Wide open worlds

Over the next ten years, artificial intelligence looks set to radically transform almost every field you can think of. Astrophysics. Materials science. Medicine and health. Education. Communications. Particle physics. Energy production, storage and transmission. Space exploration. And, um, war.

Entertainment is low on the list of priorities, but of course I'm interested in the possibilities for games, and I'm delighted to see that Sir Demis Hassabis (my former employer at Elixir Studios) is still excited by that stuff too -- and that he's talking about open world games.

The most revolutionary thing about open world games is not the ability to go in any direction or to make persistent changes to the world. As in real life, what we most care about interacting with aren't things but people. Stories are compelling, at their heart, because of character, not because of plot. 

AI opens up a host of new opportunities there. When I'm running a roleplaying game, I conjure up NPCs as needed. Some NPCs turn out to be more than walk-on parts. They can become as important to the story as the player-characters, which means I need to remember their background and goals. I need to keep them as personae that I can slip on at any time. AI can do that. You leave a magic sword at a farm, say. The farmer's lad you regaled with tales of adventure finds the sword. Much later, you might run across him -- now a renowned adventurer in his own right, jealousy guarding that sword that he really hopes you won't ask him to give back.

But the AI can do more than keep track of NPCs and their relationship to you. It can function as the game referee, judging when you need clues to steer you on the right track or when a lull in the action calls for a random encounter. This is what Jamie and I called the "god AI" when we compiled our design wishlist for the Fabled Lands MMO we hoped to develop at Eidos in the late 1990s. It only took thirty years, but now it's finally within our grasp.

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.

An audience of one

There's Matthew Berman reminding us that future is coming up faster than you think. He's talking about videogaming, but the same principles apply to movies, comics, and literature.

The novel – at least, the genre novel – may well go the way of the epic poem, to be replaced by something more like an RPG session which an AI will run for the reader. (Or, more likely, the listener or viewer.) The top authors will devise the elements of the story, the characters and timeline (perhaps more like creative directors than old-style authors) and the AI will use that to tell a story that gives prominence to the bits that interest the individual reader. Did your parents make up stories to tell you when you were little? Like that. Or maybe like this.

You'll still discuss the story with friends (an important feature of most entertainment) but the specific events in your version may vary from theirs. Initially such on-the-fly stories will be trite because roleplaying has been infected by a lot of Hollywood pablum about act structure and story tropes, and that’s what the AI models will learn from. But eventually it may shake that off and become a new independent art form. "Not a line, but a bolt of lightning," as C W Longbottom puts it:

In the meantime, a market will remain – small, though, and shrinking – for grown-up fiction that doesn’t pander to YA tastes. Genre fiction falls in predictable patterns involving plot, and so is easily copied by novice writers and neural nets, whereas literary fiction is harder to fit to a formula because it usually concerns itself with the unique outlook and choices of the characters. But don't assume that because the AI hasn't experienced human emotions it won't eventually be able to write Lolita or War & Peace. Conrad didn't personally have to hack his way through an African jungle to learn how to write Heart of Darkness. It's only a matter of time before those more complex story patterns are learned and replicated by AI, just the same way that most authors do it. And then we'll be in a whole new world of entertainment.

The river out of Eden

Back in 1998 or 1999, I was having lunch with Russ Nicholson at the Dumpling Inn in London's Chinatown. I'd been working at Eidos, a videogames publisher, and had written specs for three games: Plague (later renamed Warrior Kings), 2020 Knife Edge, and the Fabled Lands MMO that was destined to morph into Abraxas. Astounding as it may seem today, back then most publishers had no clue that game development is an iterative process that requires continual refinement of the design, and so it had been suggested to me that Eidos wouldn't have much for me to do until their internal teams had finished those three games. I disagreed, and my friend Nick Henfrey and I had given Eidos execs a detailed analysis of how development ought to work (pretty much how every developer does it now, but not in the '90s) but while waiting to hear if the message had got through I was trying to come up with a new project. Russ was also looking for something to work on, hence our brainstorming session over dim sum.

"What about a comic book?" suggested Russ. He didn't need to twist my arm. We both loved comics. Because Russ had worked out in Papua New Guinea and met quite a few tough engineering types, we came up with a scientist/archaeologist and his roustabout minder who are searching for the site of the Garden of Eden. They find two sets of weathered tree roots, which unknown to them are the remains of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. That night they get stoned and are forced to run for their lives when attacked by bandits. They run through some kind of interdimensional portal to another world. We follow the scientist character who arrives alone in a beautiful verdant landscape quite unlike the desolate rocky terrain he was camping in moments earlier. But it's a case of out of the frying pan, as a spear thuds into the ground by his foot and he realizes he's being hunted by the natives of this other world. I scribbled the notes as we ate.

Long story short, here was our surprise twist: the roustabout guy ran through the interdimensional rift a few seconds ahead of the scientist, but in this other world that meant he arrived ten years earlier. In that time he's made himself the warlord of the place. He has corrupted paradise. We were quite pleased with ourselves for dreaming that up, and remained so until Outcast came out a few months later and it turned out to feature the exact same idea. Under the sun there is no new thing, it seems. Oh well.

I didn't lament our Garden of Eden story for long. Outcast did it all so brilliantly that it's hard to imagine we could have topped that. In any case, I got drunk with another gaming friend, David Bailey, and after an all-night conversation over whisky we came up with the idea of asking Eidos to set us up as an independent development company. That became Black Cactus and although 2020 Knife Edge and Abraxas fell by the wayside, Warrior Kings finally shipped. In the world of game development, one out of three ain't bad going.

Since then we have lost Russ, sad to say -- two years ago tomorrow, hence this post. Black Cactus and Eidos are no more. Even the Dumpling Inn has gone. The grass withereth and the flower fadeth...

The game of everything

Over on the Flat Earths blog, I’ve been caught up in an interesting discussion this week with one or more anonymous game developers. Our conversation has been about the challenges of creating a kind of grand strategy game (and/or world history sim) that would cover the evolution of societies across centuries -- something like the original Civilization boardgame (or its PC version, Incunabula) but with nothing left out. You could tweak a coastline or the climate and see the effects butterfly out into the course of history. I’m mentioning it here because the Fabled Lands blog has a much wider reach, so if this sounds like something you’d be interested to weigh in on, head over to see the full discussion.

In summary: traditional strategy and tactics games often present a simplified view of control, where a single player assumes absolute command over a nation or army. In reality, historical empires were shaped by complex layers of authority and influence, with different factions vying for power. We talk about the potential for a game that reflects this complexity, eg a massively multiplayer and multi-layer World War II game where players assume various roles from platoon commanders to high-ranking generals and politicians. Such a game could offer a more authentic experience by simulating the intricacies of real-world military and political manoeuvring.

We all vary in how they approach games: some players want fast-paced action while others prefer strategic deliberation over days or weeks, and so on. Designing a game that appeals to all the player types is no small feat. We’d need to ensure that the game remains enjoyable and challenging for everyone involved. The idea is to allow players to engage at their own level, whether they are lean-back dilettantes or deeply invested aficionados.

New technology offers possibilities for expanding the scope of strategy games. Imagine a game that integrates different platforms, from PCs to smartphones, to create a rich, interconnected experience. For instance, a farming app linked to the game could engage casual players, who would contribute to the in-game economy and benefit more dedicated players. Such integration could foster a sense of community and interdependence, where players protect and support one another in pursuit of shared goals.

The conversation on Flat Earths also touches on the potential for diverse player roles. Not everyone wants to lead armies into battle or even to take part in the action. Some might prefer to act as chroniclers, documenting the unfolding events and strategies of the players. This mirrors real-world dynamics, where some individuals are active participants in events, while others observe and report. And others watch those reports and are just spectators -- also a valid way to consume the game. Recognizing and facilitating these different roles could enrich the gaming experience, allowing players to engage in ways that suit their interests and skills.

But we mustn't play down the technical challenges of merging different game elements such as abstract military units and individual soldier-based tactics. While current advances make some aspects feasible, ensuring cohesion across multiple layers of gameplay pushes the boundaries of what is currently achievable.

We also discuss the importance of a village or town system as the backbone of the game. Such a system would define troop numbers, trade, cultural values, and achievements. To accommodate a massive multiplayer environment, the game needs to move away from the exponential growth model typical of 4X games, where mismatched opponents often lead to frustration. Instead, my anonymous friend proposes a homeostatic environment reminiscent of the Dark Ages, where cooperation and cultural exchanges are vital. This shift in focus from conquest to cultural and economic development could redefine players’ goals, emphasizing collaboration over domination.

And, of course, commercial viability is a critical consideration in game development. Past failures underscore the importance of minimizing reliance on external investment and (much as I hate to say it) the potential benefits of aligning the game with a popular intellectual property, such as Lord of the Rings or (better) as the veritable psychohistory engine of Foundation.

Anyway, the bottom line is that by blending historical realism with diverse multiplayer roles and leveraging modern technology, it’s becoming possible to envisage a game of a scope far beyond the simple abstractions of the past. Whether you could sell it to players is another question, though maybe government ministers and civil servants would appreciate a way to run simulations before trying out their plans on the only reality we've got.

Dave's and Jamie's Christmas party

Every year at this time, Jamie and I get together for a marathon gaming session at his computer, which is nicknamed "the Beast" either because it's the real McCoy or because it's heavy enough to use in a smash-&-grab raid on a cash machine. This is our opportunity to catch up on some computer games we've missed, so we download a bunch and work our way through until we find one worth sticking with. It has to be said that usually the best games are the indies: Inside, Papers Please, This War of Mine, Pathologic -- though we have been known to binge on hours and hours of The Witcher too.

This year our serendipitous find was What Remains of Edith Finch. We thought we were getting a horror game, but it's much more intriguing than that. There are elements of horror, but also black comedy, tragedy, innocence, loss, grief, identity, madness, pastiche, and the awareness of the precious fragility of life. It's superbly written and voice-acted and you can play the whole thing in a few hours. We really enjoyed it.

Also on the theme of madness was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. We gave that an hour and then lost interest. Unaccountably it was about a 1st century BC Celt wandering around an 8th century AD Norse underworld -- called in the game not Niflhel, Hel or even Niflheim, but "Helheim", suggesting that historical research went no further than leafing through a heavy metal magazine. Still, you might like it if your paradigm of a game is a twenty-hour, one-note cutscene interspersed with occasional fights and arcade-style match-the-symbol tasks. Almost the opposite of Edith Finch in every respect, that.

And we finished off with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a monumental CRPG set in the Holy Roman Empire during the reign of Wenceslas IV (most definitely not the one in the carol). It's so thoroughly researched that you could use the source material text to run a tabletop campaign, and in fact the absence of magic/fantasy reminded me of a purist Legend campaign. The writing and acting are excellent, and if I had a spare one hundred hours I'd throw myself into it with gusto.

Other recommendations if you're looking for last-minute Christmas presents are Gregor's Vuga's gem of a roleplaying game Sagas of the Icelanders, David Nicholls' miniseries Patrick Melrose (the best thing on TV this year), and Posy Simmonds' long-awaited new graphic novel Cassandra Darke (surely soon to be "a major motion picture" with Gemma Arterton).

And if it didn't have a price tag in the stratosphere I'd have treated myself to the White Album, my old vinyl copy being scratched to acoustic fuzz by too much use over the years. If you've never listened to it, don't dip in track by track like some pill-popping Megacity juve perp with ADHD. Put on each side in turn and just sit back. People say it's not a concept album, but ninety minutes later you'll think differently. Good night, good night, everybody.

What now?

What Now? was a gamebook series that Leo Hartas and I took to Walker Books. The pitch document has a reference to gamebooks having been around for ten years, so I was either thinking of Death Test, which would date the What Now? pitch to 1988, or of Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which sets an upper limit of 1992. Hazarding a guess I’d put the date of this concept around 1990.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of doing a gamebook in the form of a comic. This one was different because it was for younger readers.Each book would have 28 or 29 content pages, with 4-5 full-page illustrations and the remaining 24 pages consisting of up to nine comics panels per page. We estimated a total of about 130 sections ("paragraphs" in traditional gamebook parlance) given that some sections would require more than one panel before the reader was presented with another choice.

Knowing more about publishing than we had when we started out, Leo and I appreciated that a full-colour art-heavy book of the sort we were envisaging would have to be a co-edition. That is, Walker Books would need to partner with other European publishers so that the books came out in multiple translations. That’s why we decided to use icons instead of text for the choices.

Because the lead character would appear in the illustrations, these books would have been third person, with the reader guiding the character and maybe having a conversation with them, rather than the first-person style of most gamebooks.

The people at Walker were enthusiastic. Not so enthusiastic as to offer an advance right off, but I remember a bottle of white wine was brought out at the meeting. That was rare by the 1990s, when those boozy publishing habits seemed long gone.

“We want to see thrills and spills, fun and laughter,” the editor told us. My heart sank. That meant they wanted us to do a sample before they’d commit – and a sample of something like this, to be at all representative, required us to plan out the whole system and produce a substantial chunk of one of the books. Even so, we went away keen.

But… no, you didn’t blink and miss them; these books never happened. I can’t remember exactly why. It could be that Leo’s contact at Walker Books went freelance. Or maybe we just couldn’t clear enough time in our schedules for such a daunting chunk of work, seeing as I was busy on Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Leo had cutaway books to do for Dorling Kindersley.

The idea of an interactive comic book was interesting, but I would much rather have done a version for older readers. I never got on with “kiddie humour” even when I was a kid, and while the fairytale feel of What Now? would have been interesting to work with, I'm quite sure the editors were expecting Beano-style comedy, and that style of British slapstick did not appeal to me.

From the interface and the kinds of puzzles we sketched out I think I was already leaning towards the career in videogames that I moved to five or six years later. Even so, it’s a pity we never got to do these. I enjoy working with Leo and I think the pleasure of that collaboration comes across in what we do. As it is, all that remains of the proposal now are a folder stuffed with roughly sketched pages and the pitch document below.

WHAT NOW? gamebooks

Gamebooks for older readers have been around for at least ten years now. Each year a new series comes out, but usually they’re in the same old "Fighting Fantasy" mould. WHAT NOW? books are something new.

These are gamebooks with a difference. Intended for younger readers (7-9 years), the plots are straightforward and uncomplicated. These are fantasy stories, but not the kind of fantasy that’s filled with dreary dungeons and dismal ores. WHAT NOW? will have fresh, funny, vibrant plots with a hint of fairytale magic about them.

The idea is that the reader guides the hero or heroine through a series of adventures and puzzles, selecting the next picture panel to turn to by deciding between visual icons in the picture. These give the option to talk to characters, run off, look around, solve mazes and puzzles, open doors, etc.

The books combine the best in interactive fiction with the flavour of a good cartoon: vivid characters, enthralling situations, and a comic-style format geared to the world of the younger reader.

The Ingenious Genie

The clever King of the Genies has turned the tables on mankind. Instead of a genie appearing whenever a magic lamp is rubbed, the person rubbing the lamp vanishes off to serve the genies. Since the city of Baghdad relies on genie magic, you must help Abdul enter Genieworld and set things right – by arranging a more equitable deal between mankind and the genies.

[The story had Abdul having to run errands for the genie who’d summoned him while also trying to resolve the dispute between humankind and genies. If he failed in any of his tasks he got expelled back to the mortal world, which gave us a neat way to have the possibility of failure that just took you back to the start. These weren’t books you could die in.]

The Dinosaurs Next Door

The world has gone crazy. Dinosaurs are digging up the roads, delivering the post, and having tea in the local café. Guide Colin as he goes back in time with Professor Swetybenk and teaches cavemen the secret of fire so as to prevent all this. But how is he going to manage that. when the only caveman he can find is terrified of flame?

The Sun King’s Crown

The Sun King has had his crown stolen by robbers from the far side of the moon, and now no one knows when to get up to do their day’s work. The cocks aren’t crowing and the sun isn’t shining. Princess Aurora decides to go into Moonbeam Wood to find the crown, and she wants you to help her.

Running Like Clockwork

When the Earth stops revolving one morning, it causes a lot of problems. People have to anchor themselves to the ground to keep from flying off into space, for one thing. Chang, exploring a tunnel in search of his pen-pal in America, falls through to the centre of the world and finds the source of the trouble. Maybe you can advise him what to do?

The Bad Ship Nightmare

Pirates on the Sea of Zees have been waylaying sleepers and stealing their dreams. They fight, not with cutlasses, but with pillows, teddies, lullabies and cups of cocoa. Silver, a nine-tailed cat, might just be able to find the pirates’ treasure casket and unlock the hoard of dreams. The snag is that Silver is so lazy that all he wants is to lie down and have a kip, so you’re going to have to coax him into doing it.

Almost too good to be true

If I told you there was a definitive history of computer roleplaying games available as a large format 528-page full colour book, you'd have your chequebook out and be asking me for the Kickstarter link, right?

Well, spring is here and with it a flowering of sweet beneficence. Because The CRPG Book Project, authored by divers hands under the editorial aegis of Felipe Pepe, is here right now and it's completely free. Don't believe me? I wouldn't blame you, so go take a look.

If you want a print copy you could probably fix one up for yourself on Lulu. Or just read the book on a tablet and let those colours glow the way they were always meant to.

So you want to be a game designer?

I spent more than ten years working as a designer in the games industry and, although I've also been an author, comic book creator, scriptwriter and TV producer, it's game design that I get asked about most often. In particular people want advice about courses and ways into the business. Well, everybody's story is different, so anything I say probably won't be usable as a route map. Even so, if it's a career that appeals, maybe some of the following will be of interest.

I think of game designers as being "interested in everything" and in particular in straddling the arts/science boundary that tends to divide the majority of people. My college degree was in Physics but I'd always been interested in English too. After college I started writing role-playing game articles, and then choose-your-own style gamebooks, and that got me into writing novels and comics. And then I got a job as a game designer at Eidos (working on Warrior Kings, pictured below) and that seemed like the job I'd been training for without knowing it.

But there are other experiences. My senior assistant designer at Elixir Studios, Sandy Spangler, came into it from a quite different direction. She studied Fine Arts, went from there into character design and animation for TV, and then into art direction at a game developer, and from there into design.

As the game designer is really the "show runner", you need to be able to communicate your creative vision to the artists, coders, writers, voice and mo-cap actors and so on. Design is almost by definition the thing that unifies those disciplines into a new coherent opus. Of course, you have to be able to nudge people to do their best work without coming across as a supercilious know-it-all. Charm, humour, passion and a collegiate manner - what I used to describe as a "bridge of the Enterprise" attitude - will all help.

I'd always been a movie and comics buff right from earliest childhood, so over the years inevitably I picked up some visual skills by osmosis. Two weeks into my time at Eidos, I was showing one of the artists how giving his Tyrannosaurus rex a low, forward-leaning stance with its body parallel with the ground made it look a lot more threatening than an upright Godzilla-style posture. A decade on, working on Dreams (pictured above) at Elixir, I was drawing on rules from cinema to create a game with the focus on character interaction. If I could rewind now, I'd probably add a cinematography or photography course somewhere in my school years.

A designer doesn't need to be able to code but it won't hurt. Coders can be pretty superior types until you earn their respect by proving that you at least understand the architecture of the system. My degree-level maths, rusty as it is, counts as mad skilz in the games industry. Likewise, while you'll probably be hiring writers rather than doing most of the game dialogue in person, you should know enough about storytelling and drama to manage that part of the process. If you like acting or role-playing, that'll help both with narrative structure and performance.

So the skills needed are:
Creative writing
Planning
Visual sense (cinematography/narrative art)
Some maths
Some code
Some drama and storytelling
Communication and leadership skills

- and I guess the angle you come at that from (whether science/maths first like me, or art first like Sandy) really depends on what you find most inspiring. Then fill in the other skills as and when you get the opportunity.

How games best create stories

I wrote this originally in response to one of Porter Anderson's Ether For Authors columns on Publishing Perspectives, but as we occasionally discuss the confluence of stories and interactivity on this blog, it seems like it might bear repeating.

You can read the original piece ("Where is publishing's jetpack?") here. The points I want to address are, first, by Hugh Howey in The Future of Books:

"Donning an AR headset to read a picture book will be as common twenty years from now as putting on 3D glasses to watch a film can be today. But imagine this scenario: You put on a pair of AR glasses and grab a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. The glasses recognize the cover of the book, and it knows you’ve purchased the AR version of Gulliver. When you open the book, the story comes to life all around you. Not just on the pages of the book, but on the floor in front of you. There’s Gulliver being washed up on the beach. You might pull your knees up to keep your feet from getting wet. There are the Lilliputians staking Gulliver to the sand. Maybe one of them asks you to place a finger on a knot while they tie a bow."

I like and admire Howey, but that multimedia monster isn't the future of anything. You breed from the unhappy pairing of book and movie and you're only going to get a mule.

And secondly I'm responding here to this comment by by Patrick Soderlund in This is War (for a Game Industry's Soul):

"I hate to say this, but storytelling does not come naturally to Swedes. But we’re good at designing systems, and that’s what these games really are…Battlefield is a system designed for entertainment rather than for telling you a story."

Okay, let's start with that. “Storytelling does not come naturally to the Swedes..." Utter nonsense. You will find game developers in the UK saying that storytelling does not come naturally to the British. America likewise. The fact is, storytelling often doesn’t come naturally to the kind of person who gets interested in videogame development. Software engineers may not as a rule read widely, and may not grasp how broad and flexible is our remit when we talk of storytelling. That, fortunately, is changing.

What Mr Soderlund is missing is that, when we talk of storytelling in games, that doesn’t mean a writer using the game as a stage from which to declare a pre-defined story. A game is a world: an environment populated by characters and objects with rules to govern the interactions between them. The most interesting possibilities for story in such a context are not the sequences I might write in advance for the player to watch. That’s just using the game environment as a kind of movie, albeit one you can walk around inside. The really interesting evolution of storytelling in an interactive framework is when the story emerges from what the player does. Like, if I place a limpet mine on a wall that I couldn’t otherwise scale and use that to rocket-jump over it, there I have a story to tell my friends. It’s a very simple story in that example, but it’s special because I made it happen. It wasn’t a story fragment left there for me to experience “from the stalls”. It was always supposed to be - paraphrasing Patrick Soderlund now - a system designed to enable stories to happen.

So here’s how game developers ought to be thinking about interactive stories. Once a fortnight, I run a face-to-face roleplaying game. My players are mostly writers themselves. I see myself as the moderator. I present them with the germ of incidents, non-player characters to interact with, the constraints such as legality and status. I don’t know in advance what the story will be. The story only happens when the actors – that is, my players – come on stage. Our stories are not polished the way a novel or movie ought to be, but they’re not intended to be a spectator sport. Nobody authors them. There's no talking of ourselves in third person. None of us stands back outside the narrative and tries to engineer where it's going. To allow these stories to occur, we let go of being authors and step into the world as participants.

Experienced from within, a genuinely emergent story is new and unique and thrilling. It isn’t “tell me a story” any more. More videogame developers like Soderlund should roleplay so they get to see why the rest of us are so excited by the possibilities here.

Having said all this in praise of what videogames can deliver, I have to add that prose is still the most powerful medium for telling stories. That’s been true since long before Homer first banged his stick on the ground and said, “Sing, goddess!” – and you bet you could hear a pin drop. Words are more powerful because they create a more personal conduit into the imagination of each reader or each listener. (And to think I say this as a writer of comic books and a designer of videogames.) That’s why, if a discerning fellow in the year 2034 really wants to appreciate Gulliver’s Travels, he’ll do without the sloshing surf sound FX and all that art installation gimcrackery and just go back to the words as Swift wrote them.

Ulukai te ho!

I’m typing this in madcap haste because I only just heard about a Kickstarter for the greatest game of all time. And the campaign has only four days left to go. So think of this as the blog equivalent of your TV screen going crackly and dissolving to an emergency announcement. We interrupt your regular program...

Oh, which game am I talking about? Outcast, of course.

Outcast was released in 1999 to a whole lot of fanfare, courtesy of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra no less, and Atari’s (then Infogrames) CEO Bruno Bonnell on a high wire in a leotard. Which is not something you’d catch Bill Gates doing, though he can jump over a chair.

At first glance, Outcast fits neatly into the adventure genre, albeit with an unusual pitch of science fantasy imagination that owes more to Vance, Druillet and Moebius than to the usual Flash Gordon serials that inspired Star Wars - and everything else like it that's come since. Outcast wasn't just an original setting, though. It did so many things its own way that it really defies definition.

Our hero is Cutter Slade, a Navy SEAL who is roped into a dimension-hopping experiment that takes him to an alien world where he learns that he’s a legendary hero whose coming has been prophesied for years. Hitting the ground running, Cutter has to lead a revolution, rescue the girl, and save the planet Earth from destruction.

Sounds familiar? Not the way Outcast does it. (Trust me on this. If I know anything, I know a good interactive story.)

To begin with, most story-based videogames even today are mostly linear. Outcast is an open world that allows the player to explore the story in the same way that he or she explores the landscape – by roving freely between different territories, picking up information in no particular order, ignoring elements that don’t interest and concentrating on others that do. No two players’ experience of the Outcast storyline are exactly alike.

It also helps that Outcast has a witty, intelligent script that keeps our interest and makes us care about the characters. The musical score, composed by Lennie Moore, would do credit to a great Hollywood epic. The voice acting is superb and the sound effects highly evocative. As we walk through the market of Talanzaar we hear the babble of voices, the strains of pipe music and the trudge of alien feet on ochre sand and we can easily forget that there are only a few characters visible on screen at any one time. It feels like a teeming city.

Also, Outcast is far beyond the simplistic black-and-white conflicts you usually get in SF blockbusters. Cutter’s enemies don’t do things simply because they are evil. Characters have real, complex motivations. There's at least one twist that is thought-out and executed as brilliantly as the best moments in cinema. And what makes it all the more believable is that the bad guys aren’t orcs or occupying aliens, existing solely to do evil acts. They are an army drawn from the same population they terrorize.

But all those things merely show that Outcast can do great storytelling as well as any movie. The really important factors are the unique stylistic touches that go to make it more than just an interactive adventure movie. To play this game is to take a trip to an amazing new world.

Outcast is full of great locations. The landscapes are set against alien skies that were painted as dioramas by lead artist Franck Sauer. There are points during Outcast that you have to forget about the adventure for a moment and just stop and marvel at a breathtaking view.
The creatures who populate the alien world, the Talan, aren’t just humans with a few bobbles stuck on their head. They really are alien, different, interesting. Their unusual appearance is a clever way around the limitations of the graphics, of course. We don’t have the same expectations that an alien face will display detailed emotion, so we quickly get used to taking emotional cues from their gestures and tonal inflection instead. But that’s just the technical question. Most importantly, the quaintly comical Talan with their clumsy splay-footed gait and child-like innocence are endearing. We get to like them, and so saving their world ceases to be a cliché or a mere game objective. It becomes personal. It’s something we want to do.

Outcast is distinguished by hundreds of tiny details that reveal the care and artistry that have gone into its creation. The rusty streaks that stain the stonework of Fae Rhan’s palace, the unique and clearly non-Terran flora and fauna, the simple yet engrossing subplots, the breathtaking otherworldly vistas, the humour and the humanity. All contribute to a work of art that ranks among the greatest in history. Cutter Slade goes on an adventure. And we go with him.

Now, the original team are trying to raise the money to overhaul the old voxel-based graphics and give the game an up-to-date look. It deserves to find a whole new generation of players, and maybe – thanks to Kickstarter – it will.

UPDATE (March 2017) - The Kickstarter didn't reach its target, but Appeal are now working on Outcast: Second Contact for a UK publisher, so here's hoping Brexit doesn't scupper that.

Who is making the choice?

OK, this isn't a dig at either Heavy Rain (above) or The Birthday Party (below). These interactive videos on YouTube are just a bit of fun. But they do serve to illustrate a problem with interactive movies - to wit, that they are completely and calamitously unengaging.

Look at the Heavy Rain example. It's set up exactly like a scene in a movie. Our mental gears shift to prepare us for being told a story. And then suddenly it all freezes. The engrossing but fragile confection that is story evaporates, to be replaced by the uncomfortable angles of a puzzle. Snap out of it, you have to make a decision!

But as whom? We're not the protagonist. We're not the protagonist's confidant or conscience. We are, in fact, the viewer - or we were a moment ago. But now we're the author - quite a old-fashioned author, too, hopping between viewpoints - making the next plot decision. And in a moment we'll go back to being the viewer. How discombobulating - and exhausting.

Viewers and readers do not want to make up a story. They want to be told a story. The motivation that most compels our interest in fiction is wondering what happens next. Interactivity can play powerfully into this need. You can make the reader the hero, as in a traditional gamebook, in which case their decisions fit logically within the story. Another way is to make the interactivity about the reader's or viewer's relationship with characters.

What doesn't work is disconnecting us from events so that we float around in an oneiric state of immersion one moment, then have to wake up into a different persona - the rational, active self in which we analyse, ponder, sit forward and make a choice. That's interactivity for Vulcans. Let's have no more of it.

Games from a parallel universe

A decade is a long time in gaming. I look back at my book Game Architecture and Design, co-written by Andrew Rollings, and it's clear how different today's triple-A games are. (Technologically, that is.)

GAD is a big book. If you're in the interrogation business and waterboarding isn't getting results any more, consider investing in a copy. A couple of clouts around the lugholes with this meaty tome and those terrorists will be singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with at least as much enthusiasm as Roseanne Barr.

One problem Andrew and I had was that we needed to discuss the concept and design stage of games without referencing real games whose creators would not have appreciated our putting words in their mouths. Where time didn't permit us to interview those creators, we got around it by making up games that could stand as generic examples of their genre. Andrew and I both being physicists, this came as naturally to us as starting with the case of a spherical cow.

It worked perhaps a little too well. For a couple of years after that, I'd have people asking me in job interviews how they could get hold of games that we'd actually only dreamt up to make a specific point. Then, looking at GAD the other day, I realized that some of those examples do make for quite tantalizing game concepts. And, since we quite often end up talking about games or gamebooks that might have been, here's one. This is just as it appeared in the GAD chapter on "Look and Feel" back in 2004, by the way, so you'll have to make allowance for the ten-year-old comparisons:

GAZE
The world of Gaze is La Vista, a single vast city that is technologically advanced (electric cars, computers, surveillance satellites) but socially conservative.

Introduction 
Our first view is a gray, unchanging surface that is moving like a featureless landscape below us. Then, catching sight of an observation port, we are able to take in the shape and size of what we're looking at. We realize the gray material is the skin of a dirigible, which moves slowly away like a weightless ocean liner to reveal...

…the retro-futuristic cityscape of La Vista. This is the city of the future as imagined in the 1930s and 1940s: vast office blocks, streets like canyons, gleaming skyscrapers of concrete and glass catching the sun. It's bright, clinical, and overwhelming.

Our viewpoint descends through wisps of cloud around the highest buildings. Recall the futurist architecture of the Third Reich, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the Empire State Building, The Hudsucker Proxy. The quality of the light is hazy; the daylight turned to brass close to street level by the fine dust of those swept-clean city streets. Sleek cars like huge cryo-capsules whoosh down tarmac avenues on silent tires. Looking along the block, the avenue goes on and on until lost in the distance, unchanging like a reflection in a pair of blue mirrors.

The crowds on the streets are uniformly dressed: the men in dark suits, the women in gray or white dresses. This is not a world like ours with a dozen different fashions and colors. And that means that the occasional splash of color on a hoarding or in a window display is all the more striking.

And it's quiet. The cars are electric and make very little noise. The people hurry to work without a word. In our opening shot from high above the street, the first sound you hear is just the lawnmower hum of the dirigible's rotors.

What feature of all this is startling? We see it as the camera spirals down, taking a leisurely view of the streets and the people and then turning towards the center of the city as it reaches ground level. We're now looking into the burnished bronze glare of the sun. What we didn't see before was a massive statue that towers above the buildings, matching the highest skyscraper. At first it might evoke a resonance with the Statue of Liberty, but then we see the spiked crown, the balance, and the blindfold. This is not Liberty. It's Justice.

Main playing screen
Gaze is an action-adventure game and the main screen is a third-person view like in Enter the Matrix or Max Payne.

Something we must decide: Does the view ever cut, or is it a continuous tracking shot throughout? Grim Fandango and Dark Earth use the cut and all shots are static, allowing pre-rendered backdrops. This favors adventure games with strong storylines, because you can use the cut to create suspense: a sudden high angle with the hero far below, a shot from behind as a door opens, etc.

In such games as Tomb Raider and Enter the Matrix, the story matters less. Action is more important and so a smooth tracking shot is sustained throughout. Where every action counts, the player doesn't want to keep switching views.

The graphics engine will determine if the number of characters on screen would be an issue. It would be nice to be able to at least hint at the heaving mass of humanity filling the streets during the rush hour, so as to make more of the utterly deserted streets during the rest of the day. Obviously, the first-person viewpoint always has the advantage that it's one less character on screen. In any case, Gaze is a game of suspense and nail-biting tension rather than in-your-face bloodbath action, so, in fight sequences, we'd expect only a few opponents to be on the screen at any one time.

Our thinking on this has been that we'll probably go for a continuous third-person tracking shot most of the time, as per Max Payne, with very occasional cuts or pre-scripted camera movements at key dramatic moments.

Overview screen
Our original impression had been that, between encounter areas, we'd switch to a 2D map of the city on which you'd click to go to a new location.

The problem with that is that it's not immersive. It would be far better to have a seamless way of moving between the two views. The ideal would be to pull back from the hero in the close-up main view, and keep moving up and away until you had a high-angle shot of the city with the hero now a tiny figure down on the streets. Not quite as ideal, but almost as good, would be to start pulling out and then cut to the high-angle shot.

Interface 
Obviously we'll want to keep the screen as uncluttered as possible. We'd prefer to avoid having a status bar. Instead we'll show injuries on the hero himself (a torn shirt, scratches, bruises, and so on) and by the way he's moving (bad injuries cause a limp, he hunches down nursing his arm, and so on).

Selecting items from your inventory takes you to an extreme close-up of the hero pulling items from inside his jacket, while the full range of items in the inventory is shown across the bottom of the screen. (This view will be more immersive than switching to just a clinical scroll-through item list.) You pick items using either arrow keys to get him to pull out one item after another or with function keys tagged to the full inventory of items shown at the bottom of the screen. You can reorganize items in the inventory so you'll have at hand those items you'll need in a hurry.

We need to decide how to handle items that are dropped. We could say you can deposit items only at a storage locker, say. Otherwise, it's possible to get a very cluttered screen with far too many objects on it. Another way is to have a generic "dropped object" graphic and you discover what the object(s) is/are only when you pick up that graphic.

Characters 
For character style, think of those chunkily drawn private eyes in big suits that you get in comic strips from the 1940s. Bob Kane, creator of Batman, seems to have been the main influence on that style.

What we’re envisaging is that most people in La Vista (the city) seem heavy set and move a little stiffly. Their chiseled features evoke a robotic impression. Don't make too much of all this, though; be subtle. Just because they're conformists doesn't mean they have to stumble around like sleepwalkers!

But our hero, Bracken, is a free spirit, not a cog in the machine, and the graceful way he moves tells us that. The same is true of Gaze, the mysterious woman for whom the hero is searching and who seems to hold the key to changing this stagnated world. When we get to animating the characters, it will help to think of Bracken as a hawk: proud, swift, capable of both fierce concentration and ferocious activity. Gaze is a tropical fish: fragile, languid, ethereally beautiful. The incidental characters share a kind of late ‘40s uniformity so, to mark a contrast with that, imagine the protagonists cast as silent-movie era stars: Rudolph Valentino for Bracken, Louise Brooks for Gaze.