cable TV drama (say The Shield) aims to tell a given story rather than extend off into infinity like network serials of old (Columbo, etc). The end is going to be bloody, but there are all sorts of ways to die. It's up to the players to find whatever scrap of triumph they can in this scenario.

As for humour, I don't see it as my role to build that into the tone of the game. In fact playing for laughs is the surest way to make the whole experience deeply unfunny. (See reference to Mrs Brown's Boys above.) No, I'd be inclined to run it pared-down and very bleak, like having dinner with Pol Pot when he has a migraine coming on. I'm confident that my players would find humour in the gaps between tragedy and horror - and, arising out of character, that comedy would have the ring of truth. Which is really the whole point of role-playing.