Simulation vs abstraction in game design

This is an excerpt from Game Architecture & Design, an industry textbook I co-authored with Andrew Rollings. (I wrote the game design bits, Andrew dealt with code, tech and development practices.) The book was originally published in 1999 and a revised edition came out in 2004. In the intervening two decades, a lot has changed, but it's also interesting to see what hasn't...

If I throw a ball and take many high-speed photographs of its flight, I'll see that the trajectory the ball took is a parabola. But the ball didn't follow that path because gravity told it: "Move in a parabola." A parabola is just a symbolic concept in the analytical domain of mathematics, and the universe doesn't know anything about mathematics or analysis or symbols; these are human concepts. In reality, there are just a bunch of physical processes, each of which deals only with the processes and circumstances just before and just after it. So, the ball is at one position, and gravity tells the ball's velocity to change, and the ball's velocity tells its position to change. The balance between kinetic and potential energy over the time the ball is in the air gives you what we call a parabola.

This is the opposite approach to that taken in most software applications. There, processing power is at a premium, so the sooner you can go to symbolic modelling rather than step-by-step simulation, the better. The tradeoff is that software can crash when your symbolic "shortcut" misses something that the one-step-at-a-time approach would have taken in its stride.

Researchers in Artificial Life have identified an analogous problem:

"The classical AI approach has been criticized because the symbols and symbol structures on which planning and decision making are based are not grounded in the real world. The problem is that unequivocally decoding sensory data into a symbol and turning a command without error into its intended action may be unsolvable."

- Luc Steels, "The Artificial Life Roots of Artificial Intelligence" in Artificial Life (MIT Press, 1997)

One big advantage of the way that reality does things is that the universe, being non-symbolic, cannot crash. As an example of the principle at work in a game, suppose I am putting a monster into my new Frankenstein adventure and the idea is that it will jump out of its vat when the player enters the laboratory. Instead of putting in a lot of complicated AI to do with detecting humans and having the goal of wanting to kill them, I just choose the short cut of placing a trigger tile inside the laboratory door. When the player steps on the trigger, the monster will appear and attack.

Okay so far, but what if the player manages to get onto the tower roof, jumps down, and, by some fluke, manages to land safely on the balcony of the laboratory? Now they can explore the lab, get all the power-ups, and read the journal about the monster (an entry that is supposed to be poignant if they've just fought and killed it, but that is meaningless otherwise). Only when the player goes to leave via the door does the monster climb out of its vat and growl, "You shall not steal my master's secrets!"

In the past, the nonsymbolic, step-by-step approach was not practical. The the processing capability wasn't available to deal with that and graphics too. But now much of the graphics work is done by the video card, and computers are doubling in power every eighteen months or so. At last, it is starting to be possible to create "uncrashable" games by avoiding the need to design using symbolic shortcuts.

Comparing Nonsymbolic And Symbolic Design

In the original Warcraft, peasants collected gold by entering a gold mine and bringing sacks back to your town hall. At the start of the game it was always worth spawning peasants because, the more peasants you had, the greater your revenue stream. However, there came a point when the peasants started to get in each other's way. Adding more peasants would then lead to “traffic jams” as the peasants encountered each other on the streets of the town and would have to back up to let others get past. The situation was alleviated by leaving wide streets. Additionally, it was not a good idea to place your town hall too close to the gold mine – giving a little more space also helped avoid traffic congestion.

Now, an economist could derive an equation to describe the flow of gold to the town hall. The factors would be the number of peasants, the placement density of the town buildings, and the distance from the town hall to the mine. We can imagine that it would be a pretty complex equation. The point is that the designers of Warcraft never needed any such equation.* They simply programmed in the basic rules and behaviours and the economic simulation emerged directly from those.

Contrast this with a game like Caesar II, which used underlying equations to create a simulation of an ancient Roman city. This approach is less satisfying because the player is not directly viewing the reasons for success and failure. Instead, when playing a game like Caesar II (or any simulation of its type) you are trying to build an abstract match to the game’s underlying equations in your head. The simulated economy and the gameplay are less visible, lessening the sense of immersion.

And you know what? The same goes for stories. If you construct them from symbolic forms (arcs, paradigms, act breaks) you'll end up with less robust and varied stories than if you allow each micro-event to trigger the next and see where it goes. Which is why in roleplaying terms I'm a simulationist rather than a narrativist. Hey, if it's good enough for reality then it's good enough for me.

* This gives me an excuse to digress onto the topic of AI. Foundation models (or indeed any deep neural net) are sometimes referred to as algorithms. I find that term misleading. In principle you could express all the weights of a billion-node net in the form of "an algorithm" but that's not really an accurate way of talking about what the AI is doing in, say, ChatGPT, which is akin to (though much more complex than) the peasants collecting gold in Warcraft. That too is governed by multiple algorithms (for route-finding, collision detection, etc) but it would be more accurate to talk of it as a model. An algorithm could be derived to express the rate of gold production in terms of all those variables, but the Warcraft system doesn't have that algorithm built in, and nor do AI systems. There is an example here, where the article refers to "a separate algorithm" where they really mean " a separate model".

Principle of Least Action image by Maschen CC0, 

How real is make-believe?

Which strikes you as more real: Bambi or The Deer Hunter?

When William Goldman talked about “comic book movies", he didn’t mean the MCU. This was back in 1983. He didn’t mean movies like Superman either – a movie he’d been invited to write, incidentally, being a Golden Age comics fan – or not only Superman, but also Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gunga Din, E.T., Star Wars. And The Deer Hunter. If you want to know why, and how Bambi doesn’t classify as “comic book” storytelling and The Deer Hunter does, read what Goldman has to say about all this in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician, raised a similar point on his blog recently:

“I was rereading Lord of the Rings […] and was struck by how real it felt. […] In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill […I]t doesn’t feel ‘real’, whatever that means.”

You may not have read Golden Hill. Not to worry, I read it for you. Prof Gelman is right, there is an artificiality to its picture of 18th century Manhattan that feels like a TV drama with machine-tailored suits and the wrong haircuts and makeup. This often seems to be the case with historical fiction. Compare The Essex Serpent, set in a late 1800s that never feels real, with The Odd Women, actually written in the late 1800s, which rings true throughout.

Prof Gelman seems to be focussing on prose style, which mainly has to do with whether the author is using a storytelling voice or not, but I’m more interested in stories that set out to describe a milieu that feels like our real universe rather than a “story universe”. Contrast the 1968 novel Pavane with almost any steampunk story (a genre of which it might well be the progenitor). Keith Roberts set out to tell us about something that could happen. Steampunk is usually predicated in let’s pretend – here is a fun universe for cosy adventure, even cosy misery, but you are never expected or intended to think of it as real.

For a very real story (David St. Hubbins might say “a bit too fucking real”) try George Gissing’s The Nether World. In the hands of Dickens we'd accompany a well-born character into the nether world of poverty in Clerkenwell the late 1880s. Dickens would give us their perspective of the monstrous characters and comic turns to be found there. And I like Dickens, but Gissing has an entirely different approach. We see the characters through their own eyes. We see how poverty brutalizes them. There's no sentiment, no avuncular author nudging the plot to satisfy the readers with warm life-lessons and unrealistic outcomes. Gissing's humour is sparing and far drier than Dickens's and he gives us an angry, despairing, unforgettable journey through this hell. Which is not to say it's a story without hope, only that the good is achieved at great effort and only sparingly. 

Once you start using this filter you see lots of examples. As SF, Children of Men is more real than Black Mirror which is more real than Babylon 5 which is more real than Star Wars. Breaking Bad is more real than Better Call Saul, less real than The Shield, but all three are far less real than true crime dramas like Rillington Place or The Staircase, because real life is messier and more surprising than the predictable twists and tropes of genre fiction.

Either can work, by the way. Goldman is careful to make that point. Gunga Din was his favourite movie of all time. Excalibur is one of mine, and there the characters screw and sit down to dinner in full plate armour. I used to enjoy the occasional game of Call of Cthulhu even though its 1920s is far less real than the entirely created world of Tekumel in Swords & Glory.

That reality – or authenticity, if you prefer – is what I’m aiming for with my current Jewelspider scenarios like “A Garland of Holly”. There’s still fantasy there, that’s not the issue. It’s that the society and the characters don’t feel like something set on a stage for you to watch and be entertained by. Instead you are there in the midst of them, the NPCs no less real than the player-characters. Events happen with the “ruthless poignancy” that C S Lewis admired in Homer. Like in life.

Fire and water

You're in Paris. It's 1910, the year of the floods. You've been touring a doll factory. After looking around the workshop on the first floor (American: second floor) where the celluloid dolls are made, you go up to the second floor (that is, the third floor in US English). You stay there for a few hours, unaware that the Seine is flooding. The ground floor is soon completely underwater. The level rises to almost waist-height in the workshop, shorting out a fuse box. Sparks catch on the inflammable celluloid dolls. By the time you come back down, half the workshop is already ablaze.

You have to get out of the building. There are large windows behind you, not blocked by the fire, but you're on the first floor. Hurrying to the stairs, you find the stairwell completely submerged. To get down to the exit you'd have to swim underwater. It's only about fifteen or twenty metres, but the sun has set and the electric lights have fused. The only illumination down there is whatever is cast from the flames in the workshop.

This is in fact a scene from the 2023 movie The Beast. I won't give any spoilers except to say that the movie is 150 minutes of your life that you'll never get back, and that confusing and strident are not the same things as enigmatic and beguiling. If you do want a movie that conveys real emotional mystery, watch The Double Life of Veronique instead. Or you could read the Henry James short story, "The Beast in the Jungle", that the director Bertrand Bonello claims to have been inspired by.

But this is not a film review, it's a post about how screenwriters really ought to hire gamebook or RPG players to stress-test their scenarios. Because I can see an easy way to get out of the building which obviously didn't occur to the filmmakers because they didn't have a full mental picture of the characters' surroundings. (They also showed it as daylight outside. Unlikely at 7:30pm in January, but it allowed them to provide a lot more light in the submerged ground floor.)

OK, so what would you do? And can you think of any other movies where the characters missed an obvious solution?

Crafting characters and stories

The current trend in indie roleplaying is to keep at least one eye on the authorial view of your character. I played in a recent game where a player used a retcon rule to ensure their character appeared in the right place in the nick of time to foil an NPC villain's master plan. Somebody on Twitter (or X if you're a member of the Musk family) was proposing that a player should get to write the monologue for the BBEG of the campaign. Even the rules of some indie RPGs are built around "satisfying character arcs" and other Hollywood-exec jargon.

It's not to my taste. I don't like retcons because they break immersion. Taking an authorial view of your PC doubly so. I prefer narratives that emerge in the moment; they're more exhilarating to play in and less trite to experience. I didn't even know what BBEG stood for till I Googled it. My campaigns rarely have anything as simplistic as a Big Bad (that's for kids' TV) and in any case they wouldn't waste time monologuing (has nobody out there seen The Incredibles?).

When Pelgrane Press got the Dying Earth licence, we talked about some Dying Earth gamebooks and I must admit I came up with an authorial approach. Paul Mason had to point out to me that the main effect of putting the player in the author's role would be to distance them emotionally from the events of the story. That might be why it's favoured in indie roleplaying, in fact; the ultimate safe space is when you don't have to commit to the character, the same way that Mystery Science Theater 3000 allowed nerds to ironically distance themselves from movies they'd be embarrassed to admit to liking.

But even if you don't play in authorial mode, it's handy to know about plotting and characterization. If you're refereeing the game you'll at least want to go in with a storyline in mind, even if it's just a safety net that you'll never use because the real story will be shaped spontaneously by the players' actions. And character-creation tips aren't only useful for designing NPCs. Players can benefit from starting with some traits and foibles, even if (as often happens) those drop away later as the character becomes more real to them.

Which is why I recommend Roz Morris's Nail Your Novel series. All right, yes, I am married to her. But I wouldn't let a little thing like that sway my opinion. I use Roz's advice when writing my own stories, both in book form and around the gaming table. You can try out her 100 tips for fascinating characters free. Let us know how you get on, and which style of roleplaying you prefer.

The sense of an ending

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god’s hammer. A red-bearded bruiser with a laugh like the sky splitting. A silver-tongued schemer who can’t help brewing mischief. Together, they fight giants. I was hooked right out of the gate.

Soon after that Doctor Who’s cliffhangers held a generation of children spellbound week after week. James Bond felt like he’d go on forever. (Funny, that.) And the British comic TV Century 21 wrapped all those now-classic Gerry Anderson puppet shows into one shared universe. It all fed the notion that stories don’t ever have to end.

"Give me a child until he is seven..." No truer word, only in my case it wasn’t the Jesuits, it was serial storytelling. And that's fine for kids, in the eternal summer they inhabit, but as we get older we realize the ending of a story is what gives it meaning and value.

What about roleplaying campaigns? In the old days, campaigns were as open-ended as a daytime soap. Campaigns like that can eventually reach a natural conclusion, which is perfect if all the players agree. More often they fizzle out for external reasons, which is rarely satisfying. Nowadays, when campaigns are often built around a high concept with a beginning, middle and end (like Tim Harford's brilliant Redemption campaign, or his equally inspired Earthsea-style saga The Conclave) or designed in seasons like a TV show (Camelot Eclipsed or Keeping the Peace) it's worth thinking about how you can bring them in to land.

Writing guru Rebecca Makkai has some great tips about this. It's a longish series, but worth studying.

• Part One is about open vs closed endings.
• Part Two is about endings that come about structurally. For example, in Redemption the campaign ended when we reconsecrated the abandoned chapel we'd been sent to find.
• Part Three is about meaning, the takeaway you get from the ending.
• Part Four is about the sound, style and tone of the ending. (To apply this one to roleplaying campaigns requires a bit more work.)
• Part Five deals with the change brought about at the end.
• Part Six concerns the way the ending shades into past, present or future.

And author Brandon McNulty has an excellent video essay on what distinguishes good endings from bad ones.

Prophecy or blind fate?

I'm always dubious of prophecies. In real life, they're usually incorrect and/or useless. The way they're used in fantasy, the prophecy is often a lazy narrative device that feels like it's more about telling than showing. It's even more obtrusive, though, when prophecies occur in realistic fiction. Recently I was watching The North Water, based on a novel by Ian McGuire, about characters on an 1850s whaling ship that makes the Pequod look like the Love Boat. One of the characters, Otto, is given to vatic pronouncements and one day tells the other sailors that he's had a dream in which they all die except for Sumner, the ship's surgeon, who will survive after being "swallowed by a bear".

If somebody said that to you in the real world you'd know they were the sort of wearying crank who insists on recounting their dreams, and you could safely disregard any possibility of it coming true. But in a novel or TV drama you know for a fact it will come true because a prophecy is equivalent to the author inserting a plotting note several chapters early.

This could be why I'm unimpressed by many so-called narrative games, if by that they mean they're trying to replicate the way things work in a storytelling universe. I like realistic universes (whether or not they contain magic is not relevant) because the stories that emerge from them are far more unusual. In short, they are better at narrative.

The North Water is a first-rate TV drama (in the first four episodes) especially for showing how compelling characters don't need to be likeable, but inserting that prophetic dream can't help but break the suspension of disbelief, because you know that everything will have to unfold the way Otto foretold, and that's easy for the writer to achieve because it's a cheat. The prophecy is like the author whispering semi-spoilers in your ear -- telling not showing, you see. He or she can't expect a pat on the back for signalling in advance how the plot will turn out and then arranging things so that it does just that. (Especially when you can see two episodes ahead that it's going to be a Luke-in-the-tauntaun moment.)

Incidentally The North Water is also worth watching as a cautionary tale of the over-authored story problems that Sarwat Chadda warned about in a recent post. The first four episodes are very powerful: atmospheric character-driven drama, like The Sea Wolf meets Moby-Dick. The last episode, after the prophecy has been fulfilled, disintegrates into mechanical thriller-style plotting, led astray by the literary conceit of the book ("can a civilized man find his bear spirit and so kill the force-of-nature uncivilized man?"). Stop after episode 4 and watch the end of Blade Runner instead, that's my advice.

Some player groups like their game worlds to be arranged as if guided by a storyteller. Others prefer the sense of a dispassionate universe where Fate doesn't have its finger on the scales. You'll know which kind of roleplayer you are, and if you're finding that you chafe at some campaigns it could be because you're in the wrong kind of universe.

It's not Jackanory

The T-Shirted Historian is right. Roleplaying is interesting when it allows events to take their own shape. If it's just going to be a story told to you by a GM then why bother even rolling the dice? There are other media that do that kind of storytelling better.

Professor Barker used to say there were no NPCs on Tekumel. Most narrative systems lean right other in the other direction, privileging player-characters to the extent of having them the only ones to roll for actions. In that kind of game, the PCs are intended to be the stars of their own show and the NPCs merely extras. 

We've talked about this before and everyone will (quite rightly) make their own choice. And most players now do seem to favour the tell-us-a-story form of roleplaying; I can't even find a group these days that's interested in my and the Historian's preferred style. (Told you I'm Biffen, not Milvain.)

But it goes beyond roleplaying styles. Consider the ambush scene in a movie. The first bullet misses one of the characters (probably just after he's made some comedic quip) and our heroes all dive for cover. That's The A-Team or a tongue-in-cheek knockabout action flick starring The Rock. If the bullet hits then we're watching a grittier movie entirely. Carpenter or Scorsese or Boorman, maybe, if the character survives. If he's maimed or killed then we could be watching something really uncompromising.

What about if the player-characters' enemy makes the roll, sets up an effective ambush, and then scores a nasty hit on one of the PCs? Well, too bad. They knew they were walking into danger, right? A character could get shot at any point during any firefight, so why should the opening salvo be any different? 

The point is that the story isn't what the GM decided it should be before the game starts. The story is what actually falls out when those intentions meet dice rolls and player choices. The death of Joe Lynch, a long-running character in our Iron Men campaign, came about because of a really bad roll during what should have been a routine skirmish against a small group of petty brigands. It was pure dumb luck -- and led to one of the most memorable games in that campaign. If the GM had come up with a get-out-of-Sheol-free card, in the moment we might all have been relieved (especially Tim Savin, who played Joe) but we'd have been cheated out of something great.

However, it's crucial that players have been given the choice to opt in to a disinterested game universe. When I am playing I insist on dice rolls that affect me being out in the open so that the GM can’t fudge it and let me survive a bad roll. However, when I'm running the game I probably wouldn’t let an opening shot from a sniper kill a player. So really it’s a case of personally wanting no favours or second chances, yet I will give them to players if I think the roll is too unfair. Any player who says they want the dice roll out in the open earns my respect; the rest can keep their plot armour.

You get the same kind of choices in prose fiction. Some people lap up cosy murders. (No other appalling crime is ever cosy; just murder.) Others prefer the darker writers, like Ian Rankin or Georges Simenon, who are less likely to hold a nannying protective hand over their characters. Or you might turn to In Cold Blood or You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) if you appreciate that real life (or unsentimental roleplaying) throws up far more interesting and varied stories than authored fiction ever can.

As the author Joyce Carol Oates puts it:

“My belief is that art should not be comforting. For comfort we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

Recommended reading

• Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
• The Snow was Dirty (different translation)
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Devil's Lieutenant by Maria Fagyas
• The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger

Oh, and as Columbo used to say: just one more thing. Whenever I write a post like this, someone will pop up and complain that I'm being dogmatic, and that they like escapist roleplaying with a GM who's out to tell them a story they'll like. Well, I already said that everyone will and should make their own choice. Blog posts are opinion pieces, not diktats. If you want your roleplaying games to be the equivalent of mass entertainment then perhaps you'll opt for the cosy option. If you think of roleplaying as an art form, you might demand more of it. Your call. (And yes, all that should go without saying, but I've been doing this blog for over a decade now and I've learned that some people just can't manage to parse a half-dozen paragraphs.)

A shopworn formula

Scriptwriting is increasingly about hitting a formula, perhaps because writers and studio/network execs attend the same courses that say X must happen on page Y, and so forth. And today's scriptwriters only have a very limited toolbox of tropes, it seems. Since Alien, every SF/horror movie must have a maladjusted group of squabbling malcontents. That made sense in Alien, where the ship had a commercial crew on a boring long-haul mission, a crew whose dysfunctional dynamic was exposed by the loss of the senior officers who held them together. It makes less sense if the crew is supposed to be a squad of elite marines, or a hand-picked team of top scientists.

Likewise in war movies. Everything today's scriptwriters know of war, they picked up from watching Vietnam movies. That was an unpopular, hopeless conflict fought by draftees who often didn’t want to be there, so naturally the movies written by veterans often feature disenchanted, unruly, squabbling soldiers. But it makes no sense to apply the same dynamic to the troops at Dunkirk or advancing after D-Day – except that's the only way the writers have learned to imagine war.

Star Trek's famous "lack of conflict" is often mocked as naïve, not least by its current writers, but in fact it's the same dynamic as professional astronauts describe. They don't muck about the way George Clooney's character is shown doing in Gravity, nor snit at each other like rivals in a high school movie. When I worked in game development I used to encourage a team attitude where everyone is pulling together to face the common challenges. I called it "bridge of the Enterprise" culture, the very paradigm of grown-up, ego-free cooperation. It’s getting hard to remember now, but that’s what Star Trek once stood for.

Star Trek: TOS didn't lack for character conflict, of course. Not an episode passed without McCoy and Spock having a grumble about something. But I suspect what the producers of Star Trek: Discovery mean by conflict is to have characters constantly at loggerheads like the crew of the Prometheus. Presumably they’d interpret “bridge of the Enterprise” culture nowadays as all about recriminations, secret passions, grudges and shouting matches. But if the show is to make any kind of sense that could never happen; those characters wouldn't get into Starfleet in the first place.

More to the point (because credibility in SF and fantasy is so often taken to be a foolish goal) writing high school moodiness into all the scenes is the story equivalent of putting lens flare on everything. There are other ways to inject tension into a plot, other varieties of conflict than person to person, and other tones of conflict than the shout-n-sulk.

I don't want to get sidetracked into talking about The Rings of Power (which I haven't seen, nor the Peter Jackson movies either) but from the criticism it seems it's making exactly the same mistakes as those other shows and movies. Writers who only have a very limited range of character- and story-tropes not only know nothing but how to write "piss and vinegar" characters, they even think that's somehow innovative.

I'll leave the sign-off to Ursula K Le Guin. This is from her essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", which is mostly about the jarring language used by bad writers, though that's part and parcel of the same problem:

"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple. Now the kind of writing I am attacking [...] is also written in a plain and apparently direct prose. Does that make it equal to Tolkien's? Alas, no. It is a fake plainness. It is not really simple, but flat. It is not really clear, but inexact. Its directness is specious. Its sensory cues—extremely important in imaginative writing—are vague and generalized; the rocks, the wind, the trees are not there, are not felt; the scenery is cardboard, or plastic. The tone as a whole is profoundly inappropriate to the subject."

Has gaming got a secret storytelling sauce?

You know those get-to-know meetings where everybody is invited to say a little bit about who they are. Like when the heroes exchange boasts in the Trojan War, only without the spear-throwing as a chaser. When I mention that I’m a game designer as well as a writer, a publisher or a network exec will nod and say, ‘Yes, that’s what we like about your writing. The gaming feel.’

I expect Michelangelo heard the same sort of thing. ‘What we love about your painting, Mike, is the sculptural look.’ And a compliment is a compliment. You don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, even when it’s a camel. But it irks because it’s too facile to be true or even useful. When you’re a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work. Whatever quality those network execs think they’re seeing, it’s as likely that I got it from reading Elric of Melniboné as from playing The Witcher.

Why it matters: publishers and old TV networks alike are looking at their shrinking audience and, perceiving that young people especially are eagerly consuming games, they feel sure that an injection from those glands could surely perk up their own medium.

Is that true? When I was getting started as a writer, back in the mid-'80s, all the publishers wanted Fighting Fantasy style gamebooks. Those went a long way beyond mixing a game sensibility (whatever that is) into the narrative. They were stories with gameplay. And on one level it was a massive success, but only in the same way that the US surge in Iraq was a massive success. Reluctant readers, especially boys, took to the books in their millions. But fast forward 35 years and I don’t think you’ll find many of them became regular readers. If it didn’t have a tunnel with an orc at the end they could kill, they just weren’t interested.

Should we worry? After all, most people are not regular readers. It can be a misperception to see all those kids’ faces wide-eyed and screen-lit and to think, gosh, if we could just bottle that gaming juice we’d soon have them just as addicted to books.

@Porter_Anderson well I would say the answer I offered was that they want the same 10 positive emotions. Not game like interaction.

— Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) May 29, 2015

Back in the late sixties, what got me and another 400,000 kids out of bed without needing to be called twice was the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. You think my parents and teachers approved? ‘Why can’t you read proper books?’ they asked. The answer, of course, is that it’s not either/or. Maybe most of those other Spidey fans didn’t become regular readers in later life. Others did. Some became writers and game designers and now rarely put in a day’s work that doesn’t owe something to Stan Lee’s storytelling. We didn’t look at the page and see a 3 by 3 panel grid, or four-colour pictures with word balloons. We saw how original characters, sparkling humour, a gazillion personal problems, and a spectacular fight scene or two added up to a don’t-miss monthly saga.

When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning. Yet tread carefully on these deceptive sands. It’s not necessarily about grafting gameplay into novels. Nor is anything gained by mere apery, such as renaming chapters ‘levels’. You could sell truckloads of books, after all, if you made them in the shape of a football somebody could kick around a park. Game elements, when only sutured onto other media like an experiment by Dr Moreau, have their limits.

The really valuable takeaways here require us to dig deeper. When Quentin Tarantino brought a little grindhouse vibe to CSI with his episode ‘Grave Danger’, the show’s producers acknowledged that he’d jolted them back to the realization, half forgotten after five seasons, that their stories needed to grab and excite the audience, not just fill an hour’s gap in their lives. A decade and half ago, Russell T Davies regenerated Doctor Who with a transfusion of soap opera sensibility which relegated the SF plot shenanigans almost to MacGuffins in order to foreground the characters’ personal journey. Opinions remain divided, but there’s no denying that it gave a direction to a show that seemed to have nowhere left to go.

Putting the ‘pop’ back into art is a trick that goes back a long way before one pixel dashed across a screen to devour another. Patricia Highsmith understood the same affect of compulsion: writing emotionally on the edge of your seat so as to put the reader on theirs. Dickens grabs you by the lapels; even his narrative prose has the vim and urgency of the spoken word. Coleridge too: ‘There was a ship...’ I defy you to stop there and start texting. Or how about three witches, a blasted heath, and a bloody man – you’re not going to be popping off to the loo for the next couple of hours, are you? And the Bard couldn’t have picked up those tricks from the games industry. Gadzooks, they’d only just invented cricket.

How do we make people want to read? Bring them up in a household full of books, or (next best) with free access to books. But also recognize that the human race reinvents itself. That’s its trademark turn. So we could ask, why aren’t the youth of today painting mammoths on the walls of caves? Why aren’t they going to the opera? Where are the Oscars for epic poetry?

Humans love stories, and we always will, but media evolve, speciate and go extinct. And so it goes.

Over the crump-holes and far away

Something a bit different this time. A movie producer friend asked me to help out with a story pitch. I’m sure he has other writers he can turn to, but I’m an old pal so I’m cheap. Well, free. The story he’s developing has to do with fantasy and war – maybe simply so he can say it’s “Game of Thrones meets 1917” – and because those are subjects that might also be of interest to readers of this blog, here’s what I told him.

The best place I can think of to start answering the question is with the five elements that Aristotle said every story consisted of. This is nothing to do with the thirty-six dramatic situations or the seven fundamental plots or any of that how-to-write malarkey. These five elements are the fundamental building blocks of any story: Plot, Character, Setting, Theme and Style.

A story outline should cover all of those for your story.

You say you’re developing a story where some soldiers in World War One look out of the trenches and see that on the other side of the mud and fog and barbed wire is a shining otherworld.

That's a setting (at least half of one, the real world part) and the beginning of a plot. Plot is the bit that really conveys the high concept. High concept movies are strong on plot, soft concept are strong on character. A compelling plot premise is what makes people buy a book (Sleepyhead: a serial strangler isn't actually trying to murder his victims, he's deliberately paralysing them for life) or go to a movie (Flightplan: a woman wakes up on a plane to find her child missing, but everyone else denies she ever had a child with her).

Theme is what gives the story depth and a through-line the audience connects to. If plot is the reason you pick up the book, theme is the reason you take it to your heart and recommend it to friends. Theme also guides you in developing the plot beyond its basic premise. McKee recommends exploring the Theme, the Negation of the Theme, and what he calls "the Negation of the Negation".

So if the theme is Love, you'd contrast that with Hate (the opposite of love), Indifference (the negation of love), and Hate masquerading as Love (the negation of the negation). Those are all valid explorations of the core theme, each digging deeper and giving a more visceral twist as you find the antithesis that most strongly contrasts with your theme.

In your story, perhaps the theme is fantasy itself. Fantasy can ennoble mankind and make our solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives worth living. I’m talking about fantasy in the broadest sense here – poetry, music, literature, art in general. Not goblins! In exploring that as your theme, you could contrast it with the negative side of fantasy: escapism. Escapism just says things are crap so let's pretend they're not real. The "Negation of the Negation" is when we take our bad experiences and impulses into the realm of imagination and end up sullying it with them. In your story that could be by the characters bringing disease and war into the pure otherworld they’ve found.

Now you can populate the story with characters. Who are these guys sheltering from an artillery barrage? Let's say you've got a door-to-door notepaper salesman, a communist automobile worker, a conscientious objector medic, and a chorister who got into the army by lying about his age. The story will take each of them on a journey that has some resonance. The notepaper salesman has made a living out of selling the raw material on which a million people write their dreams and hopes, for example. Sometimes the plot and the theme suggest characters, and those characters change your first idea of the plot, and so on.

That gives me some idea where you might take the plot. Say that the fantasy world is a utopia, but your protagonists find only children living there. Later it turns out these are all the millions of children who will remain unborn because their fathers were killed in the trenches. So they are literally the hopes and dreams of those men that live on despite the existence of suffering and death.

Obviously to "squeeze the lemon" you will then have to have one of the characters meet the son he is destined never to have. He refuses to go back and die in the trenches, but that causes his son in the fantasy world to grow sick.

However, I wouldn't expect the story outline to set in stone how the plot was going to develop. That's something most writers would want to allow to develop organically. The outline should set out the plot premise ("a man is chained to the wall and the hacksaw next to him isn't sharp enough to cut through the chain") and only needs to sketch out where you would then go with the plot.

Once you've sketched out the theme and direction of the plot, you start to see where the style might borrow from. In the case of this storyline, I'd look at the war poets, and also at the Utopians like H G Wells and what they wrote after WW1 about building a better world. Why not style the otherworld on that? (A bit like Priestley’s imagined post-WW2 utopia.) Those are ideals that are still around today and would give the reader or viewer something to connect to.

The synopsis should be a few pages outlining who the characters are, where they are, what happens to them, why and what is the style/tone. Some people like to begin with a guide like this one:

1. Once upon a time... 
2. And every day... 
3. Until one day... 
4. And because of this... 
5. And because of this... 
6. Until finally...
7. And ever since that day...

So:

1. Bill, Fred and Jim were in the trenches
2. And every day the guns pounded
3. Until one day the gas drove them out
4. And they ran into a magical utopia
5. And they brought war to the utopia
6. Until Bill saw that to save the purity of the place he'd have to go back and die in the war.
7. And over the years, as Fred and Jim grew old, they could still see that utopia just across the fields at dusk.

These are just f’rinstances, of course. The writer you hire will take it in another direction, hopefully much more interesting that what I’ve come up with in the space of a few minutes!

I'll just add one caveat. A good story outline is a nice thing to have. It really does help you make a sale to the studio, network, or publisher. But in striving for the very best story, you can get distracted. Like, you know that steak they sell in supermarkets? It's bright red-orange in colour but that isn't what the best steak looks like. The best steak is hung for a week or three until it goes dark brown. Supermarkets dye their meat orange because that's what people think fresh meat ought to look like. And in the same way, having a good story isn't the most important thing for reaching an audience. They only get to see the story once they’ve bought their tickets. To grab their attention in the first place you need a hook. Fantasy and the Great War both seem at first glance to be a very long way from our lives today. Yet you have to make people stop and think, “That’s a story about me.”

But we’re talking about your story, not mine. And all this is free advice. So I’ll leave it there.

Try harder, Trekkers

Looking back from a quarter century on, it's hard to believe I cared that much. I'd just seen Star Trek Generations and I decided to tell Rick Berman what was wrong with it. Audacious, you might think. Pompous, even. But I stand by what I said then. If they didn't want constructive criticism, they could have written a better script. If any reader of Mirabilis has a bone to pick with me about mistakes in the story, I'll listen.

And I was aiming to help. They wanted to write a story of tragic sacrifice, but all they'd done was describe a high-stakes gamble that didn't pan out. The climax wasn't "a far, far better thing"; it was just "oops!" The letter went on:

"Mr Zimmerman is right. Heroic figures like Kirk and Spock have so often been seen to take extreme life-threatening risks that the only way to have them die in a way that works in narrative terms is when they are faced with certain death. When Spock died in The Wrath of Khan he knew in advance that his action would be fatal. But that wasn't the case with Kirk's death. Scrambling about on the collapsing bridge is the kind of thing he's done hundreds of times before. He knew he was taking a risk, but at no point did we actually get to see him make that crucial decision to sacrifice himself. In real life you could say that this turned out to be the one time his luck ran out, but the rules of real life aren't after all the rules of fiction.

"In this sense I believe Kirk's death was wasted. Obviously it is time to move on with the Trek movies now, but when a character like Kirk has been built up to such a genuinely mythic level the way he leaves life should be on a par with the way he's lived it -- full of sound and fury, and signifying a very great deal.

"This touches on a secondary problem I think you could have with subsequent Trek movies. You have a large cast there, and the awkward subplot with Data showed that it is not so easy to give time to every character and still maintain the narrative momentum demanded by a feature film. People aren't going to come into the theatres every two years to see the latest developments in an outer-space soap, and the more cerebral and complex character-based issues for which the TV series is justly famous are too subtle to carry an action movie. The best Trek films haven't just been TV episodes on a bigger screen, but stories with a big canvas and big ideas to fit.

"Mumon said, 'Do not shoot another's bow, do not ride another's horse, do not criticize another's work.' My suggestions are meant as constructive ones and I hope they don't give the impression that the movie as a whole wasn't good. It's just that I think it could have been great."

I even went so far as to enclose a five-page treatment for a follow-on Trek movie, in which the bad guys were the Yu, a neotic offshoot of humanity in the far future. Earth is now known as Terra, feared throughout the galaxy as the nerve centre of a ruthless empire. I described our time-travelling heroes' first glimpse of what was once their homeworld:

"Terra is not the blue jewel that it was in their own time, but a sinister shadow against the heavens, mustard yellow with pollution and crisscrossed by myriad lights marking out vast continent-spanning metropolises. A grim testament to the Yu's implacable totalitarian society."

A year and a half later, Star Trek First Contact came out. This time I realized the futility of firing off a letter about the flaws in the story. It would have had to be a much longer letter anyway. But there was one bit in the movie that got my seal of approval... No blue jewel, this.

Analyze this

Maybe you’re still in the halcyon days of roleplaying. I mean the Goldilocks time when you’re safely past the juggernaut of finals and have yet to be distracted by career or kids. The days of dossing around, some might call it. You get to see your friends all the time and together you can slip into the parallel life of your roleplaying world whenever it suits you. Nothing beats it for immersion. Arguably it’s the only true way to roleplay.

For me it was back in the ‘80s. We’d have at least one evening’s gaming a week with the whole group, and usually two or three side sessions featuring one or two players who could then flesh out their characters’ extracurricular activities. And after the big Thursday night game, often we’d sit into the small hours (or even dawn) talking about the world of Tekumel, or chatting in or out of character. It was at one such post-mortem gathering, after our characters had disrupted the summoning of the tempest demon Kirikyagga, that the wind started to pick up and somebody mentioned that Kirikyagga was annoyed. That was October 1987.

But I digress. The reason I mention all this is that there was an interesting difference of approach in those post-game chats. Some players (eg Jamie Thomson and Mark Smith) liked to talk about their characters’ goals and personality and what we’d nowadays call story arc. “As Jadhak I used to be very cruel,” Jamie might say. “But since that Llyani curse caused me to lose my sense of fear I'm much mellower. I was cruel out of fear, you see, as a defence mechanism, and now my need for that has gone.”

This was a foreign language to players like me and Paul Mason. We threw ourselves into the role while playing, but I didn’t ever think about my character in an authorial way. On reflection, that might just be because I don’t think about myself in an authorial way. I would never map out how my character was going to develop, or even have any interest in analysing his behaviour. “You must have planned it that Drichansa is always kind to children,” Jamie might protest.

Drichansa was my character. All I'd started with was a mannerism: tugging at my earlobe when really trying to get to grips with a problem. Everything else about Drichansa I discovered as I played him. Jamie found the kindness to children surprising because Drichansa was otherwise notably lacking in tenderness.

“Kind to kids? I suppose I am,” I said. “I never thought about it.”

“You told Jadhak you were adopted. Could that be why?”

“Maybe. Want another whisky?”

You might think it’s odd that an author wouldn’t go in for that kind of character analysis, but I don’t tend to do it with the characters I write about either. Sitting at a keyboard making stuff up can get boring if the characters don’t surprise you from time to time.

This could explain why I’m not much interested in narrative mechanics for roleplaying. I don’t want to control my character like an author; I want to be them. I recently saw the latter method derided as the Actor Approach, and the person went on to say, “That’s not even how real actors do it.” Quite right. An actor has a script (most of the time) and even if they’re in a Mike Leigh or Christopher Guest movie they’ll have sat through extensive character workshops and discussions of the storyline first. But the attraction of roleplaying for me is to be neither author nor actor. It’s more like life: fielding stuff as it comes at you, and finding the story (or rather, stories) that emerge from all that noise only when you look back at it – and even then only if looking for story patterns is your thing.

But that style of playing is not so easy once you’re out of the sweet spot between college and adult life. We get fewer opportunities for gaming (my sessions are down to once a fortnight) and less time (no more playing till after midnight). No wonder that today’s games look for ways to jump-start inter-PC relationships and squeeze your fantasy life into the familiar shapes and tropes that stories take in creative writing courses.

And it occurs to me that’s what dungeons were, back in the dim mists of roleplaying history: a story shape, admittedly crude and built out of rooms and ten-foot corridors, that led you to a Big Bad at the end and allowed for campfire moments back at the town in between expeditions. A three-act structure in architectural form.

Modern games do a lot better – although arguably a physical environment is just as effective a way to shape a story as using plot points and scene breaks. Still, I gave up dungeons pretty early in my roleplaying career and I enjoy the emergent unpredictability of just-dive-in roleplaying stories too much to want to wrangle them with plot paradigms. Also, one of my day jobs is sitting with other writers planning characters’ story arcs. I enjoy that exercise of craft very much, the problem-solving and the personality construction, but I can’t see an evening spent doing pretty much the same thing as relaxation.

An example: not long ago I came very close to running a campaign from a published book complete with pre-planned adventure. The book begins by saying that each player should pick one of the other PCs as their closest friend, and another who they most trust, and so on. For me that should all happen in-game. I don’t want written backstories, I want players to forge those relationships out of their experiences as they play. Then they’ll really feel it. If somebody at my table says, “Out of game for a moment, I think my character would…” then I feel like I’ve failed. They should be leaving their everyday life behind. If they’re stopping to view the characters from outside then they’re distanced from the fantasy, and that means the game isn’t working.

By the way, this applies to writing too. If you start a novel or script with two characters already in love, that won’t have anything like the impact of having them fall in love in the course of the story. Games likewise. A year or two back I consulted on the design of a computer game that began with a long cutscene explaining how the player had a pet dog called Jack who was your best pal, and together you got stranded on a desert island. I threw out the cutscene. “Have the player get shipwrecked and then find Jack trapped under an overturned lifeboat," was my advice. "You get to free him -- that's the first time you've met him, and so the bonding between you happens in-game rather than before the game starts." That way the player will actually care, because they experienced it rather than just being told about it. (Game storytelling 101, that, but you'd be surprised how many developers don't know it.)

Some people enjoy being the author of their character’s life, and/or bringing a five-page backstory to the first session, or calling time out to explain (often in third person) how their character arc dovetails with something that's happening in the game. They are more comfortable with the distance that brings. Well, fine -- you should play the game whatever way lets you get most out of it. But given all the RPGs these days that are designed to conform characters to types and tailor events to an archetypal narrative, maybe you should try it at least one time without preconception, script, or safety net. Just put on the persona and be that character. The worst that can happen is you'll lose yourself in the game.

How stories emerge

Good stories arise out of what the characters do. Bad stories result when you decide on a plot outcome first and then manipulate the characters’ behaviour to reach that goal.

Showrunner Peter Gould explains how it works on Better Call Saul. And that’s the writers’ room on a TV show, where you might think they can just make the characters do whatever the plot demands. Not on a good TV show, they don't. So if you’re running a roleplaying game and you’re defining a story goal and only then going through the motions to get there, you’re not roleplaying, you’re writing – and you’re not even getting writing right.

I’ve talked before about stories as a cascade of events, the same way a series of gravitational tweaks to a ball’s velocity leads to a parabola. This was what I was trying to do with Dreams at Elixir Studios. Designing from the top down is entirely the wrong way to go about it.

(Incidentally, designing a game like that using grown-up characters in a modern town was also the wrong way to do it. The player's expectations of how human-like characters ought to behave are too high. If you want a story-creating game, start with simple animal characters and stories like you’d find in Farthing Wood. That’s my Figments concept, but let’s talk about that some other time.)

How do you encourage that cascade of events? I think the best stories arise when the rules themselves don’t address story as a goal. Take care of the details and the story will take care of itself. A good simulation system is the best narrative game.

The proof? Look around you. It’s all just physics. Real life has no story-creator processes going on at the level of the engine. Yet here’s the universe doing drama very well indeed – sometimes a little too well, as when a preening bully whips up a riot because he can’t accept he lost a fair election – and all of that is just because everyone’s acting in the moment.

I grumble about GURPS. It’s even a tag on these posts. But it’s like finding fault with an old friend. Many of our best games have sprung spontaneously out of those mechanics, which might look dry on the page but are fertile soil for stories. Like nuclear fission, GURPS if used responsibly will do whatever you need.

Maybe you’ve been put off trying GURPS because it has the reputation of being complicated? (It’s easier than physics, believe me.) The books cover everything, but you’re meant to pick the parts you need for your campaign. Admittedly I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said to players, “We are using just the basic books, no mental disadvantages, no quirks or perks,” only to have them come back with some skill they found in a supplement. Be firm and it’ll work. Start off with GURPS Lite (which is free) and take advice from The Path of Cunning, a fine fanzine (also free) published by Roger Bell-West and John Dallman.

That and imagination are all you need, and the stories will take care of themselves.

Gamebooks are growing up

Some gamebook news today, and here's one that ought to be of interest to Fabled Lands readers. Apart from the Steam Highwayman series (excellent and highly recommended btw) there haven't been a lot of open world gamebooks, in the sense of giving complete freedom to travel where you want, go back and forth without limit, and pick up whichever quests appeal to your character. But here's a new one called Alba with a post-apocalyptic setting, and it must be doing something right because in fund-raising terms it has far surpassed other print gamebooks (open world or linear) of recent times.

I haven't seen the book myself, but from the Kickstarter page it looks like it has a lot of legacy game elements such as stickers that mark items or locations on the map. (And to think players used to grumble about having to tick boxes in Fabled Lands books back in the day.)

The writing style is of  higher quality than the purple prose of yore, and it looks as if the blocks of prose between choices are longer, making this more of a weighty novelistic experience than a CRPG in book form. Think Telltale Games' The Walking Dead rather than The Witcher. Here's the author, Harley L Truslove, talking about the books.

One obvious difference from old-style gamebooks is that in Alba your character can't die. That's a gripe about FL that we still hear. Somebody on Facebook recently was disgruntled because the skeleton pirates in Over the Blood-Dark Sea had carted them off to a life of undeadtured (sic) servitude with no hope of resurrection:

It used to be that whatever happened to you was part of the story, even when that story ended in tragedy and/or horror. But those were times when PCs in roleplaying games might get killed at the drop of a bascinet, and when we could reasonably expect Bucky to stay dead. We're in different times now, and Jamie and I have taken that on board with our new Vulcanverse gamebooks, which should eventually consist of around a 4000-section adventure in which you cannot die permanently, not even if the Furies and Nemesis team up against you. The worst you'll suffer is being sent to the naughty corner (aka Tartarus) for a brief spell.

I'm being facetious, but the Don't Kill Me players are right. A single-story game (Heart of Ice, say) shouldn't require trying-&-dying till you find an optimum path through. Every time the PC snuffs it in a book like that it's a failure on the writer's part. And even in an open-world gamebook, where death might be the appropriate ending for a given character's story, it can't just be random and unavoidable. Good god, that would be too much like real life.

But it's not just the legacy features and the immunity from death that have propelled Alba to unprecedented success for a print gamebook. The main difference is that it's not the usual hokey old '80s-era D&D kind of fantasy, but instead a vivid, gritty and character-driven narrative in a setting that feels contemporary. (The excerpt is quite well-hidden on the Kickstarter page, but you can download it here.) If Alba was a TV show it'd be a talked-about cable drama, whereas most gamebooks would be a cheaply-animated Saturday morning cartoon that you dimly remembered from your childhood.

In the '80s heyday of CYOA and Fighting Fantasy, gamebooks were hugely successful. Pretty much every series was guaranteed to sell in the tens of thousands per territory. Gamebooks could still matter to a sizeable readership if they moved on from their origin as kids’ books. Interactive stories like The Walking Dead can deal with whether you’ll commit murder to save a friend. Firewatch can tackle loneliness and hope. In games from Assassin's Creed to Bioshock the player is confronted with real feelings and choices more intense than any movie.

And meanwhile gamebooks* are mostly still about which key opens which chest or which item will defeat the Big Bad. Who cares? Crosswords and sudoku already have the puzzle market covered**. It's time for gamebooks to grow up the way that computer games have. That's what makes Alba exceptional. It's about an emotional journey, as all the best stories are. Only connect, that's the way forward.

* Print gamebooks, that is. For some time now Choice of Games have been producing interactive stories with more depth in digital book format, not the least of their titles being The ORPHEUS Ruse, a superbly gripping adventure by our own Paul Gresty.

** Unless you go full-on puzzle book, that is. I'd probably quite enjoy something like Journal 29, but it has stripped out all the story. And Alex Bellos's column in The Guardian satisfies my brain-training needs.