The Lovecraft Investigations

I've been listening to The Lovecraft Investigations, a BBC audio serial by Julian Simpson that takes interesting liberties with "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward", "The Whisperer In Darkness", and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". I've provided links to the original HPL stories there because I think you'll enjoy the audio serial more if you know what they're riffing off. I'm not sure if people outside the UK can download the episodes from the BBC website for free, but if not try here.

The conceit is that we're listening to a real-life mystery podcast presented by Matthew Heawood (Barnaby Kay) and Kennedy Fisher (Jana Carpenter). These are well executed dramas, with good scripts (bar the occasional exposition-dump episode) and top-notch acting. They even got the superb Nicola Walker on board. How on earth does she have any spare time? I suspect her husband, who plays Heawood, might have twisted her arm.

If I have any quibble (and of course I do) it's that the flavour of scariness is more Delta Green than authentic Lovecraft. And, yes, I know they're not trying to do authentic Lovecraft, but it's a big step down from cosmic horror to cults-&-conspiracies. Secret organizations saving the world from scheming bogeymen? Not again, thanks. Really, what we have here is The Derlethian Investigations, whereas Lovecraft's conception of horror was genuinely innovative and I'd love to see somebody turn his ideas into a modern horror movie, TV show or podcast. That sheer bleak dread was what I was aiming for with the scenario "The End of the Line" but even there the tension can only build for so long before it all breaks up into running and screaming. Maybe that's a problem with all drama: the takeoff is always more atmospheric and interesting than the landing. That could explain Lovecraft's own aversion to plot. Thrillers are just fairground rides, whereas what was at stake in his stories was something much more personal and disquieting.

But anything that retained the existentialist nightmarishness of unadulterated HPL would likely not be that popular. Audiences want the Doctor Who style of panto horror -- the same thinking that inflicted a queen on the Borg, so that they could get actors in to chew the scenery. After a century of tying plucky reporters to chairs and planning rituals that will summon the apocalypse, it's futile to hope that drama is going to change now. But The Lovecraftian Investigations is a great deal better written than Doctor Who is these days, so putting my purist nitpicking aside I'll happily recommend it as a gripping and genuinely creepy modern classic. I've been listening to it while strolling the sunlit woodland of Surrey and it has transported me to shabby London car parks, rain-swept patches of Orford Ness, posh Pall Mall clubs, and spooky old cottages at night. It's true what they say. On radio, the pictures are better.

Coming up tomorrow: what happens when your roleplaying adventure hinges on a key character -- and the player can't make it that week?

Anybody out there?

Sam needs the help of a good friend. You are Sam's guide and only contact outside the evacuated area. Without you, Sam will not survive the next few days.

A character-driven, chat-based, story-rich text adventure game in which trust is as important as problem-solving? Of course I'm going to like Everbyte's Dead City. I'm sometimes asked what the future of gamebooks will look like. Like this.

And while poking around Everbyte's site I also found they've made an audio adventure -- something I was harping on about twenty years ago, and still am. The future of gamebooks is finally here.

But wait, there's more. Storyfix Media have just released Christopher Webster's interactive adventure The Pulse. This is another one that breaks with the old second-person narrative style in favour of building a relationship with a character. You make the decisions, they take the risks. Immediately there's the potential there for conflict, suspicion, unreliability, trust. If you've played my Frankenstein interactive story you'll know it's a development in the genre that I think is ripe for experimentation. To the castle..!

Fright Tonight

Fright Tonight is an interactive audio drama that I've written for Amazon Echo. It's pretty ground-breaking, too, even if I have to say it myself. I needed a model of interactivity that would allow the listener to influence the characters in the story while still being surprised by what happens. So the way I've done that is --

No, I can't just tell you. You have to play it for yourself. Trust me when I say that Fright Tonight is much more than a game. It's a compelling and completely innovative form of audio entertainment which is destined to be as talked-about as Orson Welles's 1938 Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds, only this time without the traffic jams and the shot-up water towers.

Experience an interactive ghost story set in Heskill Hall, England's most haunted stately home, where a great tragedy took place decades ago. Now the cynical radio host of the niche horror show “Fright Tonight” might just get the show of his life, as the crew gets ready to record their live Halloween special at nightfall in the deserted manor house...

Oh, and it's free too. Just dim the lights (easy if you have your Echo hooked up) and say, "Alexa, start Fright Tonight."

There are already some fun adventure games for Alexa -- such as The Magic Door, which is effectively an audio walking sim -- but Fright Tonight is nothing like that.. The style of interaction doesn’t require the listener to be a “game player” as such, meaning that they can be gripped by the narrative. I admire The Magic Door, but it’s the equivalent of a ghost train ride at a funfair, whereas Fright Tonight is genuine interactive drama. The developers are Mythmaker Media. Remember the name, as I'm hoping to do a whole lot more projects with them.

Who is the target audience? An interesting question, that, whenever you attempt something new. The appeal of something like Fright Tonight is certainly not limited to readers of Choose Your Own Adventure or to people who’d play a traditional adventure or CRPG videogame. While I’m sure I’ll pick up lots of listeners/players who would play, say, Layers of Fear or >observer_ , I'm aiming to appeal to lean-back audiences who just like a good scary story. So I see the typical audience being the entire family, from kids up to grandparents, and including lots of people who would never normally play a game.

Who knows, this could be the big comeback for audio drama. I hope so. As my dad always used to say, the great thing about radio is the pictures are better.

By the light of the night it'll all seem all right

A few weeks ago I got a call from Amazon to talk about the Halloween releases for Alexa. They’d seen my Frankenstein app and wondered if it could be turned into an interactive audio story.

I’d already talked to a few audiobook companies about that. Frankenstein is tailor-made for audio. It’s narrated by Victor Frankenstein, whose confidant and advisor you are, and written “to the moment” (ie in the present continuous tense). And I’ve been banging on about audio adventure games since I worked at Eidos in the mid-90s. So Amazon’s suggestion was perfect, except…

It’s over 150,000 words. That’s about twenty hours of audio. I’d have to edit all the text, it would need to be cast, recorded, have sound effects added, coded – and all that within five weeks, assuming one month was enough for testing.

So naturally I said I’d do it. Not only that, I’d recently talked to a company called Mythmaker Media about working on an interactive audio project, so how about hooking them in?

“We already have a developer in mind for Frankenstein,” the Amazon guy said, “but why don’t I talk to Mythmaker anyway? Maybe there’s another project you can do with them.”

A few days later, that one got the green light too. Now, as well as editing Frankenstein, I had to write an interactive audio drama from scratch. Only seven thousand words, but it had to be scary (Halloween, remember) and it had be a completely innovative model of interactive storytelling. (Otherwise why do it?)

Skype chirruped again. “What about your gamebook Crypt of the Vampire? That could be an Alexa app, couldn’t it? Can you get that ready for Halloween?”

I said yes on the basis that you can’t have too many irons in the fire; something always goes wrong. And a few days later the Frankenstein developer, having run the numbers for actors’ fees and studio time, asked if it would work with synthesized speech.

“Not really. Victor has to come across as impassioned, driven, stressed, increasingly desperate… But look, the story is in six parts. The second part is different from the others. It’s the monster’s story told in second person, so you are the monster. That might just work with synthesized speech. And it’s just thirty thousand words, so I’d have time to edit it and add markup. Pauses, interjections, that kind of thing.”

They lost interest. Not to worry, as I still had the drama with Mythmaker Media (that’s called “Fright Tonight”) and the gamebook, by now retitled “The Vampire’s Lair” because it’s snappier. Or bitier.

For The Vampire’s Lair I’ve teamed up with a programmer called Kevin Glick. We decided to strip out all the game-heavy mechanics: hit points, skill rolls, things like that. It’s audio, after all, though in fact there’s a Fire Tablet option with some toothsome graphics by Leo Hartas. The way it works now, you play until you die, and you can then either buy another life and keep going, or you can restart from the beginning. (And, yes, of course it’s possible to play right through to the end without having to buy a single life.)

So I hauled out a copy of Crypt of the Vampire, my first ever gamebook from way back in 1984, and embarked on what I thought would be a simple editing job. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, as they say, the enemy in this case being reality. Too much of Crypt was a dungeon bash when what Kevin and I needed was a haunted house adventure. Too many encounters depended on dice rolls. All of that needed to be rewritten. Also, it needed to be scary. Fun-scary, you understand, like pumpkin lanterns and spray-can cobwebs. The orcs had to go.

Luckily I wrote “Fright Tonight” first, because plunging into the flowchart for Crypt and completely rewriting about half of the book would have burned out my creative psyche for weeks. But I got it done, and the result should be soon available on Amazon as an Alexa Skill. (Yeah, don’t blame me; that’s what they call them.) Just say, “Alexa, enter The Vampire’s Lair,” and get ready for some agreeable chills.