How do we make gamebooks a pleasure to read?

This is a topic we've been discussing in comments for a while now (here, here and here). But let's first agree on definitions. Gamebooks are evolving, just as the whole object class of books is evolving, and some of the directions they’re going may not use text at all. So, to describe the core medium of prose-plus-choices, I'm going to use the term interactive literature. (And by literature I don’t of course just mean Dostoyevsky. For the purposes of this discussion, Dan Brown is literature too.)

Okay, so here’s the problem. These days you’re as likely to read a gamebook – sorry, a work of interactive literature – on a liquid-crystal display as a printed page. And something happens to the way we read these things in the new medium. There’s a tendency to skim the text and just look for the next set of options. The author puts: “Something whistles out of the darkness of the roof opposite. You twist aside, feeling it graze your scalp. An arrow! The figure is outlined for a second against the moon. Another arrow is already in his hand. What will you do?” And what the reader sees is: “Guy on the roof shot at you and missed. What now?”

How come that doesn’t happen with a novel? I can happily read War and Peace on an e-reader with no impulse to skip ahead. Why, reading a gamebook on-screen, do we suddenly acquire the attention span of a toddler on a sugar rush? As Ashton Saylor pointed out in the comments on a recent post, it doesn't help that gamebooks have an obvious marker (the options) to skip ahead to if the text is boring. So it's even more important than in a regular novel that the text is not boring.

If people aren’t going to read all the text, maybe we could just put in less of it. Jamie and I admired the cut-to-the-chase brevity of Eric Goldberg’s Tales of the Arabian Nights, a big influence on Fabled Lands, but that’s not really a solution to the interactive literature problem. If you write a gamebook that way, it’s tantamount to saying, “Okay, we all know text is boring, but at least there’s not too much of it.” And on-screen the reader will still skim. Even if the text comprises the most elegant little couplets since Will Shakespeare needed a chat-up line you’d skim it, because all you’re looking for is the information content:

There is a gate in the wall. The guard is here.

How about writing gamebooks with better prose? Let's get some of today's top-flight writers on the job. Would that encourage readers not to skim? Not on its own. If a beautiful turn of phrase was all it took to get us reading, narrative poetry would still be on the bestseller lists. It's not less text or better text we need, but a whole different kind of writing.

There’s a big difference between interactive literature and the traditional kind. The fact is, gamebooks have generally omitted most of the elements that make the reader want to take in every line of a good novel. Those elements are:

• Scene-setting
• Action
• Exposition (past action)
• Speech
• Interior monologue 

Historically, gamebooks have mostly used just the first two on the list: scene-setting (describing where the main character is) and action (what is happening). That’s because 1980s gamebooks evolved out of Dungeons and Dragons as it was played in the mid-seventies. They often read like a dungeon adventure without the character interplay. If you took all the sections you played through in an old-style gamebook and stitched them together, you wouldn’t get a novel. You wouldn’t even get a very good game write-up.

In a novel, those various elements don’t exist in isolation. Descriptive passages aren’t only for scene-setting. Take the opening of Bleak House. “London… Implacable November weather. As much mud on the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth…" Dickens isn’t just telling us where we are. He’s introducing the perspective (one of several) that we’re going to have on the story, he’s expressing its themes, and he’s giving some clues to what has gone before.

As Hilary Mantel says: "Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action."

I used the same principle for the descriptive passages in my Virtual Reality books, especially Heart of Ice, but that alone doesn’t make a compelling novel. What about those other elements? What’s the magic ingredient that compels us to read without skimming? Well, here’s an important pointer: readers prefer talk scenes...

“Put that away.”
“Don’t try anything. At this range, a 357 Mag will turn your face to hamburger.”

– is way better than the narrator telling the reader that Joe draws a gun.

It’s not easy to write a novel using only dialogue. Ivy Compton-Burnett used to come close, and it’s a little too much of a good thing. That’s why authors make such a big deal about the narrative voice: it allows all of the descriptive stuff to share the urgency and characterful appeal of dialogue. It’s also why you get so many books written in first person. That way, the narrator is directly addressing the reader. First person is sufficiently compelling that authors choose it even though it denies them the most interesting tools of storytelling: dramatic irony, simultaneous action, multiple character viewpoints, and so on.

Very often the old-time gamebooks featured an anonymous, blank-slate character, which made dialogue tricky as it would mean putting words into the character’s mouth. That's going to lead to a disconnect if the reader has been picturing their alter ego as a sneak-thief type and suddenly finds they're bellowing angry challenges at an ogre. You could try using conversation trees, allowing the reader to select every response, but that makes for a long, slow read and hardly results in a smooth flow of dialogue. Some adventure games get around it by having the player set the conversational attitude (aggressive, friendly, guarded, etc) and that determines what the character says. But now you’re outside the character looking in – which is okay for a videogame where the connection with the character is empathic, as in cinema, but not in second-person interactive literature, where the goal goes beyond empathy to full identification.

With a predefined character, it’s less of a problem. As gamebooks started to include character classes or skills, it was possible for the author to build in some assumptions about the character. In Necklace of Skulls, selecting the Etiquette skill means you are of noble birth, and that has a bearing on your conversations with other characters. In Blood Sword, I knew that the Trickster would countenance a whole bunch of dastardly options that the Warrior would dismiss as dishonourable.

Taking a step back, what’s so special about that second-person viewpoint anyway? It’s only there because the early gamebooks were dungeon bashes: “After a few yards you arrive at a junction. Will you turn west or east?” In Frankenstein I used a first-person narrator and to-the-moment writing, both techniques so new that they have only been in use in fiction for about three hundred years.

I’m back at the house. I don’t remember whether I walked or took a carriage after the boat docked. They are bringing Elizabeth’s body here, I know that. The lawn is still strewn with the debris of the wedding breakfast. A string of coloured paper flags, hanging lank in the dew. An ashtray with the squashed stubs of cigars nestled in damp ash. A champagne coupe lies trodden into the flower bed. Amazingly, it seems unbroken, a perfect crystal of aqueous brilliance in the blue shadows under the bushes.
* Pick it up.
* You have to talk to your father. 

The theory here is that the whole book is a dialogue between you and Victor Frankenstein. So unless you’re the type who uses the time the other person talking to think about what you're going to say next, you are going to read it without skimming. (I said it’s a theory.)

Another option, which I discussed in a post a while back, is to go with a third-person viewpoint. The trouble is, this tends to jerk the reader out of the story every few paragraphs in order to force them to take an authorial role. I was interested in it as an experiment but, as Paul Mason rightly pointed out, it breaks the experience. In order to get the reader to read all the text, we need the interactivity to mesh seamlessly with the prose. One minute I’m curious to see what Cugel does, the next I’m being asked to decide what he does. In Frankenstein there’s a justification for making choices in that you are Victor’s confidant. Confidants exist within a story; authors (though not narrators) exist outside them.

The only early-80s gamebooks written with a real narrative voice were Herbie Brennan’s Grailquest series, probably because Mr Brennan already had a dozen years’ writing experience when he started them. I have a feeling that when those books appear in digital form, readers won’t be nearly so likely to skim the text. And, happily, we should find out for certain very soon.

Possibly the best advice, then, is to write interactive literature with the same depth you would give to any mainstream novel. The final word goes to Michael Moorcock, whose tip on how to write original fantasy/SF could apply equally to writing interactive literature:

"[This advice] was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies [...] Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt."

Flying carpets

I spent a good chunk of the last nine months labouring over the Virtual Reality and Way of the Tiger gamebooks in order to convert them to Epub3. It was like steering a helicopter in to land using your feet. No, worse than that: using somebody else's feet. They do say, never say never again, but in this case, believe me: Never. Again.

Still, all that Javascript, Excel and ever-changing tools is now a thing of the past. The books are converted, and if you have an iPad you'll be able to read them when they're released. Unfortunately, apart from iBooks there aren't any ebook apps that are reliably compatible with Epub3, though you'd have to hope Google might champion a good one for Android soon. Or maybe Epub3 is just going to be that firework that never catches light.

Don't ask me the release dates, as this isn't my day job any more. If and when I know, you'll hear it here first, but all we'd better say for now is "spring" and leave the rest blank. In the meantime, here's a look at one of Jon Hodgson's cover paintings. This one is for Twist of Fate, renamed Once Upon a Time in Arabia for the ebook edition. The original paperback now sells for a few hundred dollars, but if you're the sort of person who can see the girl in the red dress amid the stream of numbers, just take a look at the flowchart here. (Blimey. Somebody has flowcharted about a hundred gamebooks? There's dedication.)

Do gamebooks need text?

The sweet spot for a gamebook app is the perfect balance between graphics and text - which maps, at a deeper level, to the balance between "game" and "book". I said in the last post that Inkle's Sorcery app achieves that, but there may be other sweet spots too. That's really just a guess. I'm basing it on the principle that a gamebook in print form can work perfectly well if there are no pictures, and a CRPG is fine with no words. (The way I play them, anyway - I can never be bothered to stop and read all those tedious parchmenty scrolls, much to Jamie's annoyance.)

But that's just the limiting cases. How about places in between? Inkle found one - are there others? And what about the medium itself? How much of a difference does that make? Reading a gamebook in print is not very different from reading a novel. On the first run-through, at least, you'll probably take time to enjoy the prose. But put the same book onto a phone, and there's a strong impulse to flip through all the jaw-jaw to get to the next set of choices.

I spent the last eight months converting four Virtual Reality titles and the first two books in the Way of the Tiger series into ebook format. Yes, not apps, ebooks. Will readers respond to these as they would to a print gamebook? I hope so; I've kept the print reading experience pretty much unchanged, as you can see from the screenshot above. But is that a valid assumption? If you're reading the books on an ereader, you presumably don't expect graphical bells and whistles. On a tablet or phone, though, you could go straight from playing The Shamutanti Hills or An Assassin in Orlandes to Heart of Ice. Absorbing a story in the form of prose requires a different mental gear, in fact a whole other mind-set, from reacting to hybrid input comprising graphics, text and audio.

To sum up: it is not obvious whether people can read a gamebook like a regular book when it is transplanted from the page to the screen.

If I were writing new interactive books, there are two obvious ways I might go. One is to dispense with the gameplay aspect so that the book is "interactive literature" - that is, it's all about the reading experience. That's what I did with Frankenstein and Jon Ingold did with Flaws. This is the interesting direction for interactive fiction if it wants to grow up.

The other route is to stick with solve-the-plot interactivity but do something with much less text - either as a Fabled Lands type experience with very short descriptive passages and a lot of freedom of choice, or by making it more of an interactive motion comic and dropping text altogether. Of the two latter options, the first tends towards CRPGs - in fact, is really just a CRPG on the cheap - so will not thrive long as a distinct species, I think. The other is just how to arrive back at adventure games by means of a ten-year detour. Which is no bad thing; adventure games have always been waiting for the equivalent of a Wii to bring them to the mass market, and maybe the iPad or iPhone is it.

What do you think is the next step in the evolution of gamebooks? Don't all shout at once.

What sorcery is this?

The strain of fantasy represented by Dungeons and Dragons and the subdivision of same that is Fighting Fantasy are not my cup of tea, but I always had a bit of a soft spot for Steve Jackson's Sorcery gamebooks. I remember actually playing through a couple of them - and bear in mind that Jamie and I spent most of our working days back in the '80s writing gamebooks, so reading other people's wasn't usually the leisure activity we'd pick to while away an evening.

The Sorcery books benefited from Steve Jackson's innovative gameplay ideas (most notably the magic system, based on 3-letter spells that the reader had to cast from memory) and a world that was a bit more interesting than the usual DnD-flavoured setting. Apparently Steve was inspired by his travels in Nepal and, while we're not talking Tekumel here or even Jorune, there is a genuine sense of the exotic that moves it away from being sort-of Tolkien, sort-of medieval. It was also possibly the first time that a series of gamebooks built into one single epic quest. Oh, and it wasn't just room after room in a big old dungeon. In 1985, something new like Sorcery really stood out.

It's fitting, then, that now that gamebooks are enjoying an Indian summer thanks to digital media, the Sorcery series is getting a retool from the Rolls-Royce Ltd of interactive book apps, Inkle Studios. The first of their Sorcery adaptations for iPad, The Shamutanti Hills, was released this week and, as Kotaku's reviewer commented, it "takes the genre to a whole new level".

Full disclosure: Inkle were the developers of my Frankenstein app, and were responsible for its gorgeous look and feel as well as providing the smoothest set of tools for writing I could have wished for - so you may need to correct for a slight bias here. But even allowing for that, I've already spent three or four hours playing Sorcery and it was only released a couple of days ago. So trust me, it's going to be a gamebook-changer.

We were recently discussing the clattery old dice-based combat systems in gamebooks of yore, so I'll start with that. Inkle have dispensed with the random rolls in favour of a streamlined tactical system that allows for an element of skill. Combats are now really rather fun, as strong attacks temporarily sap your energy and, if the opponent attacks more strongly (as in the screenshot below), will also result in you taking a more serious wound. You'll sit judiciously weighing up your choice each round and wincing when a wrong move has you stumbling into the path of the enemy's sword.

As you'd expect from Inkle, the imagery and visual design are glorious. Even something as simple as selecting the three letters of a spell is evocative and tactile, and navigating on the 3D map feels almost like dropping into the title sequence of Game of Thrones. (Okay, maybe I'm overstating it a bit there, but it's a safe bet that's where Inkle are headed in future. Give 'em time.)

So, that map. I expected to find myself skimming the text and just playing the game like an '80s top-down CRPG, but in fact the transition between map and text is pretty seamless. The more visually enhanced and videogame-like a gamebook becomes, in theory, the less patience the player will have for prose. That's not to say that long sections of text can't work in digital gamebooks, just that you have to decide where to set the slider: book or game? Sorcery's specific balance is probably not the only right answer, but it's certainly one of them.

I didn't keep my copies of the original books, so it's hard to say how much of the text is Steve Jackson's and how much has been added by Jon Ingold, but the end result certainly feels fresh and vigorously fast-paced. There are also elegant turns of phrase and sophisticated storytelling techniques like the opening flashforward that I think must have come from Jon. Either way, it's a nice read with most of the traditional DnD campaign tropes given a shiny new trim thanks to the finer and more immediate writing style.

Quibbles there are a few. The map navigation occasionally leads you to expect more freedom than the original structure of the adventure allows. So, for example, you'll venture into a tavern only to find that the option to visit a nearby waterfall disappears for good. Now, if only this had been a Fabled Lands book instead of... Ah, but now I'm dreaming.

The monsters let the setting down a bit. Ratbears. Goblins. Manticores. Trolls. Giant bats. We certainly can't blame Inkle for that. They had to work with the books they were given, and I expect those were originally populated from a Monster Manual for the sake of an afternoon's gaming. The only reason I draw attention to it is that there's that little hint of something special in the world and the religion, and then we get the usual thudding parade of DnD creatures, which is a shame.

Oh, and another legacy from the books is the flip-of-a-coin flippancy with which you may get killed. A witch is casting a spell. Do you leap left or right? Make the wrong choice and you're fried. Gamebook readers of thirty years ago may have stood for that but, alongside all the genuine innovations Inkle has put into this, the old cavalier style of gamebook "GMing" is kind of fusty.

I don't want to make too much of the quibbles, though. Make no mistake, this is a revolutionary app that has for the most part completely rejuvenated its source material. In every sense - graphics, writing, animation, music - Sorcery is a deluxe product worth hours of entertainment for the absurdly low price of £2.99. No, I can't believe that either. Snap it up while you can and count the days until Inkle release the second book, Cityport of Traps. Me, I'm standing outside the walls of Khare even as we speak.

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.

Undeadwood buried

Back in August I announced that we had a new gamebook project in progress with the working title of Undeadwood. Its real title was going to be The Good, the Bad and the Undead, but the more I think about it, the more I prefer the former. The pitch was "30 Days of Night meets Django Unchained," but that doesn't sound like something I would personally queue up for. (Funnily enough, though, if you said "A Fistful of Dollars meets Cronos," you'd have my money like a shot. Fine distinctions, I guess, as far as the wider world outside cinema geekdom is concerned.)

Even in October I still had hopes. By November I must have known better, but I am adept at denial. Anyway, it was destined to remain a shrivelled thing, hidden from the light. Jamie and I talked briefly about doing it as a comic instead, but that's unlikely now. It has joined the distinguished ranks of gamebooks that never were. That stake is not coming out.

We did at least get as far as a back cover blurb. Well, I say back cover, but it was one of the titles going in the Infinite IF series, which means an ebook, so the blurb was really just for the website:

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UNDEAD

Texas, 1870. The small, dusty mining town of Affliction, alone and isolated in the middle of the Badlands is the only place with a gaol for fifty miles in very direction, the only place Marshal da Silva can take his captive, the brutal outlaw, Walter Corse.

But when he arrives in town with his prisoner in tow, it is strangely deserted. The wind moans through the dusty streets and dust devils dance where the townsfolk once walked. But when the night comes... so do the vampires. Affliction has been overrun by them, and many of its inhabitants have been turned. The others are kept as food for the rest. The marshal and the outlaw find a shotgun-toting saloon girl still alive and free. Together they must hold out against the vampire hordes until morning.

Notable vampires include the Sheriff William Masters, Reverend Ezekiel Smith, Jacob Colt, the undead gunslinger, Jimmy Nighthorse, an Apache scout, and several other vampire versions from the mythology of the Old West.

Eventually, the marshal and his companions must take the fight to the chief vampire, Tizoca, the Bled One, an ancient Aztec vampire awoken from her sealed tomb by an over-eager treasure hunting archaeologist, along with her ‘consort’, a Portuguese Conquistador – in fact, the marshal's great, great, great grandfather.

(Okay, okay, so it was notes for a blurb...) If that whets your appetite for gun-totin' gamebook weirdness, all is not quite lost. Per Jorner wrote a great gamebook called The Bone Dogs that's a bit Wild West, a bit magic realist, and you can get that free right here.

The Good, the Bad and the Undead actually began life as a proposal for a first-person shooter that Jamie and I floated at Eidos in the late twentieth century. In that version it was a modern-day western, Dusk Till Dawn style, and I'm not sure whether it had any vampires in it, as our original write-up said:

The town is overrun by all the freaks, monsters and weird stuff that was inside Dr Marvell's Travelling Booth of Wonders. The hero's first job is just staying alive long enough to get to the bottom of things. There are pygmy tyrannosaurs, skeleton outlaws, giant fleas, Sioux medicine men, homicidal fire-breathers, crazed knife-throwing dwarves, and bearded fat ladies who sound like James Earl Jones on steroids. How all these nasties came to be in Dr Marvell's booth doesn't matter. How they even fit inside the booth doesn't matter. All that does matter is they're out for your blood.

Yeah, I know - but FPS isn't exactly about the integrity of the story, you know. Anyway, I guess we could post up the detailed notes for the storyline(s), but in the absence of the book itself (or game itself) it's just so many ideas; there's nothing to play through. However, James Wallis thought "Undeadwood" (the title, that is) would make a great Kickstarter - and he should know better than most - so if anyone wants to have a crack at that, be my guest. I'd like to read it, or play it, or watch it - especially if you can work in an Al Swearengen vampire.

The image is by PurpleFilth on DeviantArt. It's from his own RPG and you can check out his other work, and the terms of the Creative Commons licence, here.

Does interactive fiction need randomness?

I've made no bones (ha ha) about not liking dice in digital gamebooks. I’m not talking here about randomness in general (we’ll get onto that) but yer actual spotted cubes. When I’m playing a print gamebook – or, as is far more likely, playing an RPG – I don’t find the action of rolling dice especially disruptive. It’s tolerable, anyway. But when the book is on a screen, interrupting the flow of the story to show some animated dice clattering around just strikes me as inflicting brutal and unnecessary harm to any sense of immersion.

This is a personal view, however. As a designer, I’m not saying there shouldn’t be dice. Some gamebook nostalgia buffs like having them, and if the implementation isn’t going to cost too much then why not offer the option? But it should be an option. Someone who has never played a print gamebook will, quite rightly, find the use of dice to make no sense whatsoever. It’s like having animated turning pages and rustling paper sounds. Only worse.

But if not dice – if we want to move onto a new generation of gamebooks without dice – what are our options? (And incidentally this is a good point to mention that the evolution of gamebooks is also the subject of a series of very interesting posts on the Mysterious Path blog.)

That opens up the whole question of randomness. In a face to face RPG, typically when I hit a foe with a sword I might do 2-12 points of damage or whatever. In a computer RPG, on the other hand, the amount of damage is usually fixed for a given weapon, opponent and combat manoeuvre. Here’s why. If I can see my lucky or unlucky dice roll on a tabletop, and feel (utterly unsuperstitious though I am) that I was in some way responsible for that roll, I can accept it. But if I get into the same fight in a CRPG and lose because lousy numbers are generated, I’m not going to keep playing. It’s the device that made the roll, not me. I want victory in a videogame to be about tactics, reaction speed and choice of weapon, not blind luck.

In a digital gamebook it’s not likely to come down to reaction speed, nor indeed to the simple stabbing at controller buttons that satisfies us in most videogames. How do we play to the strengths of the medium? One way is to reason that, reading a gamebook being a cerebral sort of activity, maybe the fights can have a more cunning rule mechanic. This is what Inkle and Steve Jackson (the UK one) have done in the Sorcery app. You pick an attack strength, so does the opponent. The higher number inflicts damage, but also fatigues the attacker so that he can’t put as high a number next round.

This fits with the sense you get when playing a digital gamebook that you are laying a story behind you as you go. In the case of Sorcery (or Frankenstein) that’s explicit in that the sections of text are stitched together. You could show that text to somebody else and they could read it as if it were the novelization of your adventure.

I like this because it’s how we perceive time. The future is fizzing with all these quantum possibilities, the past is fixed in one shape. But hold on. If we are indeed creating a novel-like experience as we play, doesn’t that beg the question of how much prominence should be given to fights and other tests of skills, whether randomly or strategically decided? I’ve blogged before about how fights are tricky in fiction. I can’t actually remember the last novel I read that had a fight in it, and I’m willing to bet that even in A Song of Fire and Ice you don’t get very many – and that they aren’t ever described blow by blow unless (a) a lot hangs on the outcome and (b) there’s something clever, dramatic and unexpected about how it plays out.

The thing is, how much fun is it to read, “You strike at the goblin, but he parries. He ripostes and you react too slowly. His sword lays open a long gash in your arm.” It doesn’t matter if, instead of generating this stuff procedurally, you have Jeanette Winterson writing it for you. It’s just not interesting. Which makes me suspect that, in the context of a digital gamebook, it isn’t interesting to play either.

Some will say at this point, “But I like picking my main weapon, my armour, deciding when to drink the healing potion, selecting a combat stance.” Then, honestly, you need to play The Witcher, which does all that stuff with a lot more excitement and eye candy than you’re going to get in a medium that is principally prose.

That’s not to say gamebooks have to drop the gameplay aspect. You can have “interesting choices” in stories. 007 games his showdown with Oddjob – much to the delight of my eight-year-old self. And do you know how Conan defeats the peerless swordsman Mikhal Oglu? Pure gameplay. The tactic is so surprising and brilliant, in fact, that Roy Thomas doesn’t even need to show the ensuing fight. There’s no randomness there, of course. The smart choice trumps all others.

But how much do we want the gameplay to be visible? If the Game of Thrones TV show had on-screen bars showing characters’ declining political influence stats, would that make us more engaged, or less? One of the reasons that role-playing isn’t more popular is that most people don’t have the kind of mind that can see “Strength 14” on a sheet and turn that into an intuitive feel for the character. Storytelling has rules, as anyone who has done improvised storytelling will know. It’s just that those rules are a lot more implicit, interesting and subtle than THAC0.

In short, if we want more people to read gamebooks, we need to de-geek the mechanics. Mostly that means hiding them altogether, as in Frankenstein, where I do have stats (Trust, Empathy, and so on) but the reader never gets to see them, only their effects. And, if you can’t see the stats being applied, there’s no point in randomness. It’s simply no longer relevant to creating an engrossing interactive story.

Thanks to Farrin N. Abbott of CopyCatFilms for the intertitle card.