also note, that since the gaming forum is about the very old game "Dungeon Master", the story is also about same. Bear in mind it was written for fun and by a bunch of people who know each other very well, so some in-jokes may be unfathomable. I imagine therefore it would be possible to write a *sensible* story in serialised form, regardless of whether the author knows at the start how it will end.īy the way, you can play the "gamebook" that we wrote at the link below. We proved that a nonsensical serialised gamebook could be written by a group of people. Again, it made for a nonsense story, but it was bloody good fun regardless. The next person then wrote a new post for one of the choices. One year we made a short gamebook using the same approach: each forum member wrote a paragraph and added choices. It can result in nonsense, or be extremely funny. What do you think is the next step in the evolution of gamebooks? Don't all shout at once.Īt Christmas on a gaming forum I moderate, we play a game where a story is created either one word at a time, or one full sentence at a time by all the forum members. Which is no bad thing adventure games have always been waiting for the equivalent of a Wii to bring them to the mass market, and maybe the iPad or iPhone is it. The other is just how to arrive back at adventure games by means of a ten-year detour. Of the two latter options, the first tends towards CRPGs - in fact, is really just a CRPG on the cheap - so will not thrive long as a distinct species, I think. The other route is to stick with solve-the-plot interactivity but do something with much less text - either as a Fabled Lands type experience with very short descriptive passages and a lot of freedom of choice, or by making it more of an interactive motion comic and dropping text altogether. This is the interesting direction for interactive fiction if it wants to grow up. That's what I did with Frankenstein and Jon Ingold did with Flaws. One is to dispense with the gameplay aspect so that the book is "interactive literature" - that is, it's all about the reading experience. If I were writing new interactive books, there are two obvious ways I might go. To sum up: it is not obvious whether people can read a gamebook like a regular book when it is transplanted from the page to the screen. Absorbing a story in the form of prose requires a different mental gear, in fact a whole other mind-set, from reacting to hybrid input comprising graphics, text and audio. On a tablet or phone, though, you could go straight from playing The Shamutanti Hills or An Assassin in Orlandes to Heart of Ice. But is that a valid assumption? If you're reading the books on an ereader, you presumably don't expect graphical bells and whistles. Will readers respond to these as they would to a print gamebook? I hope so I've kept the print reading experience pretty much unchanged, as you can see from the screenshot above. I spent the last eight months converting four Virtual Reality titles and the first two books in the Way of the Tiger series into ebook format. But put the same book onto a phone, and there's a strong impulse to flip through all the jaw-jaw to get to the next set of choices. On the first run-through, at least, you'll probably take time to enjoy the prose. How about places in between? Inkle found one - are there others? And what about the medium itself? How much of a difference does that make? Reading a gamebook in print is not very different from reading a novel. (The way I play them, anyway - I can never be bothered to stop and read all those tedious parchmenty scrolls, much to Jamie's annoyance.)īut that's just the limiting cases. I'm basing it on the principle that a gamebook in print form can work perfectly well if there are no pictures, and a CRPG is fine with no words. I said in the last post that Inkle's Sorcery app achieves that, but there may be other sweet spots too. The sweet spot for a gamebook app is the perfect balance between graphics and text - which maps, at a deeper level, to the balance between "game" and "book".
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |