Interactivity in Narrative Pt. 2

I've written a lot about interactivity in narrative, but I feel that I have a slightly different perspective on it now that I'm deeper into actually professionally writing interactive narratives. Last week I did some brainstorming about what makes good interactivity in narrative. In particular, we talked about the importance of meaningful consequences.

But having meaningful consequences is not the only thing important to a good choice. The other factor is that the choice itself presents as an interesting decision in the moment. There are a few pitfalls that could prevent that: having not enough information, having too much information, or one or the other choice is obviously better.

Here are a few types of choices I've been thinking about that have potential...

Fog of War Choices: A choice should be informed, but not obvious. If you know exactly what the outcomes will be of each choice, then it better be a damn hard choice or there's no choice at all. You'll just pick whichever one is better for you. Similarly, if you have no clues at all as to what lies behind each door, or the clues you think you do have are totally unrelated to the actual results, then again, there's no choice at all. You might as well flip a coin.

Speaking as an English teacher, I also want to say this is a great opportunity to evoke the skill of using clues in the text to make inferences. The way I imagine it, the most fun way to be informed about a choice is to only have the roughest outline spelled out for you, but to have more clues buried in the text. The reader needs to read closely and apply the skills of observation and critical thinking. If done well, this rewards the reader with a positive outcome. If the reader fails to observe a critical detail, or misapplies her logic, then she may be in for a nasty surprise.

Of course, the down-side of this type of writing is that it's only exciting once--on a second read-through, the player will simply remember the correct choice and select it. Boooring!

Which leads us to...

Difficult Choices: In an ideal world, the choices you make should not be easy. You have to pick between priorities. Which is more important to you, the life of this one survivor, or the crate of food that could mean the survival of your whole team? Which is more important to you, protecting the honor of your clan, or showing mercy on a hapless transgressor? 

Of course, as a reader... I want it all! It's actually a serious problem I have, both as a player and in life. But I do think it's artificial to constantly enforce difficult choices. Not every choice should force a terrible decision on the player. Sometimes it's satisfying to have a "right answer," which can be deduced, giving the player the thrill of victory when it's discovered that his guess was correct. 

Or, alternately, you could write a double difficult choice: do you pick A or B--or do you try for both, with the chance that if you try for both, you could lose both? This sort of question works well with the...

Strategic Choices: One which my partner in Dwarf King is quite fond of is the strategic choice, in which the player is not dealing with absolutes but with chances. No choice has a guaranteed outcome, instead, it will be based on a semi-predictable random factor, such as a skill check. In these cases, you can make a statistics based best-guess, but it's not absolute, preserving the replay value. This is cool because it values your prior decisions. If you've previously made the decision to specialize in diplomacy, you'll be more likely to attempt the diplomatic option to resolve a conflict, rather than go straight for the fighting option. This feels very true to life, but...

It does have the pitfall that if one option is clearly better--even if it's only better because of the prior choices you've made--it's still not really a choice. Instead, you've encountered an if-then statement. If you've specialized in combat, go to the fight; else if you've specialized in diplomacy, go to the negotiations. You still don't have any real choice! 

However, strategic elements can be layered on to other choices to add factors for consideration, making a choice more interesting. Consider this: The orcs have taken your friend hostage, and will kill him if you attack. But taking this step constitutes an act of war, and they must be punished. Will you attack (utilizing your combat skills) knowing they will kill your friend, but determined to crush the orcs once and for all and claim their valuable treasure? Or will you negotiate (using your diplomacy skills), suffering the humiliation in order to hopefully save the life of your friend.

Neither option is certain; both are based on skill checks. In a simpler choice, it would be easy to just pick the skill check you're better at, but in this case, that's not the only factor. This is also a Difficult Choice: do you suffer humiliation to save your friend, or accept his heroic death to strike a blow against the orcs? This choice too might be easy if it stood alone. You probably have a tendency to go one way or the other; but it's complicated by the strategic factors--neither branch is guaranteed. In the end, you need to weigh which option you want more, and ALSO which option you are more likely to succeed at. Now that's an interesting choice to run into in your game.

In conclusion, two important factors to consider in writing interactivity in a narrative are the quality of the choice, and the meaningful consequences. First, any instance of a branch in the narrative should present to the player as an immediately interesting choice--one in which the player is at least partially informed about the options, but neither path is the obviously correct one (even on replay! at least if you're considering computer games.) Second, the decision the player makes should have real consequences. They can be small or huge, near or distant, but the experience of making a choice is most rewarding when you can see that, and how, your choice affected the world around you, in big or small ways. If it doesn't, why make that choice at all?

Interactivity in Narrative Pt. 1

A constant presence in the back of my mind somewhere is the question, "what makes good interactive fiction?" I mean, this is the angle I've chosen to pursue, and there's really a lot to untie in that one question.

As I write and work, and break, and come back, and as I read over the latest crop of Windhammer entries, I find myself thinking of it again.

I think the real thing it comes back to is consequences. The choices you make should matter somehow. Something should happen because of the choice you made. It doesn't have to happen right away. In fact, it can be especially fun if a choice you made ages back comes up later to bite you somehow. One of the most rewarding and memorable choices I ever ran into actually came in the 2013 Windhammer entry by the excellent Andy Moonowl, in which stealing from the King's treasury goes off without a hitch in the moment (originally earning my frowning disapproval), but comes up later--all of a sudden you're a wanted man, with countless consequences that make the whole adventure more difficult. I loved it.

You can't always include that level of consequence. In The Good, the Bad, and the Undead, in particular, I've made the choice to include strictly nothing that breaks the immersion of the narrative. That means not even traits or keywords. Which means, unfortunately, there is no built in memory into the narrative. If you do something in Act I, there is no way for the story to remember that you made that choice later, in Act III. It really puts a damper on the possibilities.

So I've had to get creative. How can you include meaningful consequences of the reader's choices, without long-term memory?

There are a few kinds of choices you repeatedly run into. Which character do you want to tag along with through this scene? Maybe you get a different version of events depending on who you chose to go with as your POV character for the scene. Character-driven choices are also a big one: do you choose for the Marshal to be more sympathetic, or more hard-ass? You may run into half a dozen situations where you make a choice that's fundamentally between those same two options, but it gives the reader an interesting chance to explore his character. Do you pick the hardass option every time? Or the sympathetic option every time? If you break ranks from your habitually type of answer, when, and why? What happened in that scene that you think would cause the Marshal to break from his habit? 

There's also situational consequences. Maybe the book can't remember in Act III the choices made in Act I, but not everything has to be resolved two acts later. Say you rescue a survivor, but then you have to make a choice, in which balance hangs the life of that survivor. It may not technically matter two acts later, but you're going to remember whether you let that survivor die or not. And it will change your experience of the character and, ultimately, the whole story. 

But I also have another project on the back-burner, which is not constrained by the limits of dead-tree-format. Dwarf King is planned to be an Android game, rpg-strategy. It's been in slow production for a while now, but I believe we're reaching the point where Part 1 should come out in 2016. And in that game, I have no such limitations.

In fact, the reason I'm writing all this tonight is to take a moment to pause and reflect before planning some more adventures for Dwarf King. What do I want out of these storylines? What makes the difference between good interactivity in a narrative, or interactivity that falls flat? Have I made sure to include proper consequences for each of my mini-stories in Dwarf King?

Another element has to do with the quality of the choices themselves. I've written about this before, but it's been a while.

However, this is dragging on a bit already, so I'll put that off till next time.

Why Include Randomness: Part 2

This is a thematic continuation of last week's post. To catch up, go read Part One.

Last week, I described one specific case in which using randomness adds some unpredictability to the outcome of your choices. This unpredictability can be a good thing; it forces the player to weigh their priorities against the possible outcomes before making a choice. This is interesting because it's what we do every day. We constantly, in real life, make choices, every hour of every day, and those choices affect the future. We make those choices by weighing probabilities, predictions, and priorities, and to do that in a game is fun.

That said, using randomness the way I specifically described it that time isn't necessarily that common. The most common types of randomness we see in gamebooks have to do with testing skills, if those skills are recorded numerically, or in combat--which is effectively another version of testing character skills. In this mechanic, the additive element comes in the preparation--picking which skills your character will excel in--instead of in the event of the challenge.  By the time you're testing to leap across a chasm, it's too late to make any choices that affect the outcome (other than perhaps finding another way to go...) But the existence of that chasm leap late in the game makes the choice meaningful which you made earlier about where to allocate your skills. Without the existence of the chasm leap scene, the number of points you put into Chasm Leaping becomes irrelevant.

Let's take a look at Destiny Quest, because it's a great example of this type of mechanic. In Destiny Quest, you run around, completing quests by testing (successfully) against your character's skills. As a reward, you acquire items which increase those skills, thus making you capable of completing the next quest.

In Destiny Quest, by the time you get to combat, you've already done all you can do. You've laid your bet, you've played your hand, and now all you can do is sit there and roll and hope.

Despite this, it is not a system without choice. It's simply a system where the choice is all front-loaded into the character development stage of the game. In Destiny Quest, the game remains fun because character development is an ongoing process. Every time you complete a quest, you get a reward. Often, this forces you to choose between two items which modify your character's abilities in different ways. Right there--that is the moment of player interaction. Which item do you keep, and which do you destroy?

The scenes of combat themselves are essentially very boring. For those of us who don't find rolling dice to be inherently exciting, there is nothing to do. You simply must carry through the busywork to find out whether the character build choices you made earlier will pay off or not.

But without that interaction-less moment later (combat) which tests your character build, then the choices you made during the build phase would be meaningless.

All that said, there still remains two possibilities, a skill test that involves randomness vs. a skill test that doesn't. Instead of having a Chasm Leaping skill rated 1-10 and a Killing Goblins skill rated 1-10, you could simply have each of those be a binary trait. You either have it or you don't.

In that model, when presenting the reader with a chasm, the game would ask, "Do you have the Chasm Leaping skill? y/n" and the player would either be able to jump it or not. None of this, "roll and add your skill and try to be difficuly number x, y or z."

This model has the advantage of being simpler, and in a gamebook, that often makes it worth it to go that route. But it doesn't allow for as much real choice. If you know for a fact you will be able to jump any chasm, there's no reason not to go for it every time. If you've got about a 20% chance of horrible painful death if you jump a chasm, there's now an interesting choice. Is it worth the risk? If you're running for your life, probably. But if you're out for your morning constitutional, then probably not.  Each time you run into a chasm, your mind will instantly start evaluating whether it's worth it or not. Sometimes it'll be easy, but there's still a real choice, and when it's not easy, it becomes a good game experience. And as with last week's example, this choice retains its replay value compared to a situation where there's no luck involved.

Why include Randomness?

A few weeks ago, Dave Morris raised an interesting question on his blog, "Does interactive fiction need randomness?"

One of the things I like about Dave is that he's always at the forefront of gamebooks (a term I'm using generically for our type of interactive fiction, as the term "interactive fiction" has been claimed by a slightly different genre). Dave pushes the limits of the field, questioning assumptions and imagining the genre not as it is, but as it could be. I admire this a lot, but it doesn't mean I always agree with him on each of the particulars ;)

In this case, I would like to make a defense of randomness in interactive fiction. I won't argue that every gamebook should have a random element. Like ice cream, sometimes you want one flavor and sometimes another. Sometimes one person has the flavor they prefer, and they aren't interested in any other. What I do want to argue is that randomness can be additive, and here's why:  unpredictable results create interesting choices.

A while back, I wrote about the types of choices that one finds in gamebooks. To sum up the main points... A) The core game mechanic in a gamebook (regardless of the presence or absence of other rules) is the sequence of narrative choices the player makes. B) It is very important that those choices be interesting in order for a gamebook to be fun. C) For a choice to be interesting, the player has to have enough information to make an educated guess, but not so much information that the best option is obvious.

In short, to give the reader an interesting choice, the author must reveal some information, but also conceal some information.

Think of the classic "Which Door" choice: the reader is presented with something along the lines of, "at the end of the tunnel are two identical doors. Do you open the one on the left, or the one on the right?" What the reader doesn't know is that one of these doors leads to instant death, while the other leads to tasty cake! This sort of crap may have been what dudes were into in the 70's and 80's, but by today's standards, no part of that is a good game experience. If you lose, it feels arbitrary and abrupt. But even if you make the right choice, it's not like you can take any credit for it. Success isn't satisfying if you didn't earn it.

On the other extreme, what if you knew right off the bat what was behind each door? This is, literally, the classic, "Cake or Death" choice. This is also a complete flop as a game experience, because the answer is obvious (unless you're some sort of death-seeking masochist, in which case I think you have better things to worry about than the quality of a gamebook.)

The point is, any situation in which the player has complete knowledge of the results of their choice will eliminate the existence of the choice. A choice has to do with predicting results. If you know the results with 100% certainty, the preferable choice will always be apparent. Even if all options lead equally to success or failure, then there is still no choice to be made, because the direction you choose is irrelevant to the results.

This is where randomness comes in. Randomness introduces a fog of war to the scene. Even if the player could read ahead and see all the future paragraph sections, if there is an element of randomness, the outcome is no longer certain.

Of course, information can also be concealed narratively. This is an excellent way of solving the problem, which gamebooks should always use. The only caveat is that it has no replay value.

If you take those two doors and draw a symbol of cake on one and a symbol of death on the other, then the player has an interesting choice. Is the dungeon being honest, or lying to him? Perhaps something has come up earlier to lead him to trust, or mistrust, the signs in this dungeon. The player has to think about it, predict a result, and make a choice. But once the player has read through that scene once, the next time he comes down that hallway with Character McHammenheimer the Second, the player immediately knows what's behind the door--there's no choice any longer.

Contrast this to taking the cake and death, and putting them both behind one door, but there's only a 10% chance of death, and a 90% chance of cake. Or you can go through the other door and continue on your day without taking the risk.

Whoa... now you have a choice. Just how tasty does that cake look? Is it worth a 10% chance of immediate death? Mmm... it looks pretty tasty, but immediate death?

Best of all, this remains an interesting choice, no matter how many times the player reads through the game.


Afterword: I do not think that cake is a very good reward, nor death a very good punishment. Obviously these should both be replaced with positive results that do not rely on virtual taste buds, and negative results that do not instantly kick the player out of your game. You do want people to be playing your game, right? So why did you just boot them out again? How to design positive consequences that are meaningful without being gamebreaking, and negative consequences that are meaningful without being crippling is a different topic entirely.

Combat in Gamebooks

I've mentioned a couple times a combat-related post that I was working on. Well, without further ado, here you go:

This year in Windhammer, the authors as a whole presented some amazing innovations in combat systems, rules, and styles. It's given me a tremendous amount of food for thought, and I've tried to wrap up and present here some of the ideas all this experimentation has led me to.

The big question seems to be: How to make a gamebook combat system dynamic, within the limitations of the genre? You can't present a system that's too involved, or it simply won't be manageable. Most gamebook systems are incredibly straightforward (i.e. one or two stats, very few rolls, etc.) But those don't have enough moving parts to create any real dynamism. That said, one thing I've learned is how far you can push it. Several gamebooks, such as Brewin's Trial of the Battle God, had very full systems. It was a lot, but if you're spending a lot of time in the game, it might be worth it. 

To get down to the root of the issue, we need to think about what kind of decisions are possible within a combat situation, in a game. Let's do a quick brainstorm. In a fighting game, player speed and skill becomes very important, but you're still choosing which maneuver to do when. This has a lot to do with guessing what the other guy is going to do. You've got to try to fake the other guy out, make him think you're doing one thing, then do another. This is reminiscent of my (short-lived) fencing days. Our teacher's mantra was "make noise in the east, attack in the west."

For this to be meaningful, the different choices each participant makes have to interact with each other in interesting ways. If I block in the west, but you attack in the east, then I'm in trouble. But if I block in the east, I might be able to get a quick riposte in. This often comes down to a sort of rock paper scissors effect. If the first player does action A, and the second player does action B, then second player has the advantage. But if second player did action C, then first player has the advantage.

This sort of model also relies on a multiplicity of options. If you only have one option "attack" and you do that again and again until the battle is over, then there's not this kind of model in action. Arguably, the more options there are, and the more relationships there are between the options, the deeper the strategy in this case.

So what we're seeing come together here is a few requirements:

* The player has to have options in combat. Not just "Attack," or "Defend," but what kind of attack?
* The options each combatant makes have to interact with each other in interesting and meaningful ways.

So the question then becomes, can you include that in a gamebook?

Not only do I think you can, I think I have. I've written up a system (which isn't ready to expose to the public yet, but is in progress) which includes both of those elements, and while it is heavier than most gamebooks, the feedback I've gotten so far is that it is still manageable.

Over the next month or so, I'll be working on writing up a short, sample gamebook which demonstrates these rules. When it's ready, I would love to hear all of your feedback.

Until then, stay tuned for more blog posts on this general topic. Also a couple more reviews upcoming. Next week, I'll go over a lot of the specific mechanics which various authors introduced in Windhammer this year, with an analysis of each one.

Merry Christmas!

To those of you who celebrate it. To those of you who don't, have a cookie on me you heathens.

Consequences in Gamebooks

A few weeks ago I started a post about death in gamebooks, and wound up writing a post about death in games. The basic conclusion I reached is that death is fun if it's part of the learning experience, moving the player one step closer to mastery, but not fun if it's just tedious.

But what I meant to talk about what what some of the other alternatives are to death. Risk of failure is an important part of any game, and consequences are an important part of failure. Death is only one possible consequence.

This week, let's look at what a few other types of consequences might be:

Loss of Items: A tried and true method of consequence, you can always dock stuff from the player. Players hate losing things, so use this method with some caution. Items, especially unique items, are a certain measure of progress for players, so taking their shit away can feel even more devastating than a death--especially if it's permanent.

Lose Everything: Even more devastating is to completely strip everything from the player. This can be a great story technique as it introduces challenge and struggle, and at the end of the day, the player can feel even more heroic when they get all their cool shit back, knowing they don't actually need it to succeed. As long as they get their cool shit back sooner or later.

Lose a Companion: This is a technique I used in Peledgathol: The Last Fortress (pronounced Peh-led-gat-hole btw; no blurring of consonants). Early on you are introduced to Ghuzdim Halfjaw, a stalwart dwarf warrior who swears to protect you, the young king, with his life. He is quite earnest, and will, in fact, protect you with his life. The first time you die in combat over the course of the story, if Ghuzdim is with you, you instead get re-directed to a section in which Ghuzdim leaps in at the last moment and takes the blow for you. He dies of course, and he isn't there to protect you next time, but it gives you one "get out of jail free" card over the course of the story, while still making the failure seem meaningful.

Fall to a Different Story Thread: This is one that I'm using in the project I'm working on now. There's one whole part of the book in which, if at any time you fail too severely, instead of dying, you get captured as a slave and must fight your way free. It's a different story thread, and it permanently bars you from succeeding at your original goals for the chapter, as such, but it also opens up some new opportunities that you might never have had otherwise, such as a new companion who you can meet in the Arenas. Also, it's cool. (I actually use this technique several times in said upcoming project...)

Future Consequences: Maybe the consequences of a player's actions won't kick in right away. Maybe you won't know until later on what really came of the decisions, or failures, that you just went through. I'm using this in my current project as well; in my case, if you fail at sneaking into a certain location and get caught, you won't get killed, but word gets around that you were doing something sneaky. Later on, you will find certain doors closed to you. This is an extremely open ended option that packs a double whammy: not only does it suffice as an alternate method of doling out consequences, but it also gives the world a sense of breathing realism. What you do has an effect, and you'll see that effect for time to come. That can be a very rewarding game experience.

Lose Points: Rather prosaic, but surprisingly effective, if your story has some measure of tracking progress (dollars, units of time, number of zombies killed/acquired) you can clearly signal success or failure to the player by manipulating the point numbers. Everybody likes their numbers to be better.

In some ways, I might even argue that a non-death consequence is more meaningful than a death scene, because in most games, what "death" actually translates to is, "try again."

What do you guys think? What have I missed?

Failure and Death in Gamebooks

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how to impose consequences for failure in gamebooks. The traditional method is with death, but how much fun dying is for the player is questionable.

To be sure, a well-written, colorful death scene, especially in the right tone of book, can be a lot of fun. Some of the most memorable moments of those old fighting fantasy books are some of the crazy death scenes you can get yourself into.

But from a game flow perspective, it just ends the game for the player. This jars them from the game experience, possibly causing them to stop. It's not as fun to fail as to succeed. And it may force them to re-do material they have already gone through, which is not fun, and depending on how demanding that material is, may be tedious enough to drive the player to set the book aside rather than try again.

On the other hand, though success is more fun than failure, success loses that fun factor if failure isn't very likely. If success is spoon-fed to you, it loses it's significance.

So, we're looking at a few factors here:

Challenge Factor: This is a measure of how difficult real success is to achieve. Generally, this is like salt: more of it is better, until you have too much.

but this must be balanced against...

Tedium Factor: Generally, given that this is not real death we are talking about, death in a game means going back and doing it again. For highly content-based games, forcing the player to re-do material they've already done isn't fun the second, or third, or fifth, or tenth time around. Even for more gameplay oriented games, repeating material isn't usually as fun unless it is part of honing the skill of the game.

The only time I see repetition being fun is when the death was a learning experience, and now you get to go back and try again, with more knowledge and skill. When repetition means trying again at something you failed at the first time, learning and trying again until you get it right, it's fun. But if you have to repeat stuff that's not related to why you died, just to get back to the challenge that actually challenges you, that's not as fun.

So the question becomes: In gamebooks, what cost do you impose on the player for failure? Death is just one option for that cost, and effectively what it amounts to is, "go back and try again, you loser." There are two costs in death: one is the cost to status and self-prestige. It's a message to the player, "you didn't make it, try again." The other is a cost to time, in that they are then asked to replay a certain portion of the game. On the other hand, that cost is only a cost if the repetition is unrewarding. Theoretically, getting to try again could be a good thing if it throws you right back into the meaningful, fun part of the gameplay. In that case, the cost of death is only the status cost, the "you failed" message. But while that's not awesome in and of itself, it can heighten the full gameplay experience, if the player feels like they could succeed. In that case, he or she is driven to try again, and success is all the sweeter when it's achieved.

The concept of death in video games perhaps made more sense when these were arcade games, and the cost of failure was a very real one: another $0.25 to keep playing. But even then, the only lure to keep playing is the feeling that you could have gotten it right, with another try maybe you can achieve mastery.

So, what I'm coming to is that ideally, player death in a video game should take them back right to the point where they need to do something different. This presents it's own problems, though, in that perhaps the thing you would need to change is a puzzle, and finding it is part of the challenge.

Let me rephrase: Ideally, player death in a game should reset them to the beginning of the challenge which they failed.

As a followup tenet from that, achieving success with repetition should be a matter of honing player skill, not a matter of luck. There is no satisfaction to hitting a button again and again till it comes up with the "you may proceed" screen. There IS satisfaction in improving personal skill and achieving mastery of a game mechanic.

Hmm... this post has been sort of a random, disorganized rant, and I wound up talking more about how to use death effectively rather than alternatives to death, but I think there's enough here to go ahead and post it. Maybe I'll do a followup on this topic later.

G: Gamebook Theory

At the risk of seeming like something of a one-trick pony, this post is about Gamebook Theory. I'll try to make this one shorter and more accessible, a bullet-point version, for those who want a quick primer before writing gamebooks of their own, without extensive reading on the subject.

I think there are three important things to keep in mind when crafting a gamebook: Continuity, Character, and Challenge.

Continuity: This is the logical flow of your gamebook. Quite aside from whether you're telling an engaging story that hooks the reader or not (that's Character), your story must make sense. There are many types of choices that the reader can be presented with, including the Shell Game Choice, the Which Door Choice, the Tactical Choice, and more. (See my first few posts on Gamebook Theory.)

At the end of the day, the most important thing is that the reader feel that they are in a meaningful universe making meaningful choices. Options they are presented with should be relevant to the story, (meaning something important should be at stake) and the player should be given enough hints to have something to think about when making a decision, without obviously giving away which is the "correct" answer. Finally, the results the book actually delivers from each decision should logically flow from that decision.

Got it? Good. I'll move on. (Feel free to comment or email me with questions, btw, even if you don't come across this for years later.)

Character: This is the essence of your story. Stories don't happen without characters. But having a deep and compelling character doesn't matter if the reader doesn't know it. What's most important in this category is that the character be put into a position the reader can immediately empathize with.

You're on a road, whistling as you walk, when the road forks. Do you go left or right?

What do I care? Does it make any difference?

On the other hand... You're looking for the Lost City of Xian'Tul. If you don't beat your nemesis there, he's going to kill your sister AND be awarded Archeologist of the Year by the Royal Society. Now, do you go left or right?

Suddenly, this choice is deeply relevant to me.

See what I mean? Some of the deeper aspects of a character can come from their backstory and what happened to them as a child, but that stuff only really provides context. The important thing about Character, from a story-craft perspective, is the knotty situations the character finds themselves in. This is what the reader can empathize with, and what makes the reader start to care about the character.

This is true of straight fiction also. What builds character isn't a fancy backstory, but having to make difficult choices on-screen, choices the reader can empathize with. The difference is that, in gamebooks, the reader doesn't have to just hypothetically answer the question, then safely sit back watch the character on screen deal with it. In a gamebook, the reader has to answer the question him- or herself, and face the consequences personally.

Challenge: The third, and arguably most important aspect of a gamebook is Challenge. If your challenge level is off, no one is going to read your gamebook, no matter how beautifully crafted the narrative is in terms of continuity and character.

To get the right challenge level, you want to threaten the player without actually killing him. You want to make the events seem dangerous, and show what hangs in the balance, but you always want to give him a way out, as long as he is clever enough. [Note: clever enough does not mean he can randomly pick the right door out of three. It means he can read into the text, draw logical conclusions from sparse information, and solve puzzles and problems.]

Many gamebooks incorporate a random element, such as combat. This can be a lot of fun for a player, mostly because randomness is inherently exciting. You get to hope for a great roll, and dread a terrible roll, both of which are exciting emotions that mean the game is working.

It's a fine line to walk, though, because if it's too difficult, the player will die too often and get frustrated and walk away, but if it's too easy, the player will get bored without a risk of failure and, likewise, walk away.

Humans are problem-solving machines. Our brains LOVE solving problems. As soon as there is no problem to solve any more, we lose interest. Yet, if the problem seems to not be solveable, or can only be solved by brute force (ie. trying every possible option), or requires too much tedium of the player whenever a failure occurs, we'll lose interest. We're finicky. No one game is going to get it perfectly right, but it's worth it to know what the goal is.

One final exhortation, and then I'll let you go: always make the results the player gets be based on their problem solving ability, not pure randomness. One recent, published gamebook, by a talented, professional gamebook author, included a challenge toward the end which required the player to roll above a certain number on a dice or immediately die. The book was otherwise popular and critically acclaimed, but this decision struck a negative chord in the gaming community, and there were a lot of complaints about that particular challenge. The problem is that the player doesn't get to solve any problem. There's no game to it. You just have to try again and again until you get it right. There may have been a way around it; if so, I didn't find it. It seemed to be required to beat the game, and that is (no offense, should the author happen to read this) terrible game design.

As it happened, in my play-through, that challenge was sandwiched by several others of a similar sort. Lacking enough incentive or motivation to go all the way back and try a different route, I wound up doing about a hundred run-throughs of the same 8 or so paragraph sections, until the dice, by sheer good luck, randomly decided to let me proceed through this particular sequence of combats and arbitrary death-checks. It was not an awesome game experience, and a serious blemish on an otherwise excellent gamebook.

Don't be that guy! Give your player problems to solve, not dice to roll. Don't kill the player randomly or arbitrarily, without giving them a chance to think their way out of the problem. Make your combats of sufficient challenge to scare the player, but make sure the odds are at least 80% or higher that they will win, if they play their cards right going into the challenge. If every random encounter has a 50% chance of killing you, how are you supposed to ever get to the end?

Alright, I'm rambling now. I hope I've made the point. As this is a blog post, I will leave this as-is rather than trying to clean it up, but I hope you've been able to get something useful out of it.

Next time, we will do H: How to Write a Gamebook, in which I will present a short series of 8 steps to writing a gamebook, should you want to try it at home.

Have a great day =)

F: Final Thoughts on Mars 2112

I apologize (again) for dragging out this discussion so long! In truth, Game Theory in general, and Gamebook Theory in specific are something that I have the odd trait of waxing passionate and poetical about. *shrug* I didn't make me. I just turned out this way. I claim no responsibility.

Anyway, to continue (for those who may still be reading), I present, Part III, Part the Last, of Discussion on Mars 2112: Final Thoughts.

I've left only one significant decision to discuss in this final episode, and that's the final decision of the gamebook. Should you survive the last Shell Game Choice (see end of E: Even More Discussion of Mars 2112), then you will find yourself standing over the dead body of your friend and protege, fellow agent Amanda Garret, while over her a pretty android stands shaking, holding a smoking gun.

I'm afraid my attempt to build emotional connection with the characters in this short gamebook failed, mainly because of the brevity. It's hard to work up much feeling for a character you've just met about four paragraphs back, but I tried.

Anyway, the point of this entry is to present an example of the kind of decision I love, which is the Character Decision. Per the narrative, you grab the smoking gun from the hot blonde android and throw her to the ground, and then you're given the choice whether to kill her or not.

On the one hand, she just killed someone who you cared about a great deal, and she's not even technically alive, herself. Furthermore, as the text points out, there wouldn't be any legal repercussions for killing her. She's a plastic; they don't have rights. (As has been made clear with the background conflict: the entire reason the terrorists are here in the first place is as a violent means of lobbying for basic human rights.) On the other hand, you would be killing her in cold blood.

This, of course, raises the question of whether a clever AI in a very human-seeming body is alive, or not. It seems to me, personally, that no matter how well-coded, even if given perfect humanoid self-preservation instincts, logical capacity, and everything, a computer program still won't be self-aware. But if the program running the android really is good enough to give all the cues that humans use to communicate with each other, verbally or non-verbally, how would you tell? Would it even really matter?

This is a question which fascinates me. And kind of creeps me out. A 17 section gamebook, done as an example of the kinds of choices you find in gamebooks, isn't really the place to explore this question, but it seemed like more fun than doing a short example gamebook that didn't explore any meaningful question.

The point is, that this is a choice which requires the player to think, not about what's tactically best (though that is fun) but about morals, and life. In order to decide whether to pull the trigger or not, you have to decide for yourself whether you think androids are really alive or not. Then, you have to decide whether that matters when it comes time to kill one. Which is more important, punishing her for killing your friend, or the value of a fair trial and not killing in cold blood?

Not only is it a moral question, but it says something about the character that you're playing. You get to decide something about the hero, something which changes the main character. And that is interesting.

In the end, from an external point of view, whether you pull the trigger or not doesn't make much tangible difference. If you spare her, she gets sentenced to death in the courts not long later. (Or, at least, to "de-commissioning," although whether that's a significant distinction is up for debate.)

But the decision you make changes the main character. It may not affect the outside world, but it says something about who you are. Either way, your character will be a hero in this world after these events, for saving an entire sector from suffocation by dome collapse. What your character thinks could shape the world. If you kill the android, I took the liberty of extrapolating that this means you are not an android sympathizer. The message you bring the public after the fact, as a celebrity of middling stature, is one of taking a hard stance against androids. However if you spare her life, this may not spare her, but it tells me, as the author, that you are an android sympathizer. In this path, though that particular character still ends up dead, the main character brings a very different message to the public, and with a world on edge as this one is, the difference in message your character brings to the public could make the difference in how the politics of this colony develop over the next few years, and what kind of living standards the plastics of Colony 654 can expect, going forward.

It does run the risk of being seen as a "Shell Game" Choice, in that you think you're making one decision, but the results are actually something very different. But I think that the logical connection is significant enough to leave the player not feeling too disappointed. I hope. The purpose here is to give an example of a choice which changes the main character.

My message here is to say that choices which say something about the main character, about who that person is, or who they may be changing into, and make the reader themselves seriously sit down and consider their own stance on difficult moral and ethical questions, are my favorite kind of choices. This, I think, is the real potential that gamebooks have to offer the world, and I do not think gamebooks, as a genre, have really reached that potential yet. In fact, I think they are only just beginning to scrape the surface of what they could be.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy the rest of your A-Z month :)

E: Even more discussions of Mars 2112

Hello All,

I fell off the wagon for a few days, but I'm jumping back on and trying to get caught up with posting E, F, G and H all today. Big day!

To start with, I wanted to pick up where I left off with E: Even more discussion of Mars 2112.

We left off on the "D" blog post after section 4. On section four, the player is given the only choice that significantly diverges the storyline. Traditionally, such choices are geographical. In this case, you have the option to go straight into the building, or try to sneak in underneath. As these are literally different paths, I had to write different plot paths as well. Something I would like to see more of, however, is branching plot paths based on character-driven choices, rather than geographical choices.

In this case, let's follow the "charge straight in" path first.

As we discussed last week, the choice you make in 4 is tactical, because what equipment you chose back in section 1 will make a difference now. In this case, if you charge straight in, you'd better have the EMP bomb, or it's Game Over. In a longer gamebook, there may be other options; perhaps instead of instant death if you don't have the right equipment, it could be a more challenging fight. But, as an author, it's always important to make the player's previous decisions matter. If I had provided the choice of the EMP bomb or invisibility early on, and then it never came up again, the player would feel cheated.

If you take the other route, of attempting to sneak in under the building, you end up with the exact same type of test, only it's required to have the Personal Camouflage Unit in order to survive and continue. There's no real choice, it's just, you succeed if you have the right equipment, and you don't if you don't--but it's rewarding to the player for the reasons we discussed above. Either way, if you pick the right path for your equipment, you continue to Section 11, where you find a hatch to the control center.

In Section 11, I included an example of a "Which Door" choice, asking the player if you go right or left, without providing any information about either path to give the player a reason to choose one over the other. "Which Door" choices are a big pet peeve of mine. Although I have to admit they do have a place, I think gamebooks in general, and especially the older gamebooks, heavily overuse this type of choice.

The important thing to realize is that a "Which Door" choice is not a choice. It's a randomizer. Just like there are times when you want the player to roll dice to determine a random result, there are also times when you can give them multiple choices with no information as to what leads where as a method of leading them in a random direction. But never make the mistake of thinking it's a choice.

In this case, it's especially bad because the choice doesn't even matter in the end. It's what I call an "Illusionary Choice." If you take the wrong path, you'll simply run into a dead end and have no option except to go back and re-unite with the main path. This is another thing I included as an example of what not to do. This doesn't even have the redeeming characteristics that a "Which Door" choice has. As far as I can tell, an Illusionary Choice has no purpose, and should never be used. Does anybody disagree?

In Section 13, you finally get to the actual control room (whether you want to or not). Here, I provided another example of what not to do: the "Shell Game" choice. The player is given a choice of whether to investigate the controls immediately, or attempt to radio command for tech support. The player might imagine there might be time constraints; perhaps if you take the time to radio in for tech support, you won't fix it in time. But if you blunder in without advice, you may make it worse. Or you may imagine that radioing to the commander might alert enemy forces to your position.

In truth, none of these considerations are relevant. The only outcome of your decision is to determine whether it's you or your assistant Amanda who gets shot by the terrorist plastic still in hiding here. You think you're getting one thing, but you're actually getting another. That's why I call it a "Shell Game" choice.

Like the "Which Door" choice, I object to the "Shell Game" choice in principle, but like the "Which Door," it does have a place. The danger is that the player will feel cheated because what they thought they were getting is taken away. Like the "Which Door" choice, it's essentially a randomizer, but in a sense it's even meaner to the player, because it asks the player to make a thoughtful choice based on certain considerations, and then rips that away. The considerations and the choice and the effort the player made are rendered meaningless because the results are wholly unrelated to the decision the player thought they were making.

This type of choice can have a place. In fact, this example, despite my best efforts to make it awful, turned out to be not too bad. It's a surprise, yes, but it's a point in the story where a surprise is called for. It's random, but it at least logically follows, to some degree. If you knew all the information when you were making the choice, the results that followed would make sense. This happens in real life; why not in gamebooks? Much worse examples of a "Shell Game" choice can be found in many gamebooks, especially the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. I read a CYOA book once, in which if you sat down at a certain table with a certain man early in the game, you would then fly to Africa and win the book, without a single other narrative choice. The end. Congratulations, you win! There's no way this logically follows, no matter how much you stretch it. Worse are the ones where you lose based on a Shell Game choice. Like if you decide to make a certain phone call, you wind up falling out of the airlock and dying, with no other chance to save yourself. My hackles rise whenever I see this kind of choice.

I was hoping to wrap up my discussion of Mars 2112 with this post, but I've run out of space, and there's still more to say. I apologize for the length of this discussion! I hope it is at least of some interest :)

See you next time with "F: Final Thoughts on Mars 2112!"

D: Discussion on Mars 2112

Yesterday, I posted a short sample gamebook. It's 17 entries, with maybe half a dozen real choices, but hopefully there's enough substance there to give you an idea what gamebooks are about.

It was a fun experience for me to write a short gamebook that quickly. I definitely found myself enjoying the world and the themes as I was working on it. This is possibly a story (or at least, a setting) that could bear a more well-developed treatment. 

Anyway, my intent today is to break it down a bit, and talk about what it's doing, what's good and what's bad. Ready... Go!

I've been amusing myself on this blog by describing kinds of choices that gamebooks can offer readers. The short gamebook I posted yesterday, Mars 2112, was designed to showcase a few of those kinds of choices. Let's go over them...

The very first choice you make is to pick the equipment you bring with you on your mission. You are forced to pick one of two options, a weapon or a stealth device. My intent with this choice was to demonstrate the "Apples or Oranges" style of choice, a choice in which the reader must pick between two things that cannot be easily compared to one another. This is good, because there is no "right" answer, and yet it is still a meaningful choice.

The other thing I would like to point out about this first choice is that it may be jarring for some readers to be presented with a choice about equipment when the text so far has been so story-based. It's a shift of gears. For experienced gamers, they will know what to expect and may enjoy this kind of choice. For someone new to games in general, and gamebooks in particular, I speculate that being asked to think about equipment alll of a sudden may not be fun. What do you think?

Next, you are faced with a choice regarding whether to go against the Commander's advice and try to talk to the terrorists, or search around and examine the building to consider an assault. My intent with this was to offer a "Cake or Death" choice, as an example of what NOT to do in a gamebook. I'm afraid that I might not have completely succeeded, because despite numerous hints that talking to them is not a good idea, the text still leaves enough room for speculation that someone might try anyway--especially given that many people's moral codes may require them to attempt talking rather than jumping to killing, even if it's dangerous.

A true Cake or Death choice is any choice in which one answer is clearly better. This is not something you want to do, but I was trying to demonstrate it for the example's sake. What do you think? Did I get there? 

Because this gamebook is so short, most branching storylines involve prompt player death. This is to avoid too many branches to the story that could cause the word count to bloat. That said, there is at least one choice that does take you through one of two different possible (viable) paths.  If you make it to section 4, you're given the choice to storm the building or sneak in. This falls under two categories of choices, one good and one bad. 

The good category this falls under is the "Tactical Choice," which is just the term I've been using to describe when your choice in one area may depend on situational factors, such as how much life you have left or, in this case, what equipment you brought with you. If you have the EMP grenade, storming the castle is the better option, but if you have the camouflage unit, then stealth is the better path. This requires the player to engage with the text, consider all factors, and then rewards the player with a possible "right" decision if they successfully think it through.

There is a school of thought that having a "right" option isn't good--but really, it's a little bit more complicated than that. If there is a right answer, then the player is faced not with a choice, but with a calculation. The challenge isn't for the player to pick between two competing values, but instead to think through the tactically correct approach. This isn't bad; it's like doing math. You have a problem, you solve it. If you solve it successfully, you get a reward. But it is important to remember that it isn't a real choice--unless the player doesn't solve the calculation correctly, and makes the decision based on other factors. But that carries it's own problems. Ideally, this type of problem should strike a good balance between providing enough hints in the text that there are clues as to the right answer, while not giving the answer away outright. It's not an easy balance to strike, but when successful, can be very good. Finding the clues to make good choices is one of the fun mini-games in a gamebook.

The other reason that I like the "Tactical Choice" is because, while it is a calculation, the answer can be different depending on past choices the player has made, or other factors. This helps prevent it from becoming stale, as if the player is in a different situation next time they come around, they get to solve the problem again, rather than just remembering the answer from last time.

All this is discussion regarding the tactical aspects of the choice whether to storm the building or sneak in; it's a modest example of a tactical choice, but it is one. But you'll remember I said this choice falls under another category as well, a less-desirable category. This choice, in Section 4 of Mars 2012, also falls under the category of "Blah" choice.

The "Blah" choice, according to my blog post on the topic, is one where the reader doesn't have any narrative reason to care. I won't say this wholly falls under this topic. If you're interested in tactics, this is an interesting choice, and you do have reason to care because of the stakes if you fail your mission. But it is not a character-driven choice, and to me that makes it less interesting.

 

What do you think? Do you care about this choice in the story, or is it just a roadblock to get through? Do you have a moment of fun in considering the tactical aspect of the choice? Do you think the answer is too easy and obvious, or not obvious enough?

And with that, I'm going to call this post here. We're only 4 sections in, but the discussion is shaping up to be longer than the original piece. Typical. Tomorrow, we will continue with "E: Even more discussion on Mars 2012!"

Thanks for reading, and good luck with your own projects!

P.S. I came across something in writing this, and that's the concept of including clues in the text to hint to the player which choice is the correct one. That's a dynamic I haven't discussed yet in my Gamebook Theory series. I'll have to look at that more closely in a future post. (Maybe after the A-Z Challenge!)

Gamebook Theory 3: Putting the "Game" in Gamebook (or taking it out?)

This is an article in my "Gamebook Theory" series. For prior articles, see Part 1: Story or Part 2: Narrative Choices.

Last week, we talked about the narrative choices as the "Game" in "Gamebooks." This was based on Raph Koster's model of a game being essentially a problem to solve, and a gamebook being essentially a problem of finding the "best" ending. This week, I'm curious: What if there is no "best" ending? What if there are a number of endings, each telling a different story? Would it still qualify as a game? Or at that point, is it simply an interactive story, and you're just getting a different story depending on the choices you make?

I don't have answers to that, but I do know this: I like--no--I love interactive stories. That's the whole point, to me. But at the same time, if you have the option, why not include elements of a game? People like challenges. People like overcoming challenges. It's fun.

Well, this raises a new question: "What kind of games can be included in a gamebook? What options do we have, as far as challenges to present the player with (without compromising the story)?"

As I'm in the planning stages of several gamebooks at the moment, this is a very relevant question for me. As such, I'd like to beg your patience as I consider a few of the types of challenges that a player can be presented with as a "game" element in a gamebook.

Narrative Choices: Last week, we discussed this exhaustively, so I won't go into it in detail here, except to say that you can make a challenge of the choices. As Stuart pointed out in that post, it's hard to find the balance between a "Which Door" Choice (no basis for making a decision) and the "Cake or Death" Choice (obvious correct answer.) Moving away from having a single "best" ending and toward having multiple different endings helps resolve this problem... but then is the narrative choice really a game-mechanic at all, or simply a way of interacting with the story?

Combat: Combat is one of the most obvious challenges that can be thrown into a gamebook, but I have mixed feelings about it's usefulness. Theoretically, moments of crisis and physical challenge should be the most exciting in a story. But I'm a little worried that because they are so intrinsically exciting, they have been overused to the point of making them dull.

The problem with combat is that, unless there is enough context to get the blood flowing and the adrenaline pulsing, it presents, from a purely mechanical, player-experience perspective, little except a chance that your character will die and your story will abruptly end.

What fun is that?

This is a general problem using dice-based challenges. It definitely presents a sense of challenge, sure. But if that challenge is just to suddenly and, almost randomly, force you to start over, is that really satisfying? Or is a victory by brute luck really satisfying? A good challenge should be skill based. But how?

For combat, I think one of the best ways to do that is to present the Illusion of Danger. (More thoughts on the Illusion of Danger, but I will save them for a future post.)

One way to make combat more interesting is the Challenge Staircase. By Challenge Staircase I mean the cycle of challenge, reward, bigger challenge, bigger reward, etc. Taking out a big monster feels more exciting if you couldn't take him before, but you've hiked up the challenge staircase far enough to take him now. The success of this model can be seen in games like World of Warcraft, Diablo II, and many, many more.

This is tricky to implement in a gamebook, because gamebooks (at least gamebooks now) for the most part don't have the range of system mechanics necessary. Tin Man Games does make this possible, at least, via the acquisition of weapons and armor.

What I would like to see, in order to take advantage of the Challenge Staircase as a game mechanic, is a more regulated growth of player power and monster power. If we evoke the risk/challenge/reward feedback loop and make the player feel like they've earned their progress, then when their progress allows them to do things they couldn't do before, they will feel a satisfying gaming experience.

What about a Puzzle? A puzzle could provide a satisfying intellectual challenge for the player. Solve the riddle, figure the answer, save the day. Sounds great! There's only two problems with a puzzle. First, they are hard to write. And if you write a bad puzzle, that's worse than no puzzle at all. Second, there is no replay value. Absolutely zero. Once you know the answer, you know it forever, and that particular challenge will never challenge you again. But for that first play-through, has potential for real awesomeness. (Mystery novel as a gamebook, anyone?)

That's a few ideas, but I hardly feel like the list is comprehensive. I'm going to go back to the drawing board to keep coming up with more ideas of kinds of challenges we can throw at players. Building the toolkit.

In the meantime, what do you guys think?

What kinds of challenges do you see in good gamebooks?
What are your favorite challenges to see in interactive fiction? (Your least-favorite)?

Or...
Do you really think challenges in gamebooks are necessary? Could you have just as good a time reading a piece that took out the challenges, so that your decisions simply lead you to a different story, not necessarily a better or worse one?

What makes a good gamebook - Part Two: The Game of Narrative Choices

Hello everybody =) Thanks for being patient. After the positive responses to Part One of this article, I have wanted to take my time and make sure not to let you down with Part Two!


The goal today is, of course, to discuss the game side of a gamebook, and what makes a good game in a gamebook. When I read this article by the excellent  Raph Koster (author of "A Theory of Fun") I had a bit of an epiphany: I was thinking of discussing things like combat, inventory, game balance, etc--but the true essence of the "game" in any gamebook is not any of that stuff, it's the narrative choices you make.


A lot of gamebooks have other game mechanics layered in as well: inventory, combat, magic, you name it--but all gamebooks share the core mechanic of narrative choices. This is a "game" in Raph's terms, because the entire gamebook is a problem to solve. The solution is the "best" ending. The problem is finding your way there through the maze of narrative choices. For this to be fun, the choices along the way must be interesting, meaningful and relevant. The player should be provided with enough information to have a chance of success without having to brute-force the problem (using trial and error), but not so much that the solution is immediately obvious.


What I'll do today is go over some common errors, as well as some good types of choices that we often see in gamebooks. To get started, let's look over some of the flawed narrative choices that are frequently used:

The "Which Door" Choice: One common flaw, and one which is a particular pet peeve of mine, is not providing enough information on which to base your choices. This is commonly seen in the "which door do you go through," or "do you go East or West" type of decision. If you have no clues whatsoever what's behind either door, then you might as well flip a coin. There's no choice. Don't get me wrong: luck has it's place. Even this type of faux-choice can be called for if you want to inject some randomness, but it should never be mistaken for a choice.

The "Cake or Death" Choice: The flip side of that first error is giving too much information. If the player has enough information to be able to definitively determine which is the correct path, then he has too much information. If you're offered cake or death, there's not a choice, unless you're a suicidal maniac. Obviously, you want the cake! You should be able to figure it out, or at least make a good guess, with a close reading of the text, but it should not be clear and obvious, or why offer the choice at all?

The "Shell Game" Choice: A third flaw steps outside of the paradigm of either of the first two, and that's simply making the results of a choice unrelated to the options presented. Like the shell game con, you don't get what you think you're choosing. If you're choosing between apples and oranges, and you get cake with one and death with the other, then wtf? It takes all significance out of the choice for the player, because whatever thought process they went through in order to arrive at that choice is invalidated. 

The "Blah" Choice: Finally, I would like to assert that too thin a narrative is itself a game-design flaw (in addition to simply being a weak story.) The reason for this is that the central game mechanic of gamebooks is that of making choices based on narrative. The narrative gives you the terms of your choice. The narrative gives you your reward or penalty. If you don't care about the characters or the outcome of the story, you can't take much pleasure in getting to read the "best" ending.

There's some examples of bad uses of the narrative choice. Now, let's take a look at how narrative choices can be handled well. I'll go through a few good examples to provide contrast.

The "Apples or Oranges" Choice: It can feel very rewarding to pick between two options, both of which offer a benefit, but with benefits that are different enough so that one can't be quantifiably defined as better than the other. This is often seen in picking skills or powers during character creation (see Lone Wolf), or in having a certain amount of money to equip your character early in the game (see The Wizard of Tarnath Tor). This gives a lot of food for thought in guessing which will be most useful, and also gives the player a chance to start identifying with their character. Think of trying to choose between a rope or a better weapon.They are fundamentally different, but both could be useful, depending on what you run into.

The Tactical Choice: Following up from that one, another good choice is one that gives the player a chance to take advantage of skills or equipment they may have previously acquired. If the choice presented hints that one resource or another will be more useful down each path, then it ties into a prior choice made with the same character, allowing the player to exercise an overall strategy. Then, each time a player comes through on different play-throughs, they may make a different choice, based on how they've prepared themselves this time.

The "X or ?" Choice: Another good option is the choice between a known quantity and an unknown quantity. Do you want to brave the guards you know are at that door, or sneak down into the dark tunnel below, with no idea what might be down there? This gives you something to think about, yet there's also no clear right answer.

The Moral Choice: Last but not least is the moral, character choice. Will you kill the enemy you've defeated, or show mercy and let him go? Will you assume leadership of your city, or walk away? Will you keep the jewel of power, or destroy it? Your estranged brother apologizes, do you forgive him or hold him accountable? A character of questionable moral integrity offers their services; do you accept? In some senses, these are the most interesting choices, and the ones every gamebook should be striving for. Not only do they provide meaningful choices but they also help tell a great story, and give the player a chance to really get personally involved and invested in that story.

This list is hardly comprehensive, but it at least provides a starting place to begin discussing choice theory in the terms of gamebooks. There's just one more point I'd like to make before I leave you:

The Principle of Choice-Based Results: The results a player gets should always be determined by choice, not by raw luck. It's okay to provide choices that manipulate odds. It's okay to have the challenges a player is presented with be determined randomly. It's even okay if terrible luck can sink the player even if you make perfect choices. But it's important that at the end of the day, the results be primarily determined by player choices, not raw luck.


To phrase this another way, it should always be possible to succeed with good choices without requiring good luck as well. If you have to pass an arbitrary dice roll in order to have a chance of succeeding, the author has done something wrong. Players sit down to read a gamebook in order to solve a puzzle by reading the narrative to search for the best path, not to play, "let's roll dice and try to get above a 10!" Choices are at the heart of the game, and nothing should ever supplant their rightful place there.

Well, I think that has about summed up what I've got for today. Hopefully I've provided some food for thought, as far as how to best make use of narrative choices as the central game mechanic of any gamebook. I'm sure there are a lot of directions to go from here, not least of which is analysis of some of the systems provided by specific gamebook rule-sets. But this at least provides a place to start.

To borrow a phrase from Stuart, "Happy gamebooking!"

[Edit: I've made some changes to the formatting of this post to break it up and make it a bit more readable. Those followed with some edits to the content :P]


[Edit #2: Does anyone here know Blogger well enough to have any idea why those extra spaces between paragraphs are showing up randomly between some paragraphs? As far as I can tell, I have two "enters" between each set of paragraphs. I've tried again and again to get rid of them. I just can't figure it. Thanks!]

What makes a good gamebook - Part 1: Story

I'm working on a major gamebook project at the moment, one which means a lot to me, as it represents my first chance to potentially get published. As I approach this project, I've been doing a lot of thinking about gamebooks, what they are, and what makes a good gamebook.

A good gamebook incorporates elements of both a novel and a game (as the name implies.) I would say that all too often, the historical gamebooks lean more towards "game" and away from "novel." Something like the first two Lone Wolf books would make great novels, even if you took out the game side. But something like Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, would not. If you took out the game-ness of it, there wouldn't be much left.

Let's take each of these in turn, looking at the novel aspect, and then the game aspect, understanding that gamebooks need both to be successful. (EDIT: Because this ran into being waaaaaay too long, I'm splitting this into two posts. This post is about the story aspect. Next post will be about the game aspect.)

Gamebooks are both easier and harder to write than novels. The very nature of a gamebook, with branching storylines and a demand upon the author to accomodate player choices, makes it intrinsically harder to construct a narrative than it would be with pure long-form fiction. You can't put together the ideal plot and pacing. You can't keep secrets from the player, the way you can in fiction, because the player is making choices for the hero. You can't jump from one set of characters to another, because the reader sees the wolrd only through the eyes of a single character. You can't come up with just one story, you have to make up a dozen, and then figure out how they all interweave, based on the choices the player makes. It's hard.

At the same time, gamebooks are in a sense more forgiving than novels. Warlock of Firetop Mountain perhaps wouldn't have flown as a novel, but it was certainly a success as a gamebook. Because you literally can't write a gamebook with as much tightly controlled narrative structure as you can a novel, you don't have to. The standards, as far as the story goes, simply aren't as high. That said, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to tell good stories. In fact, I would argue that though developing the plotline is harder (because of the branching nature) there is something to be gained from having branches to the story.

What you gain from a gamebook is the opportunity for a reader to get involved in a way you never can with a novel. The reader may not be whisked down one perfect plotline. But he or she can explore the world, the  character, and choices or outcomes in a way that you never could with any other strictly linear storyform. No other genre gives the audience this much control, aside from video games. And video games, all too frequently, do whisk the audience down one tightly controlled plotline, with only minor variations. The best games, like Fallout, give you real choices that effect both your path through the story, and the outcome of the story. Other games, like Skyrim, give you only the illusion of choices. You can pick which order to view the story in, but your choices don't change those bits of story once you get there. You never make choices that have any real effect on the world. (Note: I am writing this based on what I've heard about Skyrim. Please don't eviscerate me if this is incorrect, in your opinion!)

To see my favorite examples of how a gamebook can make a story interactive in a delightful and engaging way, see some of the stories by Endmaster on the Storygames website, such as Eternal or Necromancer. These gamebooks are described as more "story" than "game." They are, in fact, written using the "simple" gamebook engine, which has absolutely no features except the ability to make choices as you progress through the story. No hit points, no combat, no inventory, just choices. They are works of art. (Of course, some of Endmaster's other stories are... well, let's just say they defy description. That, and, I'm never introducing him to my children.) But those two, at least, exemplify something that I would like to see more of in gamebooks: a true interactive story.

What makes it successful as an interactive story? Well, for one thing, there's no "which door do you go through" choices. (I hate "which door do you go through" choices. I should maybe do a future blog post about this.) A few choices you make are success/failure type choices. "What method will you use to try and achieve your goals" type choices. But the vast majority are character choices. You know, the kind that in novels and movies bring the story to life. The kind that say something about the person making the choice. But this time, you don't have to sit there and watch while someone else makes this choice. YOU can make the choice. YOU call the shot, and once it's done, you get to see what happens because you made that choice. (Why did I just slip into the fighting fantasy style "YOU"?) Maybe your sister dies. Maybe you reconcile with your father. Maybe you end the world in cold fire. The point is, the choice is meaningful, and you get a different story because of the choice you made.

This comes back to why writing a gamebook is harder than writing a novel: the author doesn't get to just write one story and call it a day. An author as ambitious as Endmaster must write a dozen stories, each of which makes sense as an evocative story, each of which the reader can access based on the choices he or she makes.

But telling a good story is only one half of what a gamebook is. If you just wanted to tell a good story, you could write a novel. Of course, you would lose the interactivity that is the soul of the gamebook, but my point is, there's more to a good gamebook than just telling a good story. Gamebooks also open the door to include a "game" aspect, which can be fun in and of it's own right. Not every gamebook has to be a work of art in order to have value. Some can be fun games. Or, in the very best of circumstances, they can be both.

Because I've run out of time, we'll have to explore the game side of a gamebook next time. In fact, I think I'm finding that there's more here than can be covered in one or two posts. I might want to do a series about the kinds of choices you face in gamebooks, and my opinion of the value of each kind of choice.


One final question: One thing I'm struggling with is how much to prioritize editing while blogging, vs. just getting my ideas out there and posted, even if it's in a raw form. For anyone who actually read this whole thing (Stuart, I'm looking at you ;) do you feel this is fine as is, or could it have benefited from some editing?

Blogging in general seems to be more impulsive and free-form, but for most people, that means short. For me, impulsive and free-form means long, which all too often results in TLDR. So please, give me your feedback! Should this post have been edited before posting, or is it fine as is?


See you next time with "What makes a gamebook good - Part 2: Game"