ramtower

I’ve been in the habit lately of emptying the various contents of my brain either on twitter or into e-mails directed at my friends, and that’s not really doing anything but cluttering the internet, irritating said friends, and possibly pushing us closer to the coming infopocalypse. In all honesty, it’s mostly because, when I write to my friends or on Twitter, I know the audience, and when I write here, it’s all imaginary and hypothetical, that audience. I get all stuffy and don’t know how to explain myself. But it’s time to get over that, so I figured I’d better do my part and move the conversation here, where it can and should be safely ignored.

Lately, most of my braindumps have involved, directly or indirectly, the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. These gamebooks were not unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure series, except that where CYOA operated like a fairly simple flowchart whose branching paths didn’t branch all too terribly far from the trunk (more on that later), Fighting Fantasy used more of the elements of role-playing games, like character sheets and statistics, combat systems, and die rolls. I want to talk more about Fighting Fantasy, but that will come up later, I think, because right now, I should do some Choose Your Own Adventure stuff.

So, when I say CYOA operated like a flowchart, I mean that you, the reader, were taken from event to event and given a fairly limited set of options to choose from at the end of each event, based on what you, as the protagonist, would do in that situation. Train exploding? You can flip to one entry and jump to safety or flip to another entry and hope for someone to rescue you. Did you hope for a rescure? Too bad, now you’re dead. The situations weren’t THAT binary, of course, but there was usually a right choice and a wrong choice, and the wrong choice resolved your story fairly quickly and permanently.

Check out this directed graph for an example, taken from THE MYSTERY OF CHIMNEY ROCK.

As I reviewed that graph, I was impressed at the illusion of complexity you’d get as you were playing–you could play several times and reach the same story key points from different angles. Because each story point is simply a numbered entry, you can access that entry from any suitable plot point–all you need to do is point the reader there. On the down side, there were also certain paths that, if chosen early own, gave you no way back to the “good” endings. If, at your first branching point, you choose the option that leads you to entry 6 instead of entry 4, you have only one bridge back to that good ending, and every other option leads straight to a bad end. Ultimately, there’s a fairly narrow path you have to follow to get to a good ending, and as often as not, it takes experimentation rather than logic or skill to reach it. That’s the strength of the books, of course–you play, you lose, you try again.

What I always wanted from the books, however, was something that expanded into larger and larger possibilities the deeper into the game I played. Something that rewarded me for playing my way by changing the story to embrace, say, my decision to run away from every fight like a wee little coward without condemning me right away to a coward’s end. (Something nicely impossible, like Neil Stephenson’s primer from THE DIAMOND AGE, maybe.)

The Fighting Fantasy books came closer, because they gave me greater control at least over my own character, but I’ll talk more about them another time, because I’m tired and achy, and I can already feel my focus slipping.

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