WORD/PLAY

WORD/PLAY: An Interview with Simogo

Christof Zurschmitten — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 05:19:56 +0000

WORD/PLAY: An Interview with Simogo Christof Zurschmitten Do. 21 Aug 2014 - 07:19

In our ongoing series WORD/PLAY we look at the fusing of literature and games. The link to the the written word is almost as old as the videogame itself, and recent developments both on the side of literature and the videogame have shown that the relationship between the two media is as vital and strong as ever.

It's no secret that we here at Videogame Tourism are smitten with the work of the Swedish development studio Simogo. After all, we dedicated several thousand words to Year Walk, one of our favourite games of 2013. What we didn't talk about in such a verbose way, though, is that Simogo released a second game in 2013, Device 6, which is equally intriguing: A stylish fusion of classic graphic design, Cold War-thriller chique and typographical text that, thanks to Simogo's trademark cleverness in using the features of mobile devices, becomes navigable in hithero unknown ways. We talked with Simogo's Simon Flesser about literary influences, finding your work on the other end of education, going tactile, and much more.

When talking with Leigh Alexander, you mostly cited non-literary works as an influence (“1960s spy fiction, the unique surrealism of The Prisoner, and the texture of Judy Schlansky's book Atlas of Remote Islands.”) However, there is also a tradition of “playful literature”. I’m thinking of things like “concrete or shape poetry”, the formalist experiments done by the Oulipo, or even things like House of Leaves. Were you aware of that tradition when you created DEVICE 6? Was it an inspiration? Even if it’s not, could you see yourself as walking in the footsteps of those people?

We were indeed aware of the culture of ergodic literature, but are not very traversed in it at all. And I didn't want to start to get into it during the development of DEVICE 6, either. I wanted to us to create the game with a clean slate, without drawing any direct inspiration from for example House of Leaves. I love the concept of that type of thing and have always been curious about it, though.

Of course, there are also other lines of tradition which are more often cited as an influence on game designers when talking about the links between literature and games: the Fighting Fantasy-books and, above all, the golden era of text adventures. Did you encounter those things when you were younger? Were they maybe a (conscious or not) source of inspiration for DEVICE 6, even if it's in a “let’s do something else entirely”-way?

I didn't play any text adventures at all when I was young – because I quite frankly found them boring. One of the reasons we wanted to make DEVICE 6 was to try and make something text based a little more inviting, for people like ourselves. So having that ”contrary”-inspiration was indeed a factor!

In DEVICE 6, the clues for finding solutions are often hidden in the images, the sound, and so on -- but rarely in the text itself. (This is clear in one of the first puzzles, where you are looking at pictures of the words "HOPE", "FIVE", and "LIES", instead of the actual text.) Was this deliberate? Did you experiment with more “text based”-puzzles? Do you think it’s more difficult to direct players’ attention towards textual clues than, say, aural ones?

I'd argue that we have a good chunk of puzzles that are very based on text, or at least require the reader to digest and interpret the text as well. That said, we strived to have the puzzles as multimedial as possible, but always falling back on the player being able to interpret text in some way.

Talking of which: On Gameological, there was a comment suggesting that DEVICE 6 can be used to teach Close Reading, since it encourages readers to study the text repeatedly in a playful way. Any thoughts or feelings about the fact that your game is used in education? Also, did you have reactions in the line of “I usually don’t read, but…”?

I love to hear it. It makes me really happy if a thing we made can make people more interested in reading. Especially if they haven't been into reading books. There really is nothing like reading a good book. I think the way the written word stimulates the imagination and creative thinking is unique.

Do you follow the recent renaissance of text-based games, being lead by Twine? Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you read/play them? Do you maybe even have thoughts on that most unholy of questions, that is, how those games fit into the existing notions of “What is a game”?

I haven't actually. I do know of it, and read a few articles about it. I should really do that.

I don't have a good answer to how it fits into the question of what a game is. I'm actually not to concerned about putting labels on things or genre definitions. If a work is interesting in any way, it doesn't really matter what it is labeled as.

In academic studies of literature, space was often neglected because the important dimension for the medium was thought to be time. However, one of the remarkable things about DEVICE 6 is the sense of space and place that you as a player get. Did you find it hard to communicate that? Harder than in, say, Year Walk? What did you find to be the most essential aspects for succeeding in creating that sense of space and place? Did you experiment with different “solutions” to that problem?

We didn't think too hard about communicating it. I was honestly surprised myself about how well it worked after we had created the first chapter. When reading, I can sometimes find it hard to visualise spaces. Sometimes I don't get enough information, and I get the feeling that sometimes the author hasn't thought enough about what the place looks like.

I think part of the reason why space is so communicated well in DEVICE 6 is that I drew maps of every place of the island before we started creating the chapters. I think sound is a big factor as well. We use ambient sounds, echoes and that kind of thing to communicate the size of spaces as well.

While the highly original use of text is what’s most striking to a lot of people when encountering DEVICE 6, it is obviously a ‘transmedial’ work with lots of different parts coming together. Could you imagine that the game points to a possible future of reading, where text is integrated more smoothly into other forms of media? (I have to admit that I loved the way sound is linked to space in the game.) Or do you think that this would form a different experience/media/art form altogether than ‘literature’?

Good question. I'm really really interested in this, and hope to create more multimedial type of things in the future. Again, I am not to concerned about the label it gets. I think what is great about digital work is that we can mix medias in such interesting ways, it doesn't have to have the same limits as analog media (even though we could do much more there as well!).

When we here at Videogame Tourism talked in length about Year Walk, one of the aspects that we admired was how the game put the intimate relationship that people have with their device (you “touch” it, you have it in your lap and so on) into a narrative context where that somewhat cold object takes on aspects of an ‘artefact’, or even a device used to perform rituals. You guys are obviously very conscious of that ‘material’ aspects of works of art. Do you sometimes miss working with more tactile materials and media? Could you imagine working in other media, or even transposing elements of your games into, say books? (I’d buy an expanded book version of the Year Walk Companion in a heartbeat!)

Oh yes. This is a big dream of mine, and one I really hope I can do someday.

Me and Jonas were actually talking about how we could do that. We had a concept for a small spin-off project for DEVICE 6, that we called "The Doll Disappearances". It involved a USB stick, and lots of different types of media to create a non-linear story. It didn't evolve into a full project but some of the materials slipped into this poster.

So you could say we've actually touched upon it a little. That poster actually holds a lot of stories in itself. I find that concept really interesting, trying to tell a story on an analog piece of media, without it being a traditional piece, as for example a book.

Even the descriptions of those two posters have a narrative, tied to the bigger narrative of DEVICE 6.

There is that old cliché saying that the reading horizon of most game designers stretches roughly from Stephen King to Tolkien. Do you think that this is true? Do you think that games could benefit from being influenced more strongly by literature, or, more broadly speaking, books?

Yup, that's probably true.

Game developers mostly being influenced by other games and mainstream films is a big problem. It creates a culture when a lot of the work ends up looking the same and touching upon the same subjects.

And one last, general question that I want to ask all interviewees in this series: Could you name one book and one game dear to your heart that you’d like to point out to more people?

Oh, tough one. It doesn't feel fair to name just one thing ... But perhaps just to stay on track, I think anyone that enjoyed DEVICE 6 would find The Magus a really interesting read.

As for a game ... Very tough one too. I'd try to stay on track here as well. If you enjoyed DEVICE 6, like reading and have a DS, you should definitely try to track down a copy of 999 : Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.

[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

Thank you so much for your time!

Kommentare

Rareloots Mo. 3 Dez 2018 - 20:25 Permalink

I love how storytellers are

I love how storytellers are able to combine something so old and timeless such as great literature with something modern like video games.

https://rareloots.com

WORD/PLAY: From Shooter to (Interactive) Novel – An Interview with Misery Dev. Ltd.

Christof Zurschmitten — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 07:22:33 +0000

WORD/PLAY: From Shooter to (Interactive) Novel – An Interview with Misery Dev. Ltd. Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 24 Mär 2014 - 08:22

Imagine that you were part of an international team of enthusiasts who have just finished the acclaimed overhaul of a notoriously complex and beautiful First Person-Shooter... were would you go from there? For Misery Dev. Ltd., they behind the MISERY mod for S.T.AL.K.E.R., the unlikely answer was: you try your hands on an interactive novel. The developers do not think of this move as a departure from their true and tested strengths, though: No matter the format, The Seed, which is currently looking for money on Kickstarter, is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, with a focus on atmosphere and complex, dynamic systems. We talked with Nicolai Aarøe (creative director) and Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov (game developer) about this unusual project.

Could you say a little something about the team behind The Seed? You got to know each other working on the Misery-mod for S.T.AL.KE.R, haven’t you? Who are the people working at Misery Dev. Ltd.? (Like, what is your individual background, and how do you work together? Is it mostly remotely or do you have by now shared office space?)

Damjan: We work remotely, met remotely, and function very well remotely in fact. Misery was a remote project between a very large international team of people, now we are a smaller team, but more compact and agile in that sense. We've met in person in Poland already, and frankly we simply continued what we had previously to work on. We felt very comfortable with each other, since working on Misery previously has made us get to know each other very well. My background is in different types of media, I published a video game magazine for a while, made a cute game with my wife for iPhones. I've worked with sound a lot, so that's why what you will hear in The Seed will have great depth, both in audio quality and how the sound is procedurally generated in a multi layered way, and most importantly, how it is related to visual events on the scene. For example, smoke moves faster, or rain changes direction when wind blows harder. I am making a whole timeline of events that are random but orchestrated to a certain extent, events related to sound that affect the graphical world of The Seed, too.

So, let’s talk about The Seed: could you give the readers the elevator pitch of what it is all about and what differentiates it from, say, other interactive novels?

Nicolai: The Seed opens up the world to you in a novel format. But even after a few minutes of playing you will feel the struggle of surviving this world. You read the illustrated novel and within each chapter, you are having a visual portraying of your surroundings, including motion graphic and stereo sound.
In each chapter, you will have to make a choice. Not a simple one, but a hard one in a moral grey zone. And it will never be obvious to you where the best outcome lies as one decision always involves for something to NOT be chosen. This is one of the most important factors of the game and the Construct 2 engine will analyze your personality with each choice you make. Then add inventory management and navigation priorities to your gaming experience.

Going from a mod for a first-person shooter to an interactive novel is obviously a rather surprising and peculiar shift. How did you get there? What were your reasons for doing so? Do you think, for example, that the format of the interactive novel offers possibilities that a shooter wouldn’t? Maybe also in the context of you being a smaller studio?

Damjan: We started off with the idea that books could be treated a lot more like games – they could include all the classic elements that our ultimate game would have:

We started off with the idea that books could be treated a lot more like games.

Punishment mechanics, immersion, first-person perspective. At the same time, we wanted to start creating a very complex and unique desolate world for our future video game intentions. We all want to start working on the ultimately immersive 3D first person game, but we consider The Seed the best way to start building that world.

We wanted to start a massive, unique world that is probable, immersive and unique at the same time. We worked a lot on building a subtle sci-fi lore background for events and content to be written around that. Without revealing too many details of the story, we can say that some aspects of the realism of our game world have simply been confirmed by scientists as correct, others have been researched into hell and back for exactness. For example, consider the microbiological consequences of having an almost completely sterile world. The only remaining pockets of bacteria and viruses are exclusively in and around the small bands of people who are still alive. This is a specific type of setting, definitely not your post-apo-western, and definitely a big transition. Humanity has been reduced to an almost minimum, barely alive quantity. Air has constant particle pollution because of the sterility of most flora, people almost always struggle to scavenge food that is still edible. On the other side, processed food that is predominantly sterile would remain so for a longer period of time, just because of the consequences of the absence of most bacteria.

Are you readers of interactive novels? Are there any particular ones The Seed is inspired by?

Nicolai: We are – or rather, we were... But interactive novels never really lived up to our expectations and the potential that this category really has. We don't want choices where the outcome is obvious to you, we want choices that are hard to decide on. Where the outcome is a true balancing act, a dilemma, and truly a hard moral choice.

Some potential backers expressed concerns about the fact that in an interactive novel, writing will obviously be much more important than in a S.T.AL.KE.R.-mod, and so far, there has not been much proof of you delivering in that regard. How would you respond to those concerns?

Nicolai: We plan to publish a sample of the game, but we are a bit hesitant since people may think that what we show is all the game has to offer. In addition we don't want to reveal much about the plot at all. But it is very likely that we will respond to this concern by proving our skills with a sample release.

Obviously, there is a lot of “Zone fiction” around already, from Roadside Picnic onwards. I take it as granted that you are inspired by those works of fiction, but could you specify just how? For example, do you take inspiration only by the general ‘idea’ of the setting? Or do you also look into how the Strugazkis (or other writers) create a sense of place and space? Or, to put it differently: do you look at their narrative techniques and their style when writing for The Seed?

Nicolai: We don't look at their narrative techniques as we have our own very well defined already. We don't want to copy other people’s work, but indirect inspiration is something that no creative person can or should deny. The world of The Seed is very unique in the sense that we have several world elements and aspects that have never been seen before. And while underground shelters might be a classic elements of post-apocalyptic books and movies, we are moving away from that with the very first chapter of the game. You will be delighted to see that we are featuring sceneries that have never been touched before by any authors (that we know of).

How does the writing process work? Do you have one main writer, or is it more of a collaborative effort? Also, how does the writing tie into the bigger creative process? Is it comparable to how writing works in ‘usual’ game development or does the writer have a different /bigger role in The Seed?

Nicolai: We have a team of writers that all are deep into The Seed’s lore and world. A couple of main/basic chapters form the overall plot and the rest of the team branch this scenery in a variety of ways. We are very strict about the narrative technique and put a lot of effort into coherency.

One thing that stroke me as peculiar is that you call it a ‘2D interactive novel’. I’d like to talk about space in more detail in a second, but how did you end up with that description? Could you imagine a 3D (or 1D) interactive novel at all? Or how was that meant?

Nicolai: The "2D" is there to stress that people should not expect a 3D game from us this time around. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. MISERY mod is a 3D, immerse FPS and it would be the obvious choice for us to continue on this path. 3D interactive novels, on the other hand, may seem like a product of the future, but they may in fact be closer than you think. Maybe we could even be pioneers in this genre if our company is allowed to expand. There is so much potential in this genre that deserves to be realized.

I like to talk about space in this series, because it’s one of the most obvious differences between literature (which was for a long time considered to be a ‘temporal’ medium above all else) and videogames, which usually are thought of as a ‘spatial’ medium. In fact, giving a sense of place is something that is thought to be pretty difficult in literature, because you really have to rely on the imagination of the reader… Any thoughts on that? How do you evoke a sense of space, or place in The Seed? I take it that there will be navigation, but you also have very advanced graphics for a format that uses visuals usually often as a mere illustration of the text – how are the two intertwined?

Nicolai: This is one of the more potent questions I have had so far. We have come up with the following catch phrase about the game: "Rendered by the most powerful graphics engine - your IMAGINATION". And this is very much true in the sense that there can never be a more potent sense of space and visual appeal than the one that your brain is able to generate itself. We put a lot of effort into our artwork and each act will feature more than 200 sceneries in total. But these are mere boosters for your own mind.

"Rendered by the most powerful graphics engine - your IMAGINATION".

How many times had you read a good novel and then seen the movie afterwards, and you came out very disappointed by the limited depiction of what you had imagined? I heard this so many times and experienced it myself. This is the reason why books as a medium, physical or digital, will never die. And this is the reason why we want to raise the bar for what is possible to do with this medium.

Imagine playing The Seed in bed with the lights out, your quality headphones on, and the rain and wind in your ears. You play the game, and after a while it stops raining in the story/plot. Then the rain in the artwork stops, too – not only the sound, but also the visual effects. Imagine doing this just before you close your eyes for the night… your imagination will take over from there. Any FPS game, ANY, will have a limited map size and borders that you cannot cross. A story born from your imagination will not.

Another interesting thing that you seem to try with The Seed is the use of more ‘systemic’ elements, like a dynamic soundscape, even dynamic weather. In a way, you seem to aim for a unusuall middle ground: one extreme would be the sense of a highly complex, living, breathing ecosystem that was one of the most fascinating aspects of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games; the other extreme would be ‘static’ interactive fiction and interactive novels, a format that is very often barebones when it comes to dynamics. (Interactive fiction is, after all, often limited to the famous ‘garden of forking paths’, but only rarely track variables etc.) Can you talk a bit about how The Seed is designed in that regard? Did you find yourself limited by the format when trying to implement such elements?

Nicolai: To a degree, I answered this in the question before this. But I'd like to state that we needed a medium that allows us to do whatever we want to do with it. And in the end, all game engines have their limitations. For the MISERY mod, we took the X-Ray engine of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series to the max, and subsequently felt as if we have had squeezed this lemon dry.
You see, we are new in this industry as independent developers and we have very limited budgets to work with. But we are known for our creative minds, our creativity and conceptual story telling – and people appreciate this. Thousands of gamers download the MISERY mod whenever we release a new update.
But with this new project, we can tell (and portray) the story of The Seed exactly how we want it to be. FPS games are predictable in the sense that after a while, you know EXACTLY what this game has to offer and what tools the developers work with. With our interactive novel, you will never know how the story, contents or challenge may evolve.

We are witnessing a sort of renaissance of interactive fiction, thanks mostly to Twine and similar tools. Some of the games done with it, like Horse Master, even use the systemic elements to good effect (and, in the process, do blur the lines between game and literature even further). Do you follow that ‘scene’? Are there any Twine games or other works of interactive fiction you particularly like?

Nicolai: Yes, I believe that this is a genre that deserves its comeback and I am delighted that we are in the middle of it all. But we are very focused, and we try not to let ourselves be too much inspired by other people’s work. Everything featured in The Seed will be original – the story, plot and mechanics have been in our heads for a good while. So, we like to think of this game as unique by not comparing it too much with others. By doing so, we make sure that people don't think that they should expect a product such as title "X" from company "X".

Modding was one of the cornerstones of the success the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games experienced. Could you imagine allowing mods for The Seed? Or even opening up the use of the engine to other people?

Nicolai: Releasing the technical data for others to mod The Seed is more than likely. We have built our reputation through modding the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, so it would resonate well with our approach to the industry if we shared The Seed’s technical data. Why not give back, when we have been given so much through the years?
As a modding team (and now company), we were allowed to grow through modding – and who knows what talented people will be able to do with and through our standalone game? I love that concept.

I know that it’s proper etiquette to be modest, but screw that: Are there any aspirations to push the envelope of what is possible in and with interactive novels with The Seed? What future direction would you like to see the interactive novel headed into? Do you maybe even think that there is the potential for the format to get out of the ‘niche’ it is currently in (at least in the Western hemisphere), and if so, what would it take to do get there?

Nicolai: If we are allowed to dream for a minute and not feel obliged to work with what we have at our current disposal... We want The Seed to grow from an interactive novel to an open world 3D game. To accompany that, we would love for the setting to be adapted into a movie at some point. But we need the ladders to be built from the ground up, starting with what we are capable of doing now.

Your game is set in ‘Eastern Europe’, and post-apocalyptic fiction (and sci-fi in general) is often used to comment on the present state of things. Is that ‘critical aspect’ present in The Seed? And if so, have the recent developments in Eastern Europe changed your feelings about what you wanted to comment on?

Nicolai: We would very much like to not capitalize on real life crisis and circumstances. So we put an effort into not building on any current situation. But we observe relevant matters and watch the news like anyone else. Hard real life facts, as cruel as they may be, must be put into our game if we want to aim for realism and authenticity (which we are).
"The Event" in The Seed takes place in August 2015 and Act 1 starts out in 2026, so obviously we have to build our world around the current situation as much as possible.

I like to end each interview in this series with the following question: Could you name both a book and a game dear to your heart that you think more people should read/play, and could you say in one sentence why they should do so?

Nicolai: (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat with the MISERY mod is the obvious choice here, so I won't say that)...
The Road (book and movie) – to experience how atmosphere can be as important as the plot itself.
Heavy Rain (game) – to witness how well thought-out moral choices will linger on in your mind 10x more than any FPS kill.

Thank you for your time, and best of luck for your campaign!

The Kickstarter campaign for The Seed is still looking for backers. Also, you can find the rest of the articles in the WORLD/PLAY series right here.

WORD/PLAY: "Text is a visual medium": An interview with Jon Ingold

Joe Köller — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 11:40:53 +0000

WORD/PLAY: "Text is a visual medium": An interview with Jon Ingold Joe Köller Do. 21 Nov 2013 - 12:40

In the series WORD/PLAY we look at the fusing of literature and games. The link to the the written word is almost as old as the videogame itself, and recent developments both on the side of literature and the videogame have shown that the relationship between the two media is as vital and strong as ever. Note: This interview first appeared for Haywire Magazine.

Icaught up with Jon Ingold, creative director and one half of inkle studios, for a chat about about presentation, mechanical transparency and procedural prose. Jon’s fantastic GDC talk is available online and you can find him and inkle on Twitter.

Let’s start with the retroactively obvious question: What is Sorcery!?

Sorcery! is an epic interactive fantasy adventure. Explore the wilderness of the Old World of Kahkabad, fight terrible monsters, cast powerful spells and avoid vicious traps. The game is told entirely through text, which adapts and rewrites itself based on your choices, to create a unique tale every time you play.

Adapted from the best-selling series of gamebooks by Steve Jackson, Sorcery! has been massively expanded into a living, breathing story-world. Meet every character and explore every turning. Shape your character through thousands of choices, every one of which is remembered.

Part 1 was released last May to critical acclaim, and Part 2 is out in the first week of November.

Before we get back to that and your GDC talk, could you tell us how you ended up working with text?

I always have, really. As a kid I read gamebooks, and played Infocom's text adventures, because they were the only games that ran on our computer. When I began to learn programming, I wrote text adventures because they didn't require any graphics, which were time-consuming, difficult and, of course, wouldn't run on our computer either. Along the way, I got interested in writing - I've written a few novels, plays and short stories in my spare time - and the two interests, games and text, just kept on spiralling in and around each other.

In my twenties, I discovered Inform, a modern language for creating text adventures, and began writing them in earnest and releasing them on the internet. The games I wrote did pretty well for themselves, getting a lot of players and a lot of discussion, and I won a few awards. Off the back of those games, I got a job at Playstation and started designing console games. At that point, I guess I thought I was done with text, but when Joe (ed: Joseph Humphrey, development director at inkle) and I started discussing leaving and starting inkle, the idea of making excellent text-based games was still around.

Now, my day job is writing interactive fiction, and I couldn't really be much happier about that. There aren't many people who get to turn their hobby into a career. I'm only hoping it'll last!

I think it's interesting that you refer to your work both as text-based games and interactive fiction. Are they the same thing?[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

Interactive fiction > text-based game.

To expand on that - text-based games are a way you could do interactive fiction. Inklewriter, for instance, doesn't really produce text-based games, as there's not really any game elements to it. Our Frankenstein project is interactive fiction, but not really a game.

But Sorcery! is a game, and a lot of the parser-based work I did in the past was game-like, usually containing puzzles and riddles and the like.

Recently, we've been finding that interactive fiction needs a game-loop or two to help the player understand what it is: straight-out interactive stories can feel a bit directionless and it's not always clear where they're going, or why the reader is giving their input. A few game-elements seem to help reassure readers that what they're choosing is definitely being noticed by the game. [Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

You're saying text-based games are a subcategory of interactive fiction?[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

Yeah, I'd say so. Heavy Rain is interactive fiction, after all.

On a side note, I really hate the word "interactive" - it doesn't mean anything. Theatre is interactive. Reading is interactive, because there are words and I do a whole bunch of stuff in my head to work out what they're telling, including imagining everything, drawing inferences, etc. I'd say the fiction in theatre is probably more interactive than the fiction in a game like Uncharted.

When we say "interactive" I think we really mean "responsive", in that something about the fiction changes depending on what we do. But that doesn't mean it has to be branching narrative; it could just be a story that evolves based on how we move through it. So, a good stealth game achieves this pretty well - the original Thief, for instance.[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

I agree, games discourse tends to neglect how active participation in other media can be. Either way, it seems we are coming close to that old "game or not game" debate. Not to spend too much time on this, but what makes a game and what makes... eh... choice-based fiction?

I think the game element arises from allowing a degree of strategy and prediction on the part of the player. It doesn't need to be much! But some sense of a resource or a strategy one might have to husband.

To take an example, in Frankenstein, Dave Morris made the story track your empathy with Victor Frankenstein, and events branch based on that statistic. But the average reader doesn't know that - the UI doesn't tell you and the text is elliptical on the subject. People who read without knowing that treat the story as a story. But those who we happen to have told about the empathy mechanic bear it mind as they read, recognise it when it's relevant - and tend to have a more interesting experience. Despite the actual text and interaction being identical.

So I think the "game" element comes from giving the reader some kind of model for understanding what's going on. Interestingly of course, films these days all have the same model - a 3-Act structure, with every scene containing a reversal - and that makes them easier to watch because we use our knowledge of the model to predict, at least a little, what's going to happen, saving us from being too stressed or too surprised along the way.[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

You're making it sound as if not the resource itself, but the idea of there being a resource brought about different attitudes - to identical content no less. If these systems don't need to be visible to your players, do you need them at all or do you just need to convince people that you have one?

Well, when a game is being played, the only human in the room is the player. So it's what's going on inside that person's head which defines what the experience is.

Less existentially, it's about suspension of disbelief. The reason to make systems visible is to enable players to believe that those system exist; and to help them suspend their disbelief that the choices we are making matter. When we play any game - board-game through to playground game - we know, really, that the game doesn't really matter, that the rules are arbitrary and limited, that there are perfectly good avenues of action we could take if the game wasn't preventing us. We have to suspend that disbelief, and trust in the game's creators that we will get a worthwhile experience in return.

In a computer game, where there's no-one around to encourage you to do that, the UI helps to make the game seem both responsive and fair. It may serve a strategic function for the player as well, or it may not.

Going back to what you said about providing a model for understanding events, I'm curious if you see this exclusively in mechanical terms. Leigh Alexander famously opined on empathy as challenge and normativity as a ruleset, launching that entire Formalists vs. Zinesters debate.

Well, I don't know the debate, so can't talk to that. But I think the point of a model is it doesn't necessarily have to be rule-based, or mechanical, or even interactive, but it has to be somewhat predictive.

So my game-model might be "In this story, when you choose to act in a violent way, characters in the world will remember and respond to that choice appropriately". You learn, after the first few swung punches, that people are avoiding you. Is that a mechanic? Well, no, not unless this is useful somehow. But does it create more empathy? I'm not sure. Possibly, yes.

I certainly do think that our tendency to express everything mechanically means empathy isn't going to happen: once you start thinking of everything in terms of screw-threads and cogs, people become tools instead of humans (and this happens in the real world too; it's how management consultants can fire hundreds of people and not feel bad about themselves). I suppose I think that if you make your mechanics more blurry and indistinct, then people will rely more on empathy and emotional intelligence to fill in the blanks - in the same way that, watching a film, I rely on my empathy to understand what the hell is going on, because a lot of the time all I'm shown is Tom Cruise's face pulling a serious expression, and I have to work out what it's supposed to mean for myself.

I probably should have warned you that I have a penchant for Twine games. Or Twine fiction, if you prefer.

I've got nothing against it, but it hasn't grabbed me yet. I tend to find I'm floating in a big sea of stuff, some of which hits, some of which misses, but none of which escalates or connects together to create a larger whole. That said, the amount of Twine-type stories I've tried is pretty small, and I'm sure a canny author could use the format to make something compelling. They probably have, and I just haven't seen it.

Just by bringing it up, I already devoted more time to the debate than I meant to anyway. Perhaps we can talk about other parts of your design: At GDC you talked about the simplicity and flexibility of text, the benefits of painting with words instead of polygons. Given this, I did not expect you to cover visual design as well. How important is it to make prose pretty?

The answer is, I'm really not sure. I do know that the reason people stop and read the text in our apps is because the visual design is attractive; but it's also because the interface is easy to use, quickly rewarding and, whatever you do, it's always really easy to take the next step in the story.

In Frankenstein, which wasn't written by us, but was the first time we used our engine and interface design, the pages of text were quite long. We found that just that - having three or four paragraphs to read before the next choice came along - caused a significant tail-off in people's interest in reading. So for Sorcery! we broke everything up into ruthlessly short chunks, and you can see the effect on people playing. They read without meaning to.

So is that visual design? I think it probably is. It's the same as the way writers for magazines work, ensuring everything they print is highly consumable. You'd sort of be crazy not to do that, since computers - especially phones and tablets - are so damn distracting. You make the reading too much like hard work, and you'll have a thousand players checking Twitter instead.

The other side is beautiful visual design is important to us as a company - for Joe, because it's what he does really, really well, and for me, because it's something I do really, really badly. So it's a real pleasure to be able to work on stuff that ends up looking so good!

But yeah. Text is a visual medium. I hadn't thought of that idea until I came to write my GDC talk, but having struck on it, it seems obviously true. Same reason I break long emails into paragraphs - you'd never read them if I didn't.[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

I would, but it would make my job harder. The idea seems obvious enough - most good text games practice this kind of restraint, by intuiton or design - but I think it's the first time I heard it spelled out. How did you go about testing player attention?

We didn't do any formal testing; more just tried things and followed what we liked. Between Frankenstein and Sorcery! we wrote a piece of our own based on a parser game I wrote in 2001, and that adaptation was fascinating to do, because it took us miles away from the gamebook, text-heavy format. So when Sorcery! came around, we had a sense of which way to jump.

And now for something completely different: What directions are you planning to take the format in the future?

There's lots of interesting things out there. But we're interested right now in blending games and game structures with text in ways that bring the games to life. So in Sorcery! 2 we have an almost open-world-ish structure, where you can roam around this city, looping back on yourself and exploring very thoroughly, but what you find is individual bits of real stories, different, unique characters, and no repetition of content simply to fill out the world. So we're trying to do the exploration you get in a game like Assassin's Creed but using text to make it full of characters and not cut-outs.

At the same time, we've added a gambling mechanic - a dice-based betting game - but while that game plays, the two characters talk. What they say and what they play are inextricably linked, so the experience is a little frustrating - you can't just say anything! - but in a good way. It's more interesting than playing a straight gambling game because it has character; and as a player, I find myself taking risks because I want to string the conversation out, which is a great source of tension.

For future projects, we're looking along that axis, at different types of games that we can bring to life and bring character to, using the power of text and our combination of procedural and authored content. We've got some interesting ideas for new projects and for Sorcery! 3. But it's hard to be specific yet, as any given concept may prove to be impossible. We thought the procedurally-generated combat sequences in Sorcery! 1 would be impossible, but in the end, they worked out pretty well.

That sounds really cool. The impression I get (and got from your talk) was that you're using visual minimalism to layer on depth and detail in other areas. Hyperrealism of a different kind. Speaking of procedural generation though, could you elaborate on how you employ it? Easing up on notions of authorial intent is kind of essential to making a game, a system in which people can play around, but I get the impression automatization or randomization is still seen more critically in this area than in world generation, say.[Bild nicht mehr verfügbar]

Yeah, I've never seen any procedural text that's really worked, outside of one place, and that's the some of the parser-game works of Andrew Plotkin. In particular, his game Hunter, in Darkness has a (near-)infinite maze of rooms, which is entirely procedurally described. It becomes clear after a while but to begin with, it's not at all clear that it's doing that.

That game inspired me to try my hand, and then at about the same time, I was given a modded version of the Inform text-game compiler which allowed easy writing of sequences and cycles of text - so you could write one response, that would print differently depending on how many times the text appeared. Those two ideas - procedurally driving what gets constructed, and then supplying varying text output for repeated actions - came together in my head, and I used both techniques a lot in my last parser-game, Make It Good - and used them in all sorts of stupid places, from generating dialogue, to generating a series of backyards behind houses that you could wander through for no reason.

When we came to doing Sorcery! we pitched the idea of procedurally generating the fight scenes almost as a blue-sky concept, we didn't know if we'd be able to do it well enough to ship the feature. But I've always had this nagging feeling that writers writing fight scenes in pulp novels are basically generating random text from a set of familiar-sounding sentences they have in their heads, so it seemed a plausible thing for a computer to do.

When it comes down to it, of course, the text is still very heavily authored. What the system really relies on is that descriptions of combat contain a lot of non-sequiturs. A line describing what I do doesn't really need to flow into a line describing what they do in response beyond a few obvious things, like not repeating the same words and having the right punctuation. So at its most basic, you can stack text descriptions together and make a punchy, descriptive paragraph.

Then we layer some more authored sentences on top, which come out under certain circumstances. We make sure the various patterns the database uses vary too, so you don't get sentences of the same syntactic structure over and over, which would quickly become obvious. And then we test a lot to iron out the kinks.

In the main game flow, Sorcery! Part 1 didn't have many procedural sequences, but Part 2 has quite a few more as the story goes along, and it's a similar process to the combat.

In general, I think the reason people haven't done this before isn't because it doesn't work, but because there's an assumption that text has to be fixed, locked down and closely copy-edited. We treat text quite differently, throwing words around with abandon, and allowing algorithms to sort out the conjunctions and the punctuation of the sentences we create. And we do a lot of work to ensure we avoid repetition of phrases and words (and still, a lot slips through). The result is never outstanding prose, but it's perfectly serviceable, and buried in amongst other prose, it's pretty hard to spot.

So I think no-one else really pushed it far enough. People dabbled in it, tried things which were either too tightly authored to do anything interesting, or things which were so fundamentally algorithmic that when the system started generating weird text there wasn't any way to fix it. What lets us do better is that we have a good tool that allows the author to tweak and fix what they like, writing variations quickly, and the rules of the system are really simple - even if the final text file isn't.

Speaking of combat, do you have any plans to abandon the fantasy genre again?

Yes, definitely. Fantasy is a lot of fun, and the world of Sorcery! is gloriously malicious, always out to trip you up or send you down a wrong turn. But it doesn't appeal to everyone and I don't want the work we do to get pigeonholed as just nostalgic Dungeons and Dragons affairs. We've got a new idea brewing that's different again, still lots of fun, but appealing to a different crowd.

I'd still like to stick with genre fiction for the moment, though, I think. I want to do murder mysteries, sci-fi adventures, steampunk, maybe a rom-com. I don't really want to tackle serious, heavy-weight issues. No reason for that - it can certainly be done - but I guess I'm attracted to making entertainment that occasionally achieves the status of art, rather than art than is occasionally entertaining.

So what’s next for inkle? Can you talk a bit about what you're working on right now?

Well, we've just finished up Sorcery! 2 and the final spit-and-polish testing for release on November 7th. It's playable as a stand-alone adventure, or you can continue from where you left off in Book 1. Now it's Sorcery! 3 for me, while Joe goes off and does some R&D for another thing we're getting into, which we can't talk about yet, but is pretty awesome.

So, um, no, we can't. But we will.

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WORD/PLAY: "Can you imagine all of that?" An interview with Robert Sherman, author of Black Crown (Pt. 2)

Christof Zurschmitten — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 09:52:29 +0000

WORD/PLAY: "Can you imagine all of that?" An interview with Robert Sherman, author of Black Crown (Pt. 2) Christof Zurschmitten Di. 5 Nov 2013 - 10:52

This is the second and final part of our interview with Robert Sherman, mastermind behind Black Crown, a strange but successful hybrid between literature and Free2Play game. In part 1, we talked about why taxonomies are overrated, the importance of being close to readers, and the issue of repetition as a structure. In part 2, we go all out with big thoughts about big topics, like space, freedom, legacy, and tearing ties to shreds.

Do you know of earlier attempts to bring literature and videogames together? Have you read, for example, novelizations of computer games?

Oh, certainly. One of this year’s biggest games, Metro: Last Light, is based on a novel, and the novelist was intimately involved in the building of that game. It’s really interesting, because literature as a non-digital medium is telling stories in a linear format. I don’t think it’s becoming irrelevant, but a lot people believe it is. At the same time, though, it has this huge cultural cache, this huge weight to it. When you talk about literature, people assume a certain way of either thinking or talking about it.

Games are the most powerful cultural force on the planet at the moment – at least purely in monetary terms.

With games, it’s different. They are the most powerful cultural force on the planet at the moment – at least purely in monetary terms. Just look at GTA V, the amount of exposure and saturation that it has on the collective consciousness! Despite that, there is still a huge cultural stigma attached to games, which is slowly being eroded. But I think that there is a tension where literature and games are trying to come together in a transmedia way, and very often, the two things are being kept separate. The idea is that literature becomes involved in games to become trendier, and games become involved in literature to become more respectable. I don’t think that’s a useful way to spend time as either an author or a game designer. What should be better is bringing all those people together and telling a story in the best way it can be told.

I think writers getting involved in games is an excellent idea, but I don’t like the idea that lots of writers, or the publishing industry, or the general public has – the idea that there are no good storytellers working in games. There are hundreds and thousands of them. A traditional writer can’t just come along and say: “Well, let’s look at the way stories have been told for thousands of years! You do not know anything about it! Let me show you, because I am a literature professor!” That is simply not going to work. Things need to be much more tightly integrated, it’s not just about this trendy fusing of two media, one that is much younger and more vital and one that is much older and more respected.

And novelizations are maybe not the best example for that fusion, either.

The few novelizations I have read were not drawing on the fact that there is a game, they were drawing on the fact that there is either a rich fiction or that there is a story there that can be told in a linear way. I haven’t read any novelizations that really have anything to do with the game as a game, but more with the game as a story. To me, they are barely linked at all, but that’s just my impression.

That’s true, with the only exception that comes to my mind being the first Doom-novelization. The author knows that it’s actually impossible to make a story of what is happening in Doom, so he just breaks the Fourth Wall and starts talking about how it at feels like a game. It’s actually pretty funny in parts. Not a great book, but entertaining.

I have to pick that up, it sounds actually quite interesting. I vaguely remember watching the Doom film when I was very drunk. I think I remember that there was the trace of an undertone of it being self-aware, and, as you said, Fourth Wall-breaking. That’s interesting, because they fully embrace the fact that the story that is being told is a thin excuse to shoot demons. They are ok with that.

One other thing that you said in an interview is that you wrote a novel for Random House’s Dan Franklin to give him an idea of what Black Crown’s story would be like. It’s difficult for me to imagine what such a novel would look like. Surely, it can’t be a linear story, a classical novel, can it?

Maybe I misused the word “novel”. I think it was more in relation to the fact that I said I never wanted to write it as a novel. The original project was contained within a suitcase with lots of different items, and it was more of a transcript of that experience. It was all the text that was included in that suitcase, all the text of the journal, all of the little letters and scraps of paper that were in there. Essentially, it was a description of the process of going through the suitcase. It was like: “You are presented with a suitcase. It is made from red leather. It has got all these things on the outside, all of these fake travel stickers I had created sticking all over it.” Then it says: “You open the suitcase and you are looking through the journal”, and then it will have ten journal entries and an item from the box, and so on. It was for Dan to get hold on how I pace things, how I construct narrative and what my writing looks like on the page, because even though he works with digital media, he is still an editor. He still is somebody who is concerned with text and its quality. He just wanted to get a handle of it, but it took me a long time to fabricate it. Well, it really turned out to be worth it in the end.

I was also asking because of something another author said recently. The Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck, whose style and themes actually remind me of yours, described the process of writing her novel Amatka as starting with a series of dreams: She dreamt of different places and understood that they were interconnected. So instead of starting with a story arc, she started with mapping those. That’s actually not out of the ordinary in fantastical literature, because you have to create a whole world anyway. Still, there has been a lot of talk about a paradigm shift even outside of literature, where time as the dominant dimension is more and more replaced by a focus on space, and places. Would you say that your writing is a reflection of that as well? It obviously did not start with a typical approach to telling a story, but also with world building, in a sense.

Actually, the original project had a lot more maps in it. It’s something that I miss, though there is a map hidden somewhere in Black Crown. (If anyone finds it, let me know.) But that’s actually a really good question I do not have an intelligent answer for.

I think that idea of being spatially aware is interesting because time is so in flux in the game itself. There are quite a few points where the character will say: “I have no idea if five years have gone past.” That’s due to the character being in constant pain, delirious. There is a piece of content where they are crawling across the grass and that story is called “10’000 Years”, because the characters have literally no idea of how long they have been doing that. They have come to either a realization or an assumption that they cannot die or that they are going to be kept alive for various purposes.

But the idea of spatial awareness has always been something that is quite difficult for interactive fiction, especially interactive fiction that does not make use of graphics at all. That was one of the reasons why we changed the front page of the game to show the hillside. It was not there at launch, even though we had that artwork for a poster. Ultimately, we thought: “Let’s use it, because it’s excellent and it completely encapsulates where the players are, and the nature of this landscape.”

In terms of space and place, there is the story of the fictional town of Loss in the diary entries. Unfortunately, it is something that I won’t be able to explore as much as I’d like to, given the time and budget restraints we have to work in. (Though I would really like to come back and tell more stories about that town.)

Aside from that, you can say that the Institute is contained in a landscape of rolling hills, where geologically there is no change. It’s just rolling hill after rolling hill after rolling hill, and the ocean. That gave me an almost infinite pallet on which to paint things. That’s why in the geography of the Institute, there are very specific landmarks. There is the Boundary Stone. There is the river. There is the Marvel Ouse. There is the tree. This also meant that I could centre stories around those places easily. If I needed to tell a story or have a plot point, it also needed to focus around one of these sights. And I think that reinforces the idea that all of this is one big ritual, or that it has a mythological component, that it’s in this dreamlike landscape. But there are also incredibly physical totemic items and places around which things occur. That’s a sense that I really wanted to reinforce with the Institute. You do have a sense of space. But the way that the player or the character thinks about things or describe things, the whole journey and the disjointed nature of it, does, I hope, reinforce the idea that the characters are delirious or that their experience of space is only coming through the visor in their suit, which is their window to the world. One thing that I actually really like and that was entirely accidental was that the banner on the top of the webpage, which displays what area that you are in, is the exact same shape as the visor through which the player would see things. That was a really happy accident, but it serves to reinforce the sense of claustrophobia and being disconnected from this vast open space. I don’t know if you have played the Escape-storylets?

I actually have.

Most games are about abilities and the increasing of those - Black Crown has that in form of the diseases your character catches.

I think that’s the part people generally enjoy the least, because they feel like they should be able to escape. But the whole point of those stories is that you never actually leave your desk. The Institute actually assumes that you will try an escape, so what they do is they lead you through a hypothetical exercise and say: “IMAGINE if you tried to cross the river. And if you can manage to do that in your mind, well… what would you eat? How would you drink? See, you would just die.” And at the very end, they say that it was a good thing that you did not leave your desk for real.

That ties into the idea of imagining and the reason why the word “imagine” is highlighted. So much of what the player does is imagining, because they are so disconnected from the world. You know, they have very limited physical ability, which I suppose is another thing that is different from most traditional games. Most games are about abilities and the increasing of those. And Black Crown has that in form of the diseases your character catches. If you can do anything physical with them at all, it causes you great physical pain. And if their benefits aren’t physical, they are entirely mental, which ties into exactly what the Institute is about – the reading and cataloguing of work. The ideal clerk from the Institute’s point of view would never leave his or her desk. So what your character is doing is obviously slightly different, and it means that you are able to explore this place a little more.

Granted, there are other reasons for me using the idea of hypotheticals and imagination. But one of the big things is that you have to imagine so much because you are physically incapable of more. You cannot run, you cannot jump, you cannot do any of the things you do in a videogame. You can barely see anything; you even have to imagine your own body because it is enclosed in the rubber suit. The Escape-storylets have that element of being hypothetical, but they also reinforce the fact that there is this huge landscape just outside the glass of your visor, but you cannot really ever experience it, unless you get out of that suit. Which you simply cannot do at the moment.

You compared the structure of Black Crown to a river. I was more reminded of something that happened to my uncle once: He was so dead drunk at a village fair that they nailed his tie to the wood of the bar without him noticing. So for the better part of an hour, he tried to get up, found himself incapable of doing so, and put his head back down to let it rest on the bar. Until, finally, he managed to gather enough force to rip his tie completely up and break free. I felt a bit like that while playing Black Crown. It is so difficult to get up from your desk that the first time you actually succeed in doing so, it is a very liberating feeling. I think that this works really, really well.

That’s an interesting point, and it ties back to the imagination. There are lots of opportunities in the game which are a direct pastiche of being a hero. I don’t know which diseases your character has, but there is one disease where you grow what is essentially a giant cuttlebone out of your back. You get it by inhaling powdered prehistoric squid, which I won’t go into details about. It’s like a genetic modification, and it’s extremely sharp, but it’s connected directly to your spine. That was really a parallel to the hero’s sword being strapped across the back. It is a pastiche of it because you can never draw it – it’s always on your back and when you want to use it, you have to rub yourself up against things, much like a pig. You can use it down at the Marvel Ouse to excavate, but you have to rub yourself up against the wall, and also, because it is connected to your spinal column, it causes you incredible pain. But the player characters still try to imagine themselves as a hero or a heroine, doing these great deeds. And because they have overcome great physical pain and mental discomfort, these actions are incredibly heroic to them.

If you were to plot your character’s journey through Black Crown, there are two perspectives you can take: You can take one from the character’s perspective, where they’re right in the thick of things and they are doing all of these seemingly very heroic deeds. I hope that comes through, because I am writing like this not only because it’s my style, but also because, as I hope, it is reminiscent of epic poetry. The description is designed to be overwrought, because these things matter so much to your character.

The other perspective that you can take is almost like a bird’s eye-view, where you are watching this rather pathetic creatures crawl around in the dirt, attack things, be spiteful, walk a hundred meters from their desk. If you look at it from that perspective, the actions that you take during the game aren’t physically impressive. There is no jumping twenty meters into the air. The equivalent in Black Crown is curling up your fist. It takes as much effort as it would for a character in a traditional videogame to do that sort of super move.

I think that those two views on your character reinforce just how difficult all of this is for your character. So I think that the description of being nailed to the bar is good, but I think that when you do break free it’s because you were so constricted, and what you are doing when you actually are liberated is not incredibly dramatic in a literal sense. But it feels dramatic because of the language and because it’s the best that your character can do in that situation.

To me, it felt like Stockholm syndrome: The character never ends up doing anything else than what the Institute is expecting from him or her, but after a while, he or she starts seeing it as a noble deed, something important – the character always wanted to do something important with his or her life anyway, and so gives importance to what little he or she is allowed to do.

Yeah. I think that this comes from when you are in pain or ill, you feel very vulnerable. Very often when you’re ill, you either want to be left on your own, which the suit in Black Crown allows. It allows you to retreat into yourself. Or you want somebody to help you. You want somebody to tell you that it’s alright. And the Institute, even though it’s a bizarre one, provides structure to your life. It feeds you, it gives you promotions which you then have to complete, in the form of this very regimented, mythological descent into a cave to retrieve an artefact. So it provides structure to your life, and, you know… what else are you going to do? There is nowhere else for you to go. You cannot get yourself out of this suit, because it is fused to your chest. You are very restricted in your options.

Part of that is because it is very difficult for an author to write all of the options that you’d want. If I present a character with a situation, there are probably forty options which, if I had unlimited time and money, I would love to put into the game. There are so many things that you could do in that physical environment. You could pick up a clot of dirt and throw it into the other character’s eye, you could attack them, you could try and run away or you could try and talk to them. But you just physically cannot do that as a writer. You can’t have all of those branching positions, because there is so much story already. It would be impossible to provide any sort of meaningful resolution to all of those options. So I have to restrict myself, and I still do too much and provide too many options, and then it comes back to bite me, because it takes me three days to write one story. Especially because there are like a thousand words in each story. It really becomes ridiculous.

In conclusion, having those very limited choices is a practical thing. But I do think it makes sense within the world, because your character is, as I said, delirious, they are not necessarily sure of how to react to these situations that are not traditional. Their options are limited because of what they are wearing and their physical condition. If the character was a spry, young thing who was in the middle of a city or something like that, you would almost be forced as a writer to provide all these options. People would ask why their character can’t do this, or talk their way out if that situation. Black Crown provides reasons for why that is not the case. And that does make my life easier, but it is not just a utilitarian thing, it was designed that way.

So you went out of your way to avoid ludonarrative dissonance, to use that old-fashioned term.

[laughs] I actually only learnt that word, like, four days ago. But it’s certainly one of the biggest problems that games writers face. I think that one of the reasons why in traditional game studios the writer is so low down on the scale of priorities is that they can write something that takes them two minutes, but then takes 20’000 dollars to build. Or they might say: “Oh, I have this great idea for the story!”, but all of the core mechanics are in place already, and it would require a whole new mechanic to be built into the game, just for one story point. And this comes back to the repetition of actions we talked about. If there is a core mechanic that will take four weeks for a team of programmers to build and test and implement, one that does cost a lot of money…

…you better use it.

…then you use it, exactly. That makes complete financial sense. So if a writer comes along and says: “No, we should only use it once to reinforce it…”, well. That doesn’t give the player a chance to learn the pattern, which is what they want in a traditional videogame. But it also means that they built it for one story point. From a pure programmer’s or even programming’s point of view, that doesn’t make any sense. I completely understand that.

However, I was playing the new Tomb Raider the other day and I was looking at how they tell the story there and how they build the character. I have got a blog post lined up about it. What I want to say is that is that there are things in that game that you could do to make the character better, things that would not cost much money or require the use of mechanics. They are not even gaming points, or game design points. They are purely narrative points for how a character can be more fleshed out through the inclusion of one line of voice acting, or having built one animation in a key point which will have reverberations throughout the game.

I think that’s were traditional writers, who are like, “Oh, I can write so much better stories for games!” fall down. They do not think about financial implications or game design implications. Where writers really need to learn their skills is there: If there is something I want to say in a game or a message that I want to get across, how can I do it in the cheapest and most effective way possible, so that it gets included?

That reminds me of what Tom Bissell said about his experiences being a writer for Gears of War: For one cut scene, he thought that it would be cool to have a chandelier in a room, something that he thought would be trivial. But they told him clearly that creating that model would mean one week of work, and so they couldn’t and wouldn’t do it.

And yeah, they are completely right. The idea is to get a game out in budget. I would say that most studios and writers do the best job that they can with the limited resources that they have. There is no shortage of good writers in the world, and there is no shortage of people with great game ideas. What needs to be done is find a middle ground between the cost of these things and the artwork. Well, that’s something that the film industry is still trying to figure out. If you want to tell a good story, you don’t need great special effects, but there may be times when you will have to do something that takes a long time and uses a lot of money to tell a specific story point. That’s why indie films try to have more inventiveness and use cheap methods to tell good stories. There are also a lot of people who would not be considered professional film makers in the industry who are now able to afford good cameras and good software. And that’s something that is happening in games as well with the Unity-engine, and things like that. Bringing the barrier to entry right down.

Still, one of the most useful things that a writer can do who wants to write for games – and I am speaking as somebody who wants do that as a career – is that you got to find a way to tell a story that is not going to piss off the team. That is part of working collaboratively, and it is something that I have really learned with Black Crown. I used to have all those grand ideas, and then somebody would say: “We just cannot do that.” And what you have got to do is not throw a tantrum. You have got to say: “Ok, how can I still get the core of that experience across.”

Well, let’s come to an end, and naturally, that’s always an opportunity to talk about the future. What does the future look like for Black Crown? Will there ever be an offline version? Or do you have to live with the fact that one day when the servers shut down, all your work will disappear?

This is something I have not really talked about with the publishers yet. But it’s a really interesting issue – legacy. I would like to work out a way so that if the servers will ever get shut down, there will be a way for people to access it, whether that is offline or even if I ended up hosting it. Because in a way, that is one of the main reasons people write: Legacy. For people in the future to be able to read what they have done and experience what they have created.

As you say, the ephemeral nature of the web and web servers mean that maybe that will be quite difficult. But that’s really a conversation I will have to have when Black Crown is finished. We will see. But it certainly is my absolute wish that Black Crown will always be available, for as long as it is able to be.

And what does your personal future look like? Black Crown will be tied up soon, if I understood that correctly?

We are putting together the last diary entries and the last objects in the game, and I still have a crap ton of storylets to write. But I hope that we will finish it within the next month or so. After that? I am not really sure. I have got various things that I want to do.

At the moment, I am designing a board game in my spare time, which I would love to see the light of day. I basically had a neat idea and wanted to learn more about traditional games design, so it was an exercise. But I think that it is good enough that when it’s finished, I would like people to buy it. Other than that… Random House and I want to work together again, and I know that they are trying to expand into lots of different niches. But I really don’t know where his is going to go. I have spoken to a couple of other people about work… I have been looking for more traditional jobs to make me some money, but I guess that the next year or so is going to be very piecemeal, with me working on lots of different things. But as long as those things are interesting and I can stay within this sphere, it’s ok.

I would really like to write in games. At one point or another, I have written in pretty much every format. I have written screenplays, I have written poetry, I have put on theatre, I have written short stories and maybe I’ll write a novel someday, I don’t know… but to be honest, what I am really, really excited about is getting a chance to work in this really new medium. Historically, games are really young and they are starting to gain steam a little bit now. (No pun intended.) I just think it’s such an exciting time to be writing and to be working and to have some literacy in that domain. Maybe I’ll try to learn more mechanical skills, more technical skills.

I guess that in the end, I really do not have a satisfying answer for you. I am open to anything, really, anything that is interesting and means working in the sphere of trying to tell better stories with technology.

Thank you so much for your time.

Kommentare

Rainer Sigl Di. 5 Nov 2013 - 11:55 Permalink

Great interview! I

Great interview! I particularly found the focus on games' relationship to spatial structure very interesting - although I might add that this might mainly be a feature of non-real-time games bent on narration rather than more kinetic, ludic ones.

I really hope Rob will leave his mark on games writing, and also that he will find a framework that's a bit less restrictive.

@Robert Sherman: Please, do take a look at Simogo's work for iOS. Both Year Walk and Device 6 take storytelling in games a step further. Also, even if it's just labelling: Would you consider your work to be part of New Weird? I was reminded of Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints & Madmen or Veniss Underground. Especially the latter is structured in a very interesting way as well, and has that strong spatial element to its narration.

Looking forward to your blog entry on Tomb Raider as well, btw; drop us a line if you ever think of publishing it outside of your own blog :-D

Rob Sherman Di. 5 Nov 2013 - 14:52 Permalink

Hello Rainier, interviewee

Hello Rainier, interviewee here;

I will let you know when I have written the new blog post. This will most likely when I can get back to blogging heavily, when Black Crown is wrapped up at the end of November (anybody who plays it, and is becoming impatient, I can only apologise). I would be very happy to host it here, and if there is anything else that you see on my blog that you like (bonfiredog dot co dot uk forward slash bonfog) please let me know. I would love more people to read my writing.

In terms of spacial awareness and its relationship to games, I'm not sure that I agree that it is restricted to text-based or stall-based games. All games have spatial awareness as a huge part of their makeup. I think that, in more kinetic games, it is more tightly bound to one's perception of the experience. In text-based games, for example, it is something that needs to be explicitly evoked, and I think that quite often the writer's interests mean that they pay special attention to evoking a sense of place, rather than time, because of the restrictions of their medium. In kinetic games, time is a far more apparent axis. The space compliments it, but it is completely present. Perhaps making more of this space, of its traversal, exploration and philosophy, will take place in future games. But it is certainly there already. I am thinking of everything from 'corridor shooters' to more modern explorations, such as the excellent verticality of Portal 2 or the Elder Scrolls games telling a far better story spacially than they ever have narratively.

Device 6 is already in my Evernote 'wishlist' notebook, a disgusting insight into my rampant capitalist appetites. I have heard excellent things.

As for Vandermeer and the New Weird; I am very happy for people to call it whatever they like. Vandermeer I have not read an awful lot of, but there is certainly some crossover, and if a label brings more people to my work, to hear what I have to say, then excellent. I think there is something interesting there for them.

Rainer Sigl Mi. 6 Nov 2013 - 19:37 Permalink

Great! Just get in touch when

Great! Just get in touch when you're ready.

Cheers,

Rainer

This Week in Video Game Criticism: Procedural Death Labyrint Mo. 25 Nov 2013 - 23:04 Permalink

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[...]  On Video Game Tourism, Rainer Sigl and Ciprian David started a new series about the intersection of film and games, and Christof Zurschmitten about Literature and Games. Here’s Rainer and Ciprian interviewing John Hyams because of reasons, and here’s Christof interviewing Jack King-Spooner, maker of Beeswing, and Robert Sherman, author of Black Crown. (Part 2) [...]

WORD/PLAY: "Can you imagine all of that?" An interview with Robert Sherman, author of Black Crown (Pt. 1)

Christof Zurschmitten — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 12:29:53 +0000

WORD/PLAY: "Can you imagine all of that?" An interview with Robert Sherman, author of Black Crown (Pt. 1) Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 4 Nov 2013 - 13:29

In an recently launched series, Videogame Tourism looks at the mutual influence between movies and games. But of course, film is not the only medium that sees itself confronted, influenced and, vice versa, used as a source of inspiration by the new medium. The link to the the written word is almost as old as the videogame itself, and recent developments both on the side of literature and the videogame have shown that the relationship between the two media is as vital and strong as ever. Ample reason then to launch WORD/PLAY, a series that sheds light on interesting works that go beyond what our first interview partner Robert Sherman describes as the "trendy fusing of two media, one that is much younger and more vital and one that is much older and more respected."

According to publishing giant Random House, the future of literature is plagued by abscesses, furuncles and various other diseases of the skin and mind. It is also financed by a sleazy millionaire with sadistic tendencies. At least that’s one way of looking at the unlikely genesis of Black Crown, a peculiar hybrid between literature and videogame.

The story goes a little something like this: Fresh out of university, writer Robert Sherman went door-to-door with the final project he did for his course: Not a mere document, but a suitcase filled with strange objects and writings that provided an insight into a dark storyworld which Sherman wished to develop further. Luck was on his side: Random House, always on the lookout for options to expand the increasingly difficult core business of selling paperbound books, found itself flush with cash from the unexpected success of Fifty Shades of Grey. In fact, the publisher had already cast an eye on another peculiar success story, Failbetter Game’s Free2Play-storygame Fallen London, and its underlying platform. And so, the doors opened wide for Sherman, whose project was to be named Black Crown and built in Failbetter’s microtransaction-driven StoryNexus-engine.

However, Black Crown would be unusual even in a more traditional format: Its narrative about an enigmatic institution, so oppressive that it gives both Aperture Science and Kafka’s bureaucratic machinery a run for its money, makes not exactly for leisure reading. The feeling of uneasiness is only amplified by Sherman’s fascination for the macabre, the sick and the deformed, and his willingness to make the reader/player’s character a victim of all of this, a miserable, isolated being that has to endure constant hardship and pain… and ultimately grows stronger doing so. The world of Black Crown is highly original and bitterly dark, but not without moments of stunning beauty.

In part 1 of our interview with Robert Sherman, we talk, among lots of other things, about how hard it is to fall between chairs, about repetition as the writer's natural enemy, and cosplay as his ultimate reward.

If you’d have to give a job description of yourself, say, for a tax form – what would you call yourself? Are you a writer? An author?

That terminology really depends on who I am talking to and what their concepts are surrounding games and narrative. I suppose, at the very basis of it, I am a writer. But through the process of doing Black Crown, I have also become a game designer. There is also a term, “narrative architect”, which a lot of people are using. And which is also really, really pretentious. [laughs] But it probably is the most apt description of what somebody like me does. It’s not just the writing of the text, it’s the construction and the flow of the game, and how mechanics are wedded to content. (Which, to be honest, is what a novelist does as well. They do control the pacing of their book. It’s just that it’s in a linear format.) So, I think “writer” is fine, but in the age we are living in, people want better terminology, terminology that applies to games, or that applies to something that is not a traditional art form, and so “writer” seems a little bit anachronistic.

To be honest, though, I get quite bored of that discussion. I don’t think the terminology is massively important. People call me a lot different things. I have called myself a game designer, I have called myself an author, and I have called myself a writer, because I really don’t know what Black Crown is in and of itself. Somebody pointed out to me that in a recent interview with Rockpapershotgun, I said that Black Crown wasn’t a game, and I sort of stood by my decision and said: “Well, I’m not sure that it’s a game.” But then I stepped back from it and thought: “Why am I apologizing for it? If people think it’s a game, it’s a game.” You know, I have always played games and loved games and I wanted to make games. But I was quite self-depreciating in thinking: “I can’t be a game designer. This isn’t a game; it’s not quite complicated enough.” I guess I should stop doing that. I mean, it’s ok. You can be a game designer. It’s not something you have to put on a pedestal.

But I really think that this whole tussle over terminology is not very useful. It’s something I hope to see change in the future – that terminology, and medium, and all of those concerns won’t really matter anymore. That all that matters is how well a story is told with the tools that you have used.

Isn't it odd how, no matter what you do, those pains are always present? You try to remember what it was like to feel well.

I am also asking this because I really got the impression that Black Crown is more talked about in game related publications. With it being backed by Random House, you would imagine that they would try to push it more unto the literary sphere. Is my impression correct?

Yes, I think you are right. The game industry covered it a lot more than the book industry. The book industry is in a very weird place right now, where everyone is competing with Amazon. The book industry hasn’t had the problems that the music industry had with piracy. But there is a loss in profits from the publishers anyway, because of Amazon and because people are reading a lot of stuff for free on the web. And so I thought that Random House saw Black Crown as an interesting curiosity. I have spoken to a lot of people in the book industry who really, really like it and see it as a step forward. But they tend to be a lot more non-traditional. They usually work in the digital sector and try to do simpler stuff, like producing apps. The book industry is interested in Black Crown, but I think it’s too far removed from what most of them traditionally think of as their remit.

Whereas really, they are media companies. And so, if they got the right people, then maybe they should be looking at more game-like experiences, or expanding into film. This ties back into the idea that I hope in the future, medium becomes less important, and what you do is that you just have a team of people who are brought to a story, and they help make it in whichever format is best suited to it. It won’t matter if that contains an element of film, for example.

I guess the word that is used here is “transmedia”, which is a big topic at the moment. The problem is just: For the publishing industry (but maybe also for the game industry and the film industry), what “transmedia” really means is: “We want to make as much money as possible out of this brand”. Rather than saying: “We have a really interesting story or story world, and there are 25 different ways that it can be told – so why not use all of those ways?” I think that at the moment, it’s more of a marketing exercise. Obviously, there are a lot of people who consider themselves “transmedia artists”, who are doing just that – producing work in lots of formats. But I feel that at the top level, the company level, the term is being used more in the sense of: “Well, let’s expand out!” It’s a merchandising affair rather than a creative one. Maybe I’m just being cynical, but I think that this needs to change.

Well, there are good reasons for being cynical about it. But let’s focus on more positive aspects, for example the creative process. Black Crown is obviously very different from traditional writing. One aspect of this is that it seems to be a rather collaborative project. The text is obviously mostly done by you, but how about the other elements?

It was my initial idea, which I then developed. Random House, the publisher, is bankrolling the project. They also did another thing. I don’t know if you have seen any of the diary entries that you can flick through? I provided the text for them and the design, and Random House then went from those notes and built the entries. All of the art in those is mine, which I wasn’t planning to do initially. The art that’s in there was only supposed to be little sketches for the main artists. But because of budget reasons, we could not really afford to pay artists to that, so I just carried on doing it myself, and I ended up really enjoying it. There is another company called PopLeaf Games, who are the ones who make the three-dimensional rotating objects from my designs. And then there is Failbetter Games. They provided the software for the main game, and their artist Paul Arendt does the art for all of the main game, all of the little pictures, all of the icons, all of the banners. He helped design the user interface as well.

But most of the direction does, indeed, comes from me. Nobody else is really directing the creative input. It’s all personal expression within these bounds. I am happy to let Paul just get on with it from the descriptions I give him. They are still part of me. I mean, I really enjoy doing the art, but I do not consider myself an artist. Plus, there is still that giddiness when I see somebody who is very, very good at arts producing something from my words. There is quite a childish glee in seeing what I have produced put into pictures. So it is really collaborative. I work with three different companies and different people in those companies. It’s quite a balancing act. And it’s certainly far more collaborative than a novel would be.

What does a typical work day for you look like, then? Are there typical work days?

There are usually six or seven things that need to be done. I always start the day by bug fixing and interacting with fans. I try to do that as much as possible. I am at that stage where I am still incredibly grateful that anyone wants to read my writing at all. I am young, I haven’t done a lot professionally before, and so that’s still really exciting. And long may this feeling continue, because it’s a really useful thing to have. You view readers and the people playing the game as intelligent, real people. You don’t just use them as a mass of people to sell to. And Black Crown’s fans have been really great. They talk in character on the forums, help each other out with bugs. There is one guy who is trying to set up a cosplay for a convention. I don’t know if there is some sort of register or scale whereby if you get cosplay of your work then you’ve made it in some sort of special club. I sincerely hope that’s the case. [laughs]

So, I usually talk to them on the forums and then I try to solve any bugs that I can, and then it’s a combination of designing three-dimensional objects or writing out diary entries or writing storylets for the StoryNexus-engine. Or doing interviews, or answering a lot of emails. I tend to work from home a lot, but there are also several libraries near my place, including a medical library, which I sometimes go to. It’s really eclectic, and has been for quite a while.

Your close contact with the audience is really remarkable. Do you think that it’s influenced by the fact that Black Crown is online?

So you mean that the distance between the game and the forum is very short because it’s all within a browser? And would I do the same if I was writing a novel? Well… yes, I would. It’s easy for me to say, but I find the contact very enjoyable. I think I have been quite lucky in that the people who have been posting on the forums have been very sympathetic and have understood what I was trying to do. Or at least, they were open to it. And Black Crown is not a simple work.

There are a lot of people I have heard talk about it being a sign for what the future of the book industry might look like, and that’s all very flattering. But I quickly realized that a lot of those people probably had played for about twenty minutes, and Black Crown is a very opaque piece of work. That’s intentional, of course, this idea of not laying everything on the plate and not providing instructions to the player. It’s a risk, because you walk the line of the text becoming incomprehensible. But on the whole, people have understood the things they need to understand, they got which bits they need to read a bit more closely, or how to find the various different clues scattered about the web. They have been very receptive to that. I was surprised because I thought that people would say: “This is really difficult, I don’t understand what’s going on, nothing is resolving… I’m done with this!” That would be the traditional view of the typical internet attention span. And in fact, it is something we found quite challenging in development, because we thought that reading big chunks of text on the internet is just not something that people do. Whereas, on the whole, people seem to have really got it.

I like interacting with those people, they’re enthusiastic. And, you know… it’s nice to talk to nice people who get what you are trying to do and have similar interests and passions. It’s a pleasant part of my day. Even when they send bug reports or their game is completely broken, they’ll say: “It’s completely broken and I can’t play it anymore. But I really like it, thanks!” I have seen reports of other bug messages which were not half as polite. [laughs]

Maybe if I got a stream of haters then I would feel slightly differently, but luckily, I haven’t had to deal with that. I do enjoy doing it, but it’s also important to do. It’s something you have to keep in mind as a creator nowadays. There are not seven layers of middlemen between you and the people who you are selling to anymore. Even if you are working for a big publisher, you are much more directly connected to your fan base. And a publisher will expect you to be connected, unless it suits their marketing sense to have you remain mysterious.

It feels a little heavy, but you think that, with time, you could become used to the weight. You are good at making your peace.

Maybe it’s also because the people who are put off by Black Crown do not interact with you?

I guess they don’t feel the need to tell me that they don’t like it. Well, there has been some negative press from people who find it quite bizarre. They don’t like it, and that’s fine, as long as there are people who do. I know that as a reader I would like to read something like this. I would want to pick something like this apart, I would want to say: “That’s a reference over there on that PDF, therefore in the game this means that this person isn’t the character that was mentioned”, and so on. This sort of detective work does not require the embedding of mechanics. It just uses the inherent unreliability of the narrator and the way that you can spread things out all over the web. Like this, you can replicate the actions of somebody who is researching a subject, a process where you are also going back and forth between sources, cross-referencing. Doing Black Crown on the web means that this is easy to do that. And though it’s a very opaque story, if you pay attention to everything and you seek out the other pieces of work that are spread about, it will make sense. I truly believe that.

Have you played Gone Home by any chance?

No, I haven’t played it yet. It’s in my wish list.

What I found problematic about the game was that everything was laid out like a puzzle, and it was obvious that the developers where of the mind-set that every object that you find in the game has to be something that can be interpreted as part of that puzzle, fitting right in. The developers even went to the forums congratulating people on having deciphered the story “in the correct way”. And I wondered if that’s due to them coming from a gaming background, where everything has to be a problem with one correct solution – it’s very different from how people think and talk about literature.

That is really an interesting point. There is a definition of a “game” by Raph Koster, which defines a game as a series of patterns which at the start you don’t understand, but by the end of the game, the game will have taught the player the systems. That is a very basic structure used by most game. And for good reasons – I think there’s a very visceral, almost animal reaction when you complete a puzzle. You gain a rush of endorphins. Whereas a piece of art which doesn’t tell you everything is considered unsatisfactory by a lot of people.

If you’re going into Black Crown with a mind-set informed by traditional games, then yes, you will be disappointed. Because you would feel like that you had tried to grok the game, you tried to replicate these systems and then repeated and repeated the patterns that you saw. But in the end, there is no reward. And even if there was a reward, in the sense of an understanding of the narrative, there is not necessarily something that “pops up”.

That may be completely reductionist, and maybe there are not a lot of gamers that might be insulted by this. But what you just said about Gone Home, that the developers presented this open puzzle but then went to the forums to say: “Yes, you solved that!” I agree with you, it’s strange. After all, the game seems to be a detective novel, or a detective story, but one told within a domestic setting.

In general, I think that’s an issue for people trying to tell deep stories in games or present human situations the way they are actually happening, with some sort of truth – the problem is, things don’t always tie up nicely. I know that this has been said a thousand times before, but it’s still true: This is why the Hero’s Journey is so important in games; it’s a natural progression towards a goal, and that goal is achievable, whereas life is a lot messier. If you look at a lot of the stories that have been told in traditional literature, stories which end badly for the characters or which don’t resolve at all and thus mirror real life… well, it’s hard to see how that would fit into a traditional gamer’s mind-set.

Not necessarily a traditional game’s format, though. I think it would fit in the format very easily, actually. But then we are talking more about mechanics rather than visuals or technology. You know, there are ways to present interactivity, even though there are difficulties you have to overcome. For example, I have recently read an article about how games need to be shorter experiences to be satisfying as art. That is really interesting, because so much in many big games consists of repetitions of patterns or of an activity. Those activities may be fun, but there are limits to that what you can do with such an approach.

This is actually something we struggled with in Black Crown, too. There are repeatable activities in the game, and there are Free2Play-mechanics, which are tied to the idea that repetitiveness is where profits come from in Free2Play-games. The idea that you present something that is either fun to do or which has a promise of reward, and so players are ready to do it over and over again. It’s really hard to tell a good story working that way. Well, there are workarounds. If you have a character that is an obsessive or is in servitude, then having the player repeat a mechanic is a really good way to reinforce that particular emotional state. But most stories don’t have actions that repeat all the time. I suppose I can envision a game where you are playing somebody who lives on their own in a big city and has a daily routine…

Like Richard Hofmeier's Cart Life?

Yeah, exactly. You play a person who has to do the same things every day, go shopping, brush your teeth. I’m seeing a few games that do that, but it’s really hard to put together a compelling story when the actions do repeat the whole time. Failbetter Games, to their credit, have done that in Fallen London. Fallen London is more grindy than Black Crown, but they have created a world where people don’t really mind doing it because the rewards are great – they will get additional pieces of content which have really strong narratives. I think of all the companies that I have seen trying to use the Free2Play-model, Failbetter Games have done it best by far, because they really could tie it into the story. But it’s still really hard to do.

And as I said, there are repeatable elements in Black Crown as well. So, what I tried to do was make them into elements that reinforce your imprisonment as a character, like being fed, or sleeping. When you do those things, they are repeatable, but I put in random reward mechanics, so that you receive a piece of plot or an item every time you do it, and it will be different up to a certain number of times. That seemed like a way to have a repeatable mechanic that is justified in the story – you’re not just repeating it to make me money, you’re doing it because the character would do it. Like the feeding mechanic that comes around once a week. There is a “ticking mechanic” tied to it, you get fatter when you choose to eat. You can choose not to eat, but then the rubber suit which you are trapped in starts to fill up with various liquids and solids, and that’s something that will come to play in the final stages of the game. In conclusion, it’s a real balancing act between trying to make this a profitable project and trying to tell the best story possible.

I have to admit that the reason why I preferred Black Crown to Fallen London is that, like you said, the story actually mirrors the mechanics better, making the latter less intrusive. Is it correct, though, that every player can get to the end of the story even without paying any money? So it’s only side stories that are hidden behind the paywall?

Every player will get to an end, yes. And not all of the side stories need being bought, by any means. But there are things that are locked off. Sometimes it will be entire storylines, but I tried not to do that too often. The way it works is that if somebody is enjoying a story, then they will want to get the whole story. As I said, a complete understanding of Black Crown or a complete appreciation of the story won’t come until you read pretty much everything. Or at least there is a combination of things that you are going to have to read to get a sense of it, and that’s the main narrative.

What I tried to do was not having lots of little payments. Well, there are places where you can do that and get specific items – a lot of those things would be called “vanity items”. Things that in a traditional RPG would be a new hairstyle or a pair of sparkly pants. I tried to make them more interesting as objects, though, and make them all relate to the wider story.

But in general, it does work like this: You are entering a new area and you can go right through it, but you can pay to look around the room. Or you can pay to go and look at that one thing in the corner. When I put it like that, it might seem quite dry. People will say: “Well, my character should be able to go and look over there.” But really, you need to step back from the game and see that there needs to be a payment mechanic, so charging people for the extra detail seems like the best thing to do. The only people who are going to pay for this game are the people who like it and enjoy the story and… well, either way I put it, it sounds quite evil, but those are the people I want to charge money. Because they are the people who will pay. There are lots of people who might breeze through the game and will think: “Oh, I didn’t understand it.” And to those I say, well, you can’t understand it. I’d like to think that there is a satisfying narrative if you go through without paying, but you really want to get the full experience. There is no other way to say that. I think what people want me to say is: “Oh, you can have the complete experience without paying.” Well, of course you can’t. Because otherwise, there wouldn’t be any reason for anyone to pay for it, ever. There is a lot of depth to the world, and maybe that is something that I will explore in another project – it would be nice to expand the world a little more in another format. Maybe a more traditional videogame.

I could envision something in the style of Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic.

Yes, those guys might get that sort of weird opaqueness. But anyway, the payment structure has been probably the most difficult thing for me as a writer to get my head around. I am not selling a piece of art which you get in a block. I need to constantly be thinking about “Ok, if I lock this off, is there a likelihood that the people who are going to pay for it have played this other piece of content which you have to pay for?” All the while thinking: “Is this compelling enough for free players?” That’s really difficult, I don’t think that I have cracked that at all.

Free2Play might be difficult, but it has only arisen as a reaction to a market which is increasingly squeezed. I have to admit: When people complain about Free2Play, I don’t blame them. There have been an awful lot of dreadful iterations of it, and they have really damaged the view of it. Still, Free2Play is only there because it makes sense as a business model. Just look at how much money Zynga has made. What they are doing is appealing to the lower levels of the brain, the more impulsive and instinctual elements of game design, whereas what we are trying to do is appeal to the sense for a good story and good pacing, which is a more virtuous way of going at it. But it’s something that I won’t miss when this project is finished – trying to work out how much I should charge people each time. There is still an element to it which feels dirty. Like, why should I charge for this particular piece of writing when I have written probably 600’000 words which you don’t have to pay for? It’s horrible.

I can imagine that. You have to constantly judge your own writing. Well, I have to admit that I was ok with the model in Black Crown, because every time you see a teaser for an option that is unavailable, I role-played that this was the Institute teasing me and telling me that I should just IMAGINE what would happen there.

I think that’s due to the narrative style that I came by quite organically. Part of it was to provide more richness. I think what people are starting to realize is that even though you are putting in a character name at the start and going through the whole marks of RPG character creation, you are not playing a blank state. You are playing someone who is a character who already exists in this world and who already has a history. I mean, after all these questions about who you are, at various points the game tells you what your mother and father did. I am trying to walk a line for good narrative reasons that will be revealed – a line between generic and specific. So there will be generic points about how when you were a child, you played with your friends, but then there will be a specific point about the game you played, or something about the religious beliefs of the people you had lived with. Those are deliberate.

But it’s interesting that you said you didn’t mind not choosing the options because you gained a hint of what it could be by the description of what the character thinks. I hadn’t considered that before.

Check back later this week for part 2 of the interview, in which we judge the Doom-novelizations, talk about the lessons a writer can learn from game design, and why drunken uncles make for better metaphors than rivers, anway.

Kommentare

Rainer Sigl Mo. 4 Nov 2013 - 14:20 Permalink

Really loved Black Crown, the

Really loved Black Crown, the atmosphere, the body horror, the unique aesthetic, but have to say the monetization scheme used is quite offputting for me. I'd have preferred an option to pay in bulk instead of being asked in every other scene.

Actually I think that StoryNexus, as interesting as Fallen London and BC are, is a cumbersome construct. I'd love a new framework for literary games, and while I understand that Rob sees the system's charme in that it offers some chance at monetization, I'd always prefer up-front payment. Seeing literary games like Blackbar or, recently, Device 6 really makes me happy. I'd love it if BC were remade in a form like this, still literary, still connected to its base as a truly multimedial installation, but freed from the cumbersome architecture of the Storynexus.

Christof Zurschmitten Mo. 4 Nov 2013 - 15:05 Permalink

I have to say that I agree.

I have to say that I agree. My last question indicates that while I could IMAGINE away the monetization scheme, I would have prefered not having to do that mental work, anyway. And I also think that ultimately, I have spent at least as much money on Black Crown as I usually spend on a single game or a book these days... I don't mind having payed for it, but as somebody who is not used to F2P or MMOs, I still have to learn to live with the fact that my book/game is a service rather than an "artefact". I would have vastly prefered paying (more) money up-front.

Actually, in a bit that won't make the cut, Sherman and I also talked about Failbetter Games' successful Sunless Sea-Kickstarter -- a project I happily backed for the prize of a hardcover book, even though I never spent a cent on Fallen London. Maybe that's another way in which games can influence literature positively, though: In making people (like me) more open-minded towards even more alternative ways of financing projects. (To be honest, I don't quite know how successful Kickstarter or "early access"-models are in literature, even though I know that they do exist... but I doubt it's anywhere as "normal" as it is in gaming by now.)

Harlan Entler Fr. 8 Nov 2013 - 13:36 Permalink

"The developers even went to

"The developers even went to the forums congratulating people on having deciphered the story “in the correct way”. And I wondered if that’s due to them coming from a gaming background, where everything has to be a problem with one correct solution – it’s very different from how people think and talk about literature."

I think this is a recent trend in games actually, at least as recent as digit games and gaming. If you look at Go, you find a lot of expressiveness and people making their own stories. Maybe someone is a very defensive player, or very aggressive, or someone really values future potential over immediate advantage. Maybe they developed to be really good at timing but their joseki needs work. The player is making unique choices that shape the way the game comes out, it is a collaboration with their opponent.

Same with modern competitive titles. As in Go, you can find plenty of instructions, but it is still mostly about what the player is creating. Some starcraft players are going to figure out how to squeeze out every bit of economy, some are going to figure out how to micromanage their units to be incredibly cost effective, even at the professional level these totally different viewpoints and narratives exist. "Working as Intended" is the last thing the creators of these games want to hear.

So there is definitely a precedent in the gaming community for this sort of thing. I hope it continues to become popular, and I'm really enjoying Black Crown.

This Week in Video Game Criticism: Procedural Death Labyrint Mo. 25 Nov 2013 - 23:04 Permalink

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[...] of reasons, and here’s Christof interviewing Jack King-Spooner, maker of Beeswing, and Robert Sherman, author of Black Crown. (Part [...]