You don't need a learning curve to have fun

“A scout is a man who likes a change,” wrote Jack Vance at the start of his Planet of Adventure novels.

What’s true for interplanetary scouts in the Gaean Reach applies also to dyed-in-the-wool gamers. Whatever their preferred genre, they like change. They enjoy encountering new situations that test their understanding of the game. Granted, predictability provides a comforting safety net while performing those mental and pollical gymnastics. Sometimes it’s nice to know exactly what you have to do next. But consider those moments when you feel the real exhilaration of gameplay. It’s when you’re facing fresh, unexpected challenges. That’s when you get to extend your limits.

Hardcore gamers are not the mass of humanity, not by any means. We all like to feel a sense of improvement, but for most people heuristic problems are simply stressful. They don’t want to keep testing their understanding. They’re content to test their knowledge.

Think of it this way. A general has to deal with continually changing situations across multiple problem domains, drawing on his or her understanding of psychology, logistics, weapon systems, weather and so on. There’s never a dull moment when you’re Napoleon, especially when you have Ney on the battlefield.

At the other end of the scale, the ordinary soldier has a set of routine tasks and (we’re generalizing of course) all he has to do is perform them with proficiency and alacrity when he’s told to.

More people are suited to be soldiers than to be generals. There are more players than gamers, more consumers than creators, more colonists than scouts.

For the majority of us, familiarity with a place (or a group of characters) is more rewarding than familiarity with a set of rules. No doubt this was true even in prehistoric times. Asked, “How do I get something to eat?” the casual player type would respond by pointing the way to the nearest berry bush. Only the dedicated gamer would explain how to hunt.

Learning curves are only important if you think the player wants to achieve an A-level in your game. There’s no learning curve in Disneyland. Once you’ve worked out how to use the ticket book and how to fold the map, it’s all about turning discovery into familiarity. Goofy’s in the parade and the fireworks are at six o’clock. It’s interactive and it’s fun. That’s all you need to know.

Rules for status

My role-playing group has been using GURPS as our default system for many years now. Third edition was a little kludgy but the overhaul they did with GURPS 4e fixed most of that. Even if you don't use the rules, I recommend the sourcebooks.

One aspect of GURPS that we've rarely had cause to explore are the rules for status. Our Legend characters are reviled mercenaries, our Spartans characters are a law unto themselves, our sci-fi characters zoom through a Mass Effect inspired universe of libertarian laissez-faire chaos, our Ghosts of London characters are misfits who have more intercourse with spirits than with regular society. There hasn't been much call for a skill like Savoir-Faire.

Until now, that is. Tim Savin's 1890s Investigators campaign has us playing a mix of social classes, talking to people rather than fighting them, and so we've been drilling down into how GURPS handles all that.

Not terribly well, is the answer - not even in the GURPS supplement designed expressly for the purpose: Social Engineering. Probably one reason is that there is after all no such thing as a generic status system; every society is different. French writers throughout the 17th and 18th centuries were continually puzzled and horrified at the way social classes mixed in England in a way unthinkable on the continent at that time. Henri Misson de Valbourg made this observation while visiting London in the late 17th century:

If two little boys quarrel in the street, the passengers stop, make a ring around them in a moment, and set them against one another, that they may come to fisticuffs. During the fight the ring of bystanders encourages the combatants with great delight of heart, and never parts them while they fight according to the rules. And these bystanders, are not only other boys, porters and rabble, but all sorts of men of fashion.... The fathers and mothers of the boys let them fight on as well as the rest, and hearten him that gives the ground or has the worst.

These combats are less frequent among grown men than children, but they are not rare. If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with the gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart:the gentleman pulls off his sword, lays it in some shop with his cane, gloves and cravat, and boxes in the manner I have described. If the coachman is soundly drubbed, that goes for payment; but if he is the beater, the beatee must pay the sum for which they quarrelled. I once saw the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street with such a fellow, whom he lambed most horribly. In France, we punish such rascals with our cane, and sometimes with the flat of the sword; but in England this is never practised. They use neither sword nor stick against a man that is unarmed, and if an unfortunate stranger (for an Englishman would never take it into his head) should draw his sword upon one who had none, he'd have a hundred people upon him in a moment.

A bigger problem might be that GURPS is written by Americans. Hold your horses there, I don't mean any insult - simply that it makes perfect sense for an American game designer to just add wealth and social class together to get an overall status number, but in fact an impoverished aristocrat, a rich commoner and an average member of the gentry (all in GURPS terms Status 3) would not be treated as exactly equivalent even in 1970s Britain, much less in 1890.

And then there's what higher statuses actually mean. When I visited Bali in the 1980s you'd meet Brahmins - usually not so well off (because they wouldn't stoop to wheedling cash out of tourists) but on the top rung when it came to status. But high status in late 20th century Bali means a very different thing from high status in mid 18th century France. The same numbers of status levels may separate high from low, but what does that translate to? It all depends on the society - indeed, on the sub-stratum of society you're considering. In War and Peace, Field Marshal Kutuzov has lower status than some of the junior staff officers at court. Even a lieutenant can keep him waiting at a whim. Yet on the field, among his own men, presumably Kutuzov's status is very much the higher.

Status and social class have always been important factors in our Tekumel campaigns. There it matters not only which clan you belong to, but also the status of your lineage within the clan. A comparison might be: is it more prestigious to be a commoner at St Peter's College or head porter at Christ Church? A complex issue. In Tsolyanu, if you join a legion or the civil service, your rank doesn't simply add to social status as it does in GURPS. Rather, your social class determines the rank you are likely to rise to. Any damned fool of the aristocracy can become a junior officer in a medium regiment; after that, further advancement depends on ability and bribes (wealth). But that's Tsolyanu. In other societies, wealth might not count for so much, or might count for more.

Game write-ups

Game write-ups make for notoriously bad fiction. It’s not that surprising. “What happened in last night’s game?” someone asks, and we’ll trot out a great wodge of incident. But a story is much more than incident, as the Master reminds us. Incident – that is to say, the plot – is just the foundation. On that a storyteller builds the real narrative, which is a personal journey of change. Fighting a shoggoth has to mean something. You know this; you’ve seen “The Body”.

The best games would anyway make the worst stories. Fiction is designed to have endings that are “surprising yet inevitable”. We know Luke has to hit the thermal exhaust shaft, we just don’t know how he’s going to hit it. But we don’t want games to be inevitable, we want them to be like a second life. And our lives, engrossing as they are to us, don’t have the neat symmetries and moral and thematic patterns to be found in a work of fiction. The only way to achieve that effect in a game is if the referee (“games master” to me evokes a low-wattage sadist in a rugger shirt) twists events to come out the way he or she wants them to – which is the antithesis of good roleplaying. Not only must it be possible for defeats to occur, but they might be pointless. Shit must be able to happen - as, in our play-through of this adventure, it most definitely did.

All that aside, background incident is a useful resource to a writer. A lot of creative writing graduates could do with more of it. So in theory it should be possible to grow a good work of fiction out of a roleplaying game. Raymond E Feist infamously based a lot of his early novels on Tekumel campaigns. Still, we were talking about good fiction… I have been pestering Paul Gilham to turn his blisteringly brilliant Ghosts of London campaign into a novel. Paul demurs because I’m sure he realizes that all that meticulous plotting, vital though it is, is only the start. He’d need to break it all apart, insert a character with a need to change, and let us see the succession of plot events as the conduit for that change.

I did none of that with this write-up for our current 1890 campaign run by Tim Savin. It’s just the bare events of the game, albeit in the voice of my character. But it might be of interest because it’s based on a published scenario (“The Night of the Jackals” from Cthulhu By Gaslight 3rd edition) and because it gives a glimpse of our own games, which some of this blog’s readers have enquired about. Tally ho.

 

The pale unsatisfied ones

There's been enough interest in the re-release of The Chronicles of the Magi trilogy that I've decided to bring forward the print publication date. So as of Monday Feb 29 you can buy the books in both paperback and ebook editions.

If you want to try before you buy, there's a PDF of the opening chapters of the first book here. Or just take advantage of Amazon's Look Inside feature. And reviews, as I've said before, are always appreciated.

The Chronicles of the Magi

A lot of people said that the Blood Sword series would make great novels, so in 1997 I took the plunge and revisited the gamebooks in order to convert them into regular fiction. If I'd anticipated the writing being a cakewalk - just a cut-n-paste job, right? - it only took a few days to demolish that notion. I needed to add a lot of text, for one thing, because in between the options in a gamebook there's an implied train of thought process and action that is left entirely to the reader's (ie player's) imagination. For a novel all that has to go onto the page.

And then there was the little question of a protagonist - or two. I rejected having a complete party of adventurers. I didn't want it to feel like a game write-up, for one thing. These were supposed to be proper novels, and having too many characters tends to throw a story out of focus. You've seen X-Men: The Last Stand, you know what I'm talking about. In the end I imported my own character Caelestis, a Vancean rogue who had appeared briefly in Tim Harford's Legend campaign, but on realizing that he was too much of a reprobate to serve as standalone lead in a middle grade series I created a "warrior monk" character (a sort of Capellar-in-training, I guess) called Altor who could come out with all the traditionally heroic lines.

A few weeks into the writing, I accepted Ian Livingstone's offer of a job as game designer at Domark (later Eidos Interactive) which made writing the Chronicles of the Magi trilogy a bit of a juggling act. I enjoyed it, though. Solving problems is my thing, and every scene threw up plenty of those. For instance, to get around the way the first Blood Sword book was really detached from the rest, being effectively a gameplay tutorial, I moved the opening scene of The Kingdom of Wyrd to the start of the first Chronicles novel. That got us right into the quest - though with rather more plot-twists along the way than the gamebooks needed to have. Here's (almost) the moment our two heroes first meet:

Altor reached for the banner, but just then there came a loud outcry from the far side of the square. He looked up to see the young dandy he had encountered earlier. His cloak swept out behind him like a bat’s wings as he ran, and hot on his heels were several guardsmen of the night watch.

‘Stop that thief!’ bawled the irate sergeant of the guards as the young man came racing past the booth.

Altor stepped forward without thinking and put out one arm. The dandy skidded to a halt in front of him and glanced up in surprise. For an instant their eyes locked, and Altor saw a look not of panic but of agile cunning. Then the young man ducked under his outstretched arm and reached for the last pennant. Altor lunged for it too. They both gripped the shaft at the same time.

The guardsmen pounded to a halt and began to fan out. ‘So, villain,’ gasped the sergeant, ‘will you come quietly?’

The dandy looked at him in disdain. ‘Villain, you say? I am Caelestis, the champion of Magus... of Magus...’

He turned to Altor who, although bewildered by the turn of events, found himself saying, ‘Magus Balhazar.’

‘Champion?’ The sergeant tucked his thumbs in his belt and rocked with breathless laughter. ‘You’re no champion, lad. You’re just a pickpocket and I’m taking you in.’

Caelestis stared back at him defiantly. The other guards hefted their cudgels and stood glowering. For a moment there was a tense silence, then the steward cleared his throat. ‘The youngster’s right. You can’t arrest him now he’s taken Magus Balhazar’s banner.’

Altor suddenly realized what was happening. Tugging the banner away from Caelestis, he said, ‘I was here first. Rightfully it is I who should be Magus Balhazar’s champion.’

‘Aha!’ cried the sergeant in triumph. ‘As I thought. Arrest him.’

Two of the guardsmen stepped closer. Caelestis wove away from them and snatched back the banner. ‘Not so fast. The banner is mine. How can this oaf be the magus’s champion? He doesn’t even have a weapon.’

It was true. Altor had left his sword buried in Magus Byl’s black heart. Rather than go into that now, he simply planted himself in a solid stance with his big arms folded across his chest. ‘I need no weapons. The monks of my order are trained to fight with empty hands if need be.’

‘Indeed?’ Caelestis cocked an eyebrow. ‘I doubt whether Magus Balhazar will be impressed.’

Altor snorted in derision. ‘Do you think he’ll be impressed by having a pickpocket as his champion?’

The sergeant flung up his arms in exasperation. ‘Enough!’ He turned to the steward. ‘What is the law? Are both these youths now employed by Magus Balhazar? Frankly I’d be happy to arrest the pair of them.’

‘I have committed no crime!’ protested Altor.

‘And I myself am merely a suspect,’ added Caelestis, ‘until my case comes to trial.’

The steward leaned on the rail in front of his booth and stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘Both took the banner at the same time, so both are eligible to serve the magus. Consequently they are immune from prosecution.’

At this the guards gave sighs of disappointment and started to wander off. The sergeant spat on the ground to show his opinion of the steward’s judgement. Fixing Caelestis with a beady stare, he said, ‘Just you wait, lad. I’ll be waiting outside the Battlepits for you, and if you fail then you won’t be able to count on the magus’ protection.’

‘If he fails,’ said the steward laconically, ‘then he’ll be past caring about the laws of mortal men.’

The Chronicles of the Magi books are due to be republished on Kindle by Fabled Lands LLP at the end of the month and you can pre-order them now at a special introductory price:

The Sword of Life
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

The Kingdom of Dreams
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

The City of Stars
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Amazon Spain

Another bite of the cherry

It's dusk in Wistren Wood again. If you've been stymied by earlier false starts of the crowdfunding for Crypt of the Vampire (my first ever gamebook) then you'll be happy to hear that Megara Entertainment are running it again for real. The Kickstarter campaign is not just for a full-colour hardback edition of that book, but also to pay Leo Hartas to colourize his illustrations for the second Golden Dragon gamebook, The Temple of Flame.

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.