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.

Thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls

Paul Gresty is perhaps best known around these parts as the writer of The Serpent King's Domain (Fabled Lands #7), but in the wider world he's the top-selling author of a couple of acclaimed Choice of Games gamebooks, The ORPHEUS Ruse and MetaHuman Inc.

Making it the hat trick, here's Wraiths of SENTINEL, an interactive adventure in which you play a Deadman-like spy:

"Dying made you the perfect spy. You are now a disembodied spirit working as a covert intelligence operative for SENTINEL, a secretive Federal agency. As a ghost, your unrivaled powers of surveillance can safeguard the freedom of the country -- or bring it to its knees. Will you use your phantom powers to defend the United States government, or to overthrow it?"

As instantly gripping and dramatic a concept as Paul's other gamebooks, then. I don't know why he isn't pitching these things to Amazon to be honest, but TV's loss is interactive literature's gain.

Dave: 'The ORPHEUS Ruse and MetaHuman Inc both have high concepts that immediately grab the reader. If they were movies you’d know just from the pitch if you wanted to see them. Wraiths of SENTINEL is like that too. What’s your process for coming up with those strong concepts? Do you start there, or do you begin at a more detailed character level and the world-building comes later?'

Paul: 'In the case of Wraiths of SENTINEL, the player is essentially a ghost, who's working as an intelligence agent for the US government. Certainly the ghostly, spectral side of that was something that had been bouncing around in my head for a long time, probably a few years. And, for interactive fiction, or for any kind of gamebook, that's how it works for me – the concept comes first. I pick at ideas, sometimes for years at a time, and then at some point things click into place. Or sometimes you have to force a few of those long-held ideas to click together, when you're pitching ideas to a publisher.

 
'I'll specify that concept and setting come first for interactive fiction – but then, the player is by definition the main character; everybody else is the supporting cast. For more conventional fiction, characters can be more prominent at the planning stage. I once listened to a Babylon 5 DVD commentary where JM Straczynski said something to the effect of, 'To write a good story, you just have to create a character that people will like, and then put him up a tree and throw rocks at him.' It's good advice.'

Dave: 'I must admit I had to look up the title each time. Was Wraiths of SENTINEL your first choice?'

Paul: 'It was not. The game went through a few different working titles during development; the game I originally pitched was The Darkling Watchers and then I later decided that I liked Wraiths of AEGIS. But that title was similar to another game that Choice of Games had already published, 180 Files: The Aegis Project. So I had to change mine. And that was entirely my own fault, of course, for being so wishy-washy about the title from the start.

 
'I had a fun time trying to think of names for a sinister government agency, that I could condense into a cool-sounding acronym. I see why so many Marvel writers do that, now. SENTINEL – that is, the Surveillance and Espionage Network, for Tactics and Initiatives in the Negation of Extra-normal Lifeforms – was the one that came out of the editing process.'

Dave: 'It’s 250,000 words, which is incredible value for money – it’s almost as long as A Game of Thrones, and those books take GRRM a decade each to write. How long did you spend on Wraiths of SENTINEL?'

Paul: 'Start to finish, it took me a crazy-long amount of time. Well over four years. In terms of fiction writing work, I've been working almost wholly on this since I finished The Serpent King's Domain. And that's not completely due to the length of the game – I had some fairly seismic life changes, good and bad, during the time I spent writing Wraiths, and that had an impact on the amount of time I could devote to it. At some point, our agreed deadlines became a bit of a distant memory, and I massively appreciate the patience the Choice of Games team showed me. (Note that I'm not encouraging other CoG writers to be so laissez-faire with their deadlines; I may have exhausted the team's patience for this kind of behaviour...)

'I'll add that 250,000 words is by no means the longest Choice of Games title. They've published a few titles over 500,000 words, and one or two that are over a million words. Those are some dedicated writers, right there.'

Dave: 'I’m curious about your process. Do you sketch out the entire storyline, do you write the scenes in order, or do you write the big set-pieces and then connect them with other scenes later?'

Paul: 'My information on how Choice of Games approaches its games might be a little out of date – I haven't pitched an idea to them for a few years, at this point – but they like to see a structured plan from their writers. They maintain an open call for writers on their website, even for writers with no prior experience with interactive fiction, so I feel that this is essentially their way of providing support at the planning stage, and ensuring that their writers aren't leaping out into the void unassisted.

'So, when it comes to creating that structure, yes, I tend to have an idea of the main points that the story needs to hit, but then offer as much flexibility as possible when navigating between those points. I find that it helps as well, in terms of both the story and the worldbuilding, to really drill down to the details of the main character's existence. What's a typical day for a government-employed wraith? Where does he live? Can he listen to music, or browse the internet? What websites might he like? When you reach that level of familiarity with your character – when you see not only the extraordinary obstacles they have to overcome, but the mundane challenges as well – the story kind of starts to write itself.

'A case in point: with Wraiths of SENTINEL, the obvious and most primordial question was why a ghost would be interested in working for anybody at all. Not for money, certainly. This consideration led to some of my favourite sections in the story, quite early on, when the player is exploring the practicalities of being a wraith – but he or she is also learning about how it feels to be truly invisible, and utterly disconnected from the world. Ultimately, and certainly in the earlier parts of the story, the player's work with SENTINEL simply offers a chance to be perceived, and to interact with others.

'For games or interactive fiction, there are also sometimes mechanical elements to consider, which can have an impact on the overall structure of the story. In MetaHuman Inc, the character can lean towards specializing in either magic or super-science – and so, in that case, I specifically wanted to include a scene about halfway through where the player can reverse those choices so far, and develop the opposing discipline without losing progress. It provides a bit more flexibility like that; the player isn't constrained by choices he made early on.'

Dave: 'Presumably there are trade-offs between making a compelling story and providing the player with freedom of choice. Do you feel those different requirements have to involve compromise, or is there a way to deliver both? In the cases when it’s either/or, which takes precedence?'

Paul: 'For the really big moments in the story, you need that element of choice. And that’s the raison d’être of the interactive fiction format; if you don’t want to offer choice, you should go write a novel instead. Moreover, you have to deal with the consequences of that choice, which might mean adding a big chunk of content to the story. You can’t short-change the player by offering a seemingly big choice that has no real impact on the overall story.

'An example in Wraiths of SENTINEL: at one point, about two-thirds of the way in, the player has a life-or-death choice over one of the major characters in the story. Most players are, I think, essentially "good", so I wrote this with the expectation that most people would allow that character to live. Even the story’s main antagonist is expecting the player to let that character live. But, for whatever reason, the player might choose differently, and I had to allow for and respect that. If the player chooses death for this character, then they’re no longer around – but it isn’t sufficient to simply send the player along a truncated version of the story. The player’s choice here isn’t inherently "wrong", and cutting their story in this way wouldn’t be fair. Rather, in writing for this possibility, I had to consider the new paths generated by this death. What actions occur because of this death? What does it set in motion? How does this unexpected move screw up the antagonist’s plans, and what are the consequences of that?

'But, yes, the medium of interactive fiction does impose some constraints. Purely in terms of the word count required, and the work that would be involved, you can’t realistically include such far-reaching consequences for every single choice. You have to hold them back for the really significant moments in the story. And you can fudge things to some degree; the example above, for instance, is a binary choice, life or death, so in this case you only have to accommodate two main outcomes – but even then you can add in extra considerations to broaden that choice somewhat. I personally like to add motivations in to big decisions like this: "This character should die for the greater good," say, or, "This character should die because I just don’t like them." That kind of thing can have an impact on your overall character build, in addition to the outcomes for the story as a whole.

'When it comes to tradeoffs between absolute freedom of choice and an interesting story… I think I’m going to prioritize the story. All art is subjective, of course, but my own feeling is that the only bad story is one that’s dull. That said, every single choice in the game should have an impact. That might only be a small impact – it might only be an adjustment to your character’s stats, which only affects the story in the aggregate – but it needs to be there. Inconsequential choices are pretty dull too.'

Dave: 'When Choice of Games realize that you’ve created the bases for three hugely successful TV shows or movies, do they get a cut of that or are the subsidiary rights in your hands? (Asking for a Hollywood producer friend.)'

Paul: 'Heh. I’ve retained intellectual property for the content of these games; that is, I think, standard for Choice of Games writers. I’ll make sure my phone is on the hook, just in case.'

Hot off the anvil

The first two books in the Vulcanverse series are now out, with two more coming later this year. If you don't know what that means -- well hey, where have you been? (And check out previous posts here and here.)

There will be five books in the series, but they're open world solo roleplaying, which means you can start in any of the first four books and play them in any order. The numbers on the spines are just so you know where to put them on your bookshelf.

The art is by Mattia Simone, who also painted the cover for the Librarsi edition of Heart of Ice.

You'll be seeing more of Mattia's work on our future projects, I hope. Comments are open below if anyone has played Vulcanverse -- and there's a no-prize if you spot the itsy-bitsy deliberate mistake (I hope there's only one) in The Hammer of the Sun. 

If you want to order the full-colour hardcover editions, any bookstore should be able to do that for you and the details are:

• The Houses of the Dead  ISBN 978-1-909905-37-5
• The Hammer of the Sun  ISBN 978-1-909905-38-2

Or you can get the black-&-white paperback editions from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the usual places.

hardcover

 

  

Also at Blackwell's UK:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun

And at Barnes & Noble in the US:

• The Houses of the Dead
• The Hammer of the Sun

paperback

And by the way you can get copies of the Adventure Sheets (including maps) for the books from the Spark Furnace website: The Houses of the Dead and The Hammer of the Sun.

IF critique

This made for a lovely start to my year: an in-depth, considered and very flattering review by D F Chang of my four Critical IF gamebooks. "Compelling characters, perfectly plotted, amazingly written..." I didn't bribe him to say that, honest. Mr Chang's comments on Once Upon A Time In Arabia are more than fair, and three out of four A-ratings is nothing to gripe about. I just came across the video by accident, but you can bet modesty won't stop me sharing it every place I can.

Mr Chang raises a few interesting points, some of which have been addressed in earlier blog posts but this is a good opportunity for a recap. There were six Virtual Reality gamebooks but I only wrote the four that were republished as Critical IF; Mark Smith wrote Green Blood and The Coils of Hate. I wrote Down Among The Dead Men first, then Necklace of Skulls, then Heart of Ice, and finally Twist of Fate -- which was retitled Once Upon A Time In Arabia for the new edition.

Mr Chang has some valid criticisms. He doesn't like 'Necklace of Skulls' as the wizard's name. My only defence is that the nobles and kings of the Maya tended to be called things like that, if we interpret their names literally: Bird Jaguar, Sky Witness, Centipede Claw, Shield of the Sun, Curl Snout. It was anyway fashionable to translate them like that in the '90s, rather than attempt to recreate the sound of the names (K'inich Kan B'alam, for instance) which are even more deeply lost in the mists of time.

I agree that my inspiration was flagging when it came to the Arabian book. Or maybe I was trying too hard to recreate the picaresque feel of the Tales of the Arabian Nights boardgame, where the goal is likewise to scoot all over the world in order to achieve riches and honour. Probably I lavished too much energy on Heart of Ice and had nothing left to spare for the final book, and the deadline didn't permit me to take a break and recharge. That's why, when editing the new edition of Twist of Fate, I took the opportunity to change the lame title and rewrite the introduction to the story.

But how marvellous it is to hear of readers still getting pleasure from books I wrote twenty-five years ago and more. I'm nearer the end than the start of my writing career, but that reward never gets old.

Coover story

I just read “The Babysitter”, a short story by Robert Coover which ought to be of interest to anybody who aspires to write interactive stories. I’ll begin with a confession: I’d never come across any of Coover’s work before, which is quite an omission seeing as he has spent his entire career experimenting in nonlinear and game-like fiction.

I won’t spoil “The Babysitter” except to say that it resembles the text of a gamebook with the choices removed. So you get to see a superposition of multiple overlapping possibilities. That’s actually one of the things I like about writing gamebooks – coming up with all the variations on a theme, all the outcomes that might flow from each story node – so it’s a little surprising I never published anything like this myself. (Even if I had, Coover would have got there way before me; "The Babysitter" was published in 1969.)

I’m going to be adding a lot more Coover to my already teetering to-read pile. If gamebooks and interactive fiction is your thing, do read “The Babysitter” before taking a look at any reviews that might spoil it. (There was a movie too, but I have a hunch it’s probably better to disregard that.)

To sooth a savage breast

If you only know Frankenstein’s creature from the movies, you’d think he talked like Tarzan. “Alone, bad! Friend, good!” Except, of course, Tarzan in the books didn’t say things like that and neither does the monster. He quotes Plutarch. He knows Paradise Lost almost verbatim. Victor calls him “fiend”, “demon”, “monster”, “vile insect”. The visionary genius is reduced almost to incoherence by his hatred for the thing he's made, but we rarely see the creature in a blind rage. By the time he meets his maker for the second time, he has left the innocent brute behind. Now he has become a civilized killer.

Also because of the movies, most people think Frankenstein is a story about a mad baron who sticks a criminal brain into a corpse and brings it to life in his castle laboratory during a thunderstorm, with the help of his hunchbacked assistant, only to be thwarted by rampaging villagers with pitchforks.

In fact none of those things is in the novel. I created my digital interactive retelling of the story, in part to rescue Mary Shelley’s classic from the neglect into which it has fallen. It’s a great story, but one bogged down by swathes of unlovely prose. My aim in making it interactive has been to turn it up to eleven, to reach out and drag the modern reader right into the text. That opening scene of the creature’s birth gave me the clue for one way to do that – a way to show his awakening consciousness using all of the senses. And that led me towards music as the vanishing point where his raw sense of hearing converges with his aspirations to join the communality of art and culture that unites the rest of humankind.

Because of the way the story has mutated its way through popular culture, a common image has Victor Frankenstein sewing his creature together out of dead bodies: the world’s most monstrous rag doll. In my version of the story, as in Mary Shelley’s original novel, it might be more accurate to think of the creature constructed, golem-like, a swollen homunculus of flesh. I describe his skin being grown on needlework frames, his tissues cultured from simple cells. This creature is not an old thing patched up; he’s a whole new being.

It’s alive

On “a dreary night of November”, with rain pattering dismally against the panes, the creature draws his first breath. Everything is a blank slate. His senses are one confused storm of inputs and feelings. Sounds have colour. Shapes have taste. Gradually he makes sense of the world, marvelling at the mystery of birdsong and the immense round mountain that rolls across the sky at night.

Spurned by his maker and rejected violently by everyone he meets, the creature takes shelter in an outbuilding adjoining the chateau of an aristocratic family, the de Lacys. And here’s where Mary Shelley came up with an inspired story device: a crack in the wall through which he is able to spy on them. He observes the de Lacys at the dinner table, or gathered around the elderly, blind pater familias as he plays the harpsichord. When a Turkish girl comes to stay, the son of the family starts to teach her French and, eye pressed to the crack, that’s how the creature gets his education too.



It’s at this point in the novel that we start to perceive, buried in its grosser body tissue, the outlines of another familiar story: the former ingénue who, as he acquires education and culture, becomes increasingly dismissive of those who remind him of his former ignorance. “Her grasp of French is almost as good as mine,” remarks the creature of Safiye, the Turkish girl, in a backhanded compliment. When an official of the Revolutionary government shows up to evict the family, the detail that causes the creature greatest outrage is that the man cannot read.

Finally the creature feels that his efforts at self-education have earned him a place by the hearth. He is ready to creep out of his ruined hovel and go round to the house. Dressed in stolen clothes, he waits till the others are out to present himself to old Monsieur de Lacy, whom he expects to be the most sympathetic to his plight – and who, being blind, is not going to panic the moment he appears at the door:

Alone in the cottage, the old man sits at his keyboard playing the opening contrapunctus of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. It is a sweet sad air, mournful and yet gloriously so. Though Bach intended this piece of music as just an exercise, everything human is contained there. We live and will die. Nothing has meaning except what we give it. And yet the tiny equations of mortal perception contain everything that is beautiful and true.

Now, Mary Shelley doesn’t do a whole lot of showing. “He played several mournful but sweet airs,” is how she renders this scene, “more mournful and sweet than I had ever heard him play before.” But I wanted the reader to see how the creature has changed over these months – from a thing whose senses run together in a synaesthetic whirlpool to a man who can quote Plutarch and Milton. And that piece by Bach, played here by Margaret Fabrizio, seems to me the epitome of humanity in its melding of simplicity and beauty, logic and almost spiritual emotion.

But it’s not enough to show your character has become almost a gentleman, you must remind the reader where he came from. A few minutes later, talking to M de Lacy, he invites him to play something:

Turning back to the harpsichord, he lets his fingers find the keys and then bursts into a performance of Rameau’s Tambourin. It is of a very different mood from the Bach he was playing before I came in: a fast-paced work full of gusto and melodramatic flourishes. A mere entertainment. How disappointing that he doesn’t recognize a kindred spirit.

The creature’s scornful reaction to what is, after all, a jaunty bit of 18th century pop (played here with great gusto by Julian Frey) is more than just resentment at being thought unsophisticated. It shows us his fatal flaw. Sheltered in his hovel beside the chateau, all that he has seen through the crack is the best and most serious side of mankind. The aristocratic M de Lacy is wise enough to appreciate that there is room in life for both the transcendent brilliance of Bach and the heel-kicking silliness of Rameau. The creature fails to understand that. His morality is as pure and absolute as an adolescent’s, as furious as one of those French revolutionary fanatic’s. And in the gap between these two pieces of music, he will experience his downfall.

This is a longer version of a guest post I originally wrote for The Undercover Soundtrack, a website about how music inspires writers.

The dawn of the Frankenstein Wars

It’s hard to put a precise timeline to it, but say the first real gamebooks appeared in the early 1970s. That means they’ve been around for as long as the gap between a one-minute amuse-œil like The Miller and the Sweep (1897) and Citizen Kane (1941).

Given that, it’s reasonable to ask when we’re going to see the grown-up classics of interactive literature. Early gamebooks were aimed at kids, after all, and there’s a limit to how many times you can save the world from the orc army in a sub-sub-Dungeons and Dragons setting. No, I don’t mean we need more sympathetic orcs. Just as Alan Moore utterly shook up the world of superhero comics with Watchmen, I want to see gamebooks that move beyond solve-the-plot. Gamebooks with three-dimensional characters, tangled relationships, complex motivations, difficult moral choices, and a story that really takes you on a journey.

The Frankenstein Wars is that gamebook. Written by Paul Gresty, who’s already proved his Wellesian creative chops with richly imagined gamebooks The ORPHEUS Ruse and MetaHuman Inc, this is the story of two brothers caught up in a wave of Napoleonic conquest as Victor Frankenstein’s resurrection technology ushers in an era of total war.

If that sounds familiar – yes, it’s my Frankensteinian alternate history of the early 19th century. Originally I created this as a computer game, then later tried getting it off the ground as a movie or a novel, then as a comic book, and even as a tabletop RPG which was to comprise two rulebooks, French and English, each with its own slant on events. I never expected it to be a gamebook app, but now that I’ve seen the fabulous job Paul and Cubus Games have done, I’m fired up to return to the Frankenstein Wars universe and see what else I can do with it.

As well as a sophisticated storyline that would do justice to any blockbuster novel, the app boasts tactical maps, weather effects, astounding artwork, all wrapped up in a cutting-edge design ethic that shows Cubus Games are now one of the leading developers of interactive literature.

It’s impossible here to give a summary that would do justice to Paul’s writing. As I said earlier, this is a story that will really take you on a journey. For my money it’s destined to be a genre-defining classic, and next week Paul will be here with a guest post to give you just a taste of all the marvellous work that has gone into creating this truly unique interactive adventure.

The Frankenstein Wars is out now for iOS and Android.

Gamebooks: the value of doing it with dialogue

Eighteen months back, Leo Hartas talked me into starting work on an interactive story app. Leo is a very persuasive fellow, and it sounded such a beautiful plan the way he told it. I’d write the thing, Leo would do the artwork, and his coder friend would put it together in his spare time.

I really should have known better. Spare time is pretty much a mythical concept anyway, and so the chance of such a project ever happening decreases exponentially with the size of the team. After six weeks and two Skype calls, the coder admitted he was too busy and Leo got a contract to illustrate six kids’ books. The project went quietly back to bed and set the alarm clock for never.

Still, all experience is useful. Some of the writing made its way into a novel called The Mage of Dust and Bone that Jamie and I may yet finish. And I had enough fresh insights about gamebook app design to fill this blog post. So not a total loss.

The app, which was going to be called Winter’s Rage, was a sandbox adventure based on the Christmas scenario here a while back. The map would serve as the top level of navigation through the story, as in Fabled Lands. Nothing new about that; it’s been a staple of CRPGs from Might and Magic right through to Sorcery.

Encounters

‘When you have an encounter, you’ll drop down from the map to a location screen that will be mainly text.’

‘I could do illustrations for each location,’ said Leo.

‘No. Doesn’t work. See, we’re used to using a map in real life without thinking about it. Our brains have the subroutine that means we look at where we are on a map and that’s part of our seamless word-view. But as soon as you put a picture of a church, say, in front of somebody who up till then has been picturing the world as a map or via text, suddenly they’re thinking, hmm, that’s not a real church, that’s a drawing. So then you’ve broken suspension of disbelief.’

‘But I thought you said you'll be wanting little mugshots of the characters’ faces for when they’re saying something?’

‘That’s different. When the brain is used to interpreting images symbolically – a figure on a map, a face next to some dialogue – then artwork doesn’t pull you out of the story. Given that we have to have text, simply because it’s cheap, we need to let the text be the player’s main “world rendering medium” and any artwork has to conform to that design principle. That is unless you can find a million dollars down the back of the sofa, in which case we’ll do it all in a 3D environment with audio.’

‘Text it is.’

We came up with a screen template for locations like this:

OK, OK, gimme a break - I'm the designer, all right? Leo would've done the art. Anyway, at the top you’ve got the location name (The Bank Road in this example) and under that a brief description that sets the scene. Then you’ve got the faces of the characters who are here. In this case there’s a Blind Man who you just met at the start of the adventure and who is accompanying you along the road. Your answers to his questions are creating your character at this point – eg he begins by asking if you’re familiar with these parts, and you can answer either ‘I’m an outsider’ or ‘I grew up not far from here’.

But I digress. The point here is that you’ve just had an encounter, that’s why the view has dropped down from the map level. The encounter is with the Robber. So then we look at the pane below, which is the dialogue. This is where the action of the story gets presented. Why? Because the key to keeping the player’s attention is writing in the moment. That’s not new either; it was invented, or at least popularized as a novelistic technique, by Samuel Richardson in the mid-18th century. If you’ve read my Frankenstein app, you’ll see the same technique in action throughout. The entire text there is what Victor Frankenstein is saying to you, so his words must carry all the narrative, rather like in a radio play.

The advantage of placing the narrative emphasis on dialogue is that readers of an app will skip descriptive text. Description is less compelling to an untutored eye even in a regular novel, and when you’re leaning forward waiting for the next decision point, the temptation to scan for surface meaning may become irresistible.

Not so in the case of dialogue, because we’re attuned to care about other people and what they say. Arguably the main reason for these big, energy-hungry brains is to interpret the nuances of meaning in speech.

The way we planned to do it in the app, the dialogue would appear one speech bubble at a time, with a beat between them. You could read and re-read it at your own pace, obviously. The beats were there just to reinforce the sense of them speaking in real time, rather than everybody’s dialogue appearing at once like on the page of a book.

So the Robber says, ‘Hand it over. All your money.’ And it turns out your blind companion also has something to say: ‘Gar John’s-son, I know your voice. Have you turned to thievery now?’

(Later in the adventure, you will typically be travelling with a companion – more about them in a minute. For example, if your companion was Fosse the hunter, in this encounter he’d now chip in with: ‘Huh. Since when wasn’t he a thief? Five years old and I caught him taking rabbits from my traps.’)

Options

Then at the bottom of the screen, under the dialogue for the encounter, you’ve got the DECIDE tab. When you tap on that, you’re presented with your options. Why not display them right away? Extra unnecessary taps/clicks are usually a bad idea on an interface, aren’t they? Yes, but here it’s to stop your eye just scanning straight down to the bottom of the screen for the options. It keeps you in the story.

If you tap DECIDE, in this case you’ll get two options to choose between:

• ‘It’s not gold you’ll be getting from me, it’s cold steel.’
• ‘I don’t need to fight you.’

As often as possible, like there, an option will be a line of dialogue. Say you choose not to fight. That dialogue gets added to the scroll underneath what’s been said already. Then, after a beat, the Robber will reply to you:

‘I don’t need to fight you.’
   {set #Spared_Robber = true}
   // #Spared_Robber is an inline conditional not visible to user
   // sets reminder that Gar Johnson may be encountered later
   {beat}
Robber: ‘I’m starving. I was sick. Couldn’t get no work.’

And your options now:

• ‘Take this coin and buy yourself some bread.’ { if #Status_Noble == true }
• ‘Winter’s hard on everyone. You’ll survive.’
• ‘Come and see me at the manor house. Maybe I’ll find a job for you.’

Options can be conditional, as in the example above where the option to give the robber a coin is only available if the player is an aristocrat.

Companions

You pick up companions at the manor house, which is the player's base of operations for the game. You can only pick one companion to accompany you at any given time. You can change companion when you return to the manor house, though sometimes they may be absent on their own errands, depending on the adventure timeline.

Companions become more loyal to you over time, assuming they see you solving problems and showing good leadership. A companion who is more loyal to you will volunteer more personal information (possibly unlocking backstories) and also uses their skills more effectively. Therefore it makes sense not to switch companions too often. Balance that against the need to have the right companion with the right skills for specific tasks.

When you return to the manor house you can show any clues to the steward or the NPC companions you didn't pick up - so you can get the benefit of advice from any of those four listed with a delay, but only the one companion you pick to go with you will notice things, prompt you during investigation, help in fights, unlock subplots, etc.

A possible mechanism for giving the player hints is that when you’re at the manor house, companions will talk to each other (‘You won’t believe what I saw up on the heath, Sir Werian…’) based on their preset relationships, and if you listen in you will get the benefit of their theories.

NPC companions add an element of communitas and emotional grip to an adventure game - a discovery I made by happy accident when writing Down Among the Dead Men, though I guess the germ of it was there in the interactions with the faltyn in the Blood Sword series. As a rule, people are way more interested in character and the development of relationships than they are in facts and the development of plot. Given that Winter's Rage was to be a gamebook app constructed almost entirely through dialogue, and an investigative adventure at that, having a foil for the player to interact with was essential. Not only did the choice of companion on each mission mean a set of skills and insights that would customize the experience, the companion also gave me as writer another pair of eyes and another voice to interlocute the world for the player. And, as this is an adventure with a ticking clock, interjections from the companions can be used to ratchet up the tension.

Takeaways

Text is inexpensive, but there are some tasks it doesn't handle well. Artwork is useful for the top-level navigation of the adventure (ie the map) and to depict the faces of nonplayer characters. But don't be tempted to use more than that. Presented with a little judicious artwork, the brain interprets it symbolically; too much and your "gamebook app" becomes a broken CRPG.

Also, use dialogue as much as possible in place of descriptive text. Even in the example above, in the final version I'd probably have lost that descriptive line "a robber steps out" in favour of a companion saying, 'It's a robber!' or 'Now who's this?' or 'This guy looks a bit shifty' depending on which companion it was, the time of day, that kind of thing. After all, you know you've dropped down from the map level because an encounter was triggered, and you can see the guy's face has appeared in the mugshot pane. You don't really need a stage direction to tell you what's going on here.

In order to get maximum mileage out of dialogue, focus on writing to the moment. Listen to radio plays. Read how it's done in something like Pamela, Riddley Walker or the Frankenstein app I mentioned above. Anything you can let the dialogue carry, do so. Strip down descriptive text to the barest scene-setting. Don't tell when you can show. There's nothing new about any of this; it's just that it hasn't often been applied to interactive literature before.

*  *  *

Writing this, I’m thinking it’s a shame we never got to do the game. It was to be the first in a series of interactive adventures set in the world of Legend. If I’d only had a coder with no wife and kids and re-enactment hobby to eat into his leisure time, eh? Ah well, it’s water under the (half built) bridge.

Students talk to Reason

A while back I did an interview for Exeposé, the student newspaper of Exeter University. As it deals with a couple of my main interests (comics and interactive fiction) I thought I'd reproduce it here. The picture is me dressed as Reason at my wife-to-be's "Come as a God" party a good few years ago. Why the pistol? Because you can't argue with Reason.

We notice that you studied Physics at university. How did you go from that to what you are doing now?

I’d have done an English degree too if I’d had the time. I’ve always been on that cusp between art and science, could never quite make up my mind to go for one or the other. That probably explains why I’ve ended up gravitating towards the games industry, where I can indulge my passions for storytelling, visual design, logic, physics and maths all at once.

What attracted you to graphic novels? What do they give writers and readers that traditional books don’t?

If you look at it from a practical point of view, some stories are easier to tell visually. Like if you are creating a completely new world without any real-world references – Avatar, say. If you did that as a novel you’d have to bombard the reader with great chunks of descriptive prose – ugh. At the same time, you might not want to do it as a movie because your story needs more space and depth than you can fit into two hours. Or, of course, you might not have a quarter of a billion dollars to spend.

In fact, though, I never think it through in that kind of detail. You just start working on a story and you either feel it’s right for prose or you start blocking it out in comic panels in your head. Your muse decides for you whether it’s going to be a graphic novel.

As for what graphic novels have that traditional books don’t – well, what does painting have that music doesn’t? They’re different, both equally to be cherished as modes of expression.

Do you have a favourite graphic novel? If so, why?

Wow – I wouldn’t know where to start, I read so many. I like the works of Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Alison Bechdel, Posy Simmonds, Matt Kindt, Alan Moore… A bunch of diverse comics creators who don’t have anything much in common, except that they rarely disappoint.

If I’m going to pick my desert island read it’d be Neil Gaiman’s tour-de-force run on The Sandman. That’s an opus of around 1500 pages, so if you want to dip in, start with the collections Dream Country and Fables and Reflections.

Do you think graphic novels are taken seriously enough as a form of literature?

Not in the UK, that’s for sure. Here, a graphic novel has to be freighted with literary significance for critics to get past their aversion to the medium. Like, I was looking at the Guardian yesterday and they had a full-page review of Chris Ware’s latest graphic novel. Now, I’m not disrespecting Ware’s work – he’s very talented, and I like that comics are a rich, broad tapestry with room for all kinds of story. But as Wiki says, “His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression.” And that’s why the Guardian will review him and wouldn’t touch 300, say. UK critics don’t know how to read comics; they don’t have a cultural lineage to fit them into. So they view them with the classic cocktail of fear, loathing and fascination. And so the only graphic novels they review seriously are the ones that fit really in an illustrated literary tradition rather than being unashamedly comics.

I don’t want to get too parochial about this because all writers work internationally these days, but Britain punches way above its weight in comics. You’ve got Gaiman, Moore, Ellis, Millar, Ennis, Quitely – too many to list, and many of them among the most successful in the profession. But they’re all working mostly outside the UK because comics here are barely a cottage industry. And the problem with that is it makes it difficult to get a British voice and sensibility across in comics. Those writers and artists have all had to adapt their style to the American market to some extent.

It’s very different in France, where four out of every ten books sold are graphic novels. You can go to a bande dessinée convention and you’ve got whole families there – kids, teens, parents, all reading graphic novels. And because of that there’s a nicely diverse range of genres: thrillers, rom-com, whodunits, science fiction. It’s not all superheroes and zombies.

You often work in collaboration with other writers and artists, what do you enjoy about these collaborations and what do you find more challenging? Has there been a collaboration that has been particularly interesting for you?

Actually, the truth is that my name may be alongside somebody else’s on the cover, but I rarely collaborate that closely. I’ve worked on a lot of series where I’ve split the writing chores with partners, but we usually have a quick consultation and then get stuck into our own individual books.

Comics like Mirabilis are the exception. Those are interesting precisely because the creative collaboration is so challenging. For example, I grew up on movies and Marvel comics, so all my layouts for Mirabilis are informed by that. But the penciller, Leo Hartas, is more influenced by illustrated books and European stuff like Tintin and The Beano. So sometimes it feels like we’re coming from opposite ends of the spectrum. I go for sexy, dark, dramatic with close ups, upshots and wide angles; he goes for funny, sweet, diagrammatic with medium shots, flat/diorama staging, and so on. But that cycle of thesis, antithesis, synthesis can throw up some nice creative surprises, I think.

A lot of your work makes literature an active experience, and puts the reader in charge. What do you hope to achieve by giving the reader a central part?

Only what any writer wants – a connection. An emotional reaction. That’s why the interactivity in Frankenstein isn’t about solving the plot, it’s about the relationship you develop with Victor and his creature. The choices you make affect their degree of empathy, alienation and – most importantly – the extent to which they trust you. That affects how much of himself Victor will reveal to you, for instance. Whether it works or not is up to readers to judge, but I think there’s never been a book anything like it before – and it’s nice when an author gets to say that.

It’s true that I’m interested in ways to make story worlds that people can interact with to discover or create their own narratives. But I think videogames are a better place to do that than interactive literature. I’m just using books (book apps, that is) as a test-bed to try out some ideas first.

Do you think it is difficult to adapt such a well-established story? Has it been well received?

Very well received, especially among younger readers (I mean teen and up) who probably wouldn’t crack open a 200-year-old novel if they’re not doing an Eng Lit course. Frankenstein is one of the modern world’s defining myths, a story that everyone thinks they know but one that is rarely read in the original. I hope my version will encourage more people to take a look at it.

Now the but: it was well received for a book that was only released on iPad and iPhone. I’m working on epub3 and Kindle versions but it was a big mistake not to bring those out at the same time. Lots of people were seeing the reviews (Salon.com had a nice one, incidentally, saying “it may be the best interactive fiction yet” – though admittedly the competition is not fierce) but couldn’t read it because they had Android tablets. But, you know, I don’t get to direct the publishing strategy. Unfortunately.

The adaptation wasn’t hard because, seminal work though Frankenstein is, it’s pretty much the worst classic novel ever written. I should qualify that. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she wrote it, and I certainly don’t want anyone seeing my teenage scribblings. On the other hand, she revised it in her thirties and only made it stodgier – and didn’t fix some glaring plot holes. So I felt completely free to take liberties with the text in a way I wouldn’t have done with Austen or the Brontës, say.

The end result is that my version is much more modern. There’s a lot of Mary Shelley’s prose still in there, but I fleshed out the characterization and the relationships as we’d expect in a novel these days, and I went for a pastiche style which feels 19th century in spirit but might flow a little easier to today’s readers. A large part of that is because I cut all Shelley’s travelogue stuff. Boy, she really padded that thing with chunks of a Grand Tour guide book.

Oh, and I set the action in Paris during the Revolution. That’s because Mary Shelley had Victor creating the monster in 1792, but for some reason had him at university in Ingolstadt – which seemed a bit of a waste of a rather wonderfully serendipitous dramatic setting.

Do you see interactive creations such as Frankenstein as the future of the publishing industry?

Not in the slightest! Take Amis writing Time’s Arrow. He didn’t think, “Now all novels will be written backwards.” My version of Frankenstein is an experiment, that’s all. Literature has always been experimenting and always will. But God help us if publishers suddenly start churning out “classics interactive”.

With the growth of the digital publishing industry, how do you think the issue of piracy will be handled?

Publishing is going to have to learn to get along with digital piracy, unless they have a trick up their sleeve that the music industry didn’t. But it’s not all bad news. We need to look at ways to extend the usual revenue model – slipcase editions with extras, for example, and pre-subscribed serials. Digital can be seen as part of the wide mouth of the funnel that draws paying customers in, whether or not they pay for the digital experience itself.

Do you have any exciting plans for the future?

Fabled Lands LLP, my company with Jamie Thomson, Frank Johnson and Tim Gummer, owns the Dark Lord series, co-created by the two of us and written by Jamie, which won the Roald Dahl Prize and has appeared as a comic strip by Dan Boultwood in The Phoenix. And we have a couple of new series that are about ready to go in book form. We tend to use print as a springboard for properties that we want to go on to develop in other media, which is either cynically manipulative or far-sighted depending on how much of a fiction purist you are.

Add to that my ongoing work on Mirabilis – which was conceived as a 260-page graphic novel saga but is growing to more like a target of 800 pages. And I have a long-cherished videogame project for kids that would be built around forging a real relationship with the characters. So I have more exciting projects than I have time to work on them, that’s for sure.

What would be your dream mash-up novel?

I love mash-ups in music. Have you heard the Arcade Fire v Blondie one? Or that sublime moment in The Sopranos where you realize that, yes, they really are crashing the Peter Gunn theme into “Every Breath You Take”. Oh, and as a role-player I have to give an honourable mention to “Roll a D6” even though strictly speaking it’s a cover spoof, not a mash-up.

So I love that stuff, and I think mash-ups like that are a great modern art form. But (sorry) I have to say that mash-up novels aren’t books, they’re just marketing gimmicks. That “this meets that” thing was always just a formula to get the attention of the dumbest guy in the room. Why, if mash-ups work so well in music and art, do they come across so lame in storytelling? (And, yes, I do mean you, Cowboys and Aliens. Or anything "vs" anything, come to that.) You’d think it would be the easiest medium to do a mash-up in. Maybe that’s the problem. It always feels like creativity by numbers.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note, so let’s take a look at some great mash-up movie trailers. Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments are over eight years old but they still haven’t been bettered. Sheer genius.

Gunsmoke and grave-mist

The Kickstarter campaign for all-new gamebook The Good, the Bad and the Undead is painting the town red at the moment. If you don't know anything about it, take a look at Ashton Saylor in the video. I asked him and Jamie Thomson, who was originally slated to write GBU, where they got their ideas from:

Dave Morris: There are so many Wild Wests to choose from. The character dramas of Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle, psychological epics from directors like Mann, Ford and Hawks, and then there’s the whole down-n-dirty, morally complex European tradition of the spaghetti western. I’m just wondering which are your personal favourite western movies?

Jamie Thomson: Pretty much anything with Clint involved. Unforgiven is probably my favourite western of all time. Followed by all the spaghetti stuff. Oh, and also Ulzana’s Raid - a real classic.

DM: Talking of different aspects of the Old West as a story environment, what is it about the setting that appeals to you?

JT: Its semi-feral frontier lawlessness (relatively speaking compared to the east coast cities) allows for greater opportunities in story telling and characterization. Historically, you get a lot of larger than life characters knocking around as well. Plus six guns. They look so cool. And Apaches. And those hats.

DM: What are the themes you were interested in exploring?

JT: Not sure about that... it’s cowboys versus vampires after all. I suppose it touches on fear and the psychology of fear, mortality, death, moral questions about the price of survival, the breakdown of civilization and whether you can remain true to yourself in the face of it and so on. But mostly for me it’s six guns vs fangs in the night

DM: It’s often said that fantasy works when it brings out something in the story that couldn’t be told in a conventional setting. Does that apply to The Good, The Bad, and The Undead?

JT: There are interesting questions about the price you are prepared to pay to keep your own sense of what is right and wrong intact and other issues to explore. But I’m not sure there’s anything you couldn’t do in another setting. I think you can pretty much explore any theme in any setting, just in different ways. With the western horror setting you can push things to the max but at the end of the day I think it’s exploring old themes in new ways, which can sometimes give you an unusual perspective on it.

DM: It’s not a traditional good guys versus bad guys story. I’d be interested to hear what inspired you to take the narrative off in those unexpected moral and emotional directions. Is that coming from the movie idea of the western, or does it owe more to the fact that this is a literary work?

JT: It’s the thing that puts an interesting twist on the tale – the relationship between Walter and the Marshal. What do you do when the good and the bad are faced with an even greater evil? What is it like when you are forced to work with something or someone that you know to be morally unsound (to put it mildly.

DM: Whenever vampires are in a story, there’s the question of whether they should conform to the usual tropes (crosses, holy water, garlic, etc) or whether you’re free to reboot them in a new image. What did you decide?

JT: We’ve got our own take on it from Aztec mythology. They’re not your run of the mill Transylvanian vampires by any means. But I won’t say more in case it spoils the fun.

DM: I see that you’re talking about this as an interactive novel rather than a 'gamebook'. That’s how I describe my retelling of Frankenstein. In GBU’s case, is it simply to alert readers that the story isn’t a game to be won or a puzzle to be solved, or are you getting at something deeper?

JT: There are no dice or skills or any ‘game’ stuff really, so I think it’s just so people don’t get confused, expecting some kind of rule system etc. But Ashton might have a different take on where the story goes!

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?