Author's job and interactive literature

Choose the future of interactive fiction

Books where you decide what happens sprung from the bedrooms of D&D-playing teenagers, but the form is having something of a revolution

Back in the 1980s, when most proto-geeks could only dream of owning a home computer that would run a primitive text adventure game in which you could PICK UP AXE and ATTACK ORC, the next best thing was, funnily enough, a book. And now they're back.

But it was a very special kind of book, which allowed readers to exercise some semblance of control over the plot through the decisions they took at the end of each segment.
These "choose your own adventures", half work of fiction, half roleplaying game, appear to be enjoying something of a resurgence, perhaps partly due to nostalgia and partly due to a generation weaned on the internet looking for the same interactivity in books.
If you want to explore this argument further, click on "Read More". If you want to take another path, then choose a different blog entry.

The re-emergence of the format has three main strands. Firstly, in what can only be pure nostalgia, the original "Fighting Fantasy" books have all been re-packaged and reissued. The book that started it all off, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, received the 25th anniversary treatment in 2007.

Just like early text-based computer adventure games, these gamebooks used the tools of heroic fantasy - dwarfs, goblins, quests and the like - as they both had their roots in insanely popular roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons which arose in the 1970s. Fighting Fantasy books dispensed with the need for friends that made D&D so unwieldy. An American publisher, Wizard Books, re-released the original series of books and is adding new titles every year.
The second strand is the appropriation of the formula, in a very nudge-nudge wink-wink way, for a tale of thirtysomething angst called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, released in the UK by Virgin Books after success in the States. Bob Powers's book replaced the usual hack-and-slash fantasy stuff with choices such as "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183".

These modern rehashes look like a flash in the pan, with grown-up fans returning to the form in a blaze of nostalgia after an adult life spent getting used to web interactivity. Can a book replace a computer game, when a Nintendo DS is as easy to carry around as a paperback?
The last strand in the development of interactive fiction takes the idea in a different direction: it might be called a true web 2.0 version. In a similar way to how Elizabeth Baines wrote a blog-based novel last year with plot input from her readers, with varying results, new American publisher Underland Press is publishing weekly instalments of what it calls a "wovel" (it's a contraction of "web novel" - I know, I know, but give it a chance. It didn't take us long to get used to "blog", after all). Entitled The Living, it is a riff on the zombie genre and new instalments are posted every Monday. Depending on which way the vote at the end of each chapter swings, author Kealan Patrick Burke apparently writes the next chapter in accordance with the readers' wishes.

Whichever way the public takes it, Underland Press's The Living will eventually be released as a proper volume when the experiment is over. The question is, do readers really want the responsibility of driving the narrative, or is that the author's job? Make your choice now...

David Barnett

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor