Gamebook Theory: Treasure Hunt gamebook mechanic

Definition: a Treasure Hunt Game is any game (computer or otherwise) that allows the player to explore multiple geographic areas, regions or places in the search for treasure (items, information. etc), implementing elements of randomization (finding the treasure is a matter of chance) and surprise (there is little, if any way at all, of telling what kind of treasure the player would find). A perfect example is the board game Enchanted Forest by Ravensburger.

Note that every Treasure Item or Information found during a Treasure Hunt Game is ultimately a key which is needed to open a corresponding door later in the adventure. The mechanic of "if you have [this key] item, go to [that door] section or page" is inevitable in a Gamebook Adventure.

It is a fact that all gamebooks implement a Treasure Hunt algorithm. They have come a long way since the first Fighting Fantasy book was published back in the early 1980s, but I recently realized that many of them still have similar approach and game mechanics. The old "which door choice" of "do you want to go left or right?" is now replaced by the "shell choice" question of "which area would you like to explore?", but either way, that is a Treasure Hunt algorithm.

Even though, they seem completely different on the surface, "which door" and "shell game" choices represent a very similar gamebook mechanic deep inside: the outcome is a matter of luck rather than good performance of the player. Here are the examples: "do you want to go left or right?" against "do you want to cross through the forest or do you want to explore the caves in the mountain?". In both cases you have absolutely no idea what is going to follow nor you have any valuable information to help you make the choice which will lead you to the better outcome for your protagonist. You might as well throw the dice to find out what is going to happen. However, the "shell game" choice is preferable due to its storyline value and the fact that it creates an illusion of control. Besides, we all love learning new things, exploring new areas and being unexpectedly surprised. What I am trying to say is that the "Treasure Hunt" has its place in the gamebook adventure genre, but way too many books rely entirely on this mechanic alone, forcing the player to read the book a few times in a search for the correct path to victory. I have to admit that having more than one way to reach the final goal of an adventure is an excellent improvement as a result of the gamebook evolution throughout the years, but the author should seek the right balance between Treasure Hunt Mechanics and Logical Conclusion Choices in every adventure, so there is enough room for meaningful input by the reader (he gets rewarded for good performance) as well as just enough randomization of the adventure (the outcome is not always predictable, providing enough excitement and surprises to the reader).

I already did a post on Logical Conclusion Choices and I will soon write a post on Logic Puzzles (another mechanic that gives the player real control over the outcome). Today I will focus on how to actually build a good Treasure Hunt for our gamebook adventure? The answer is: Diverging Diamond. Why not write "branching paths" or create a "straightforward story line"? Well, because creating too many branches is a waste of time for you, as an author, and also a waste of space in the book and therefore a waste of money if it ever gets published. Imagine writing 100 sections and the reader only goes through 20 of them to finish the adventure! You wrote 80 more that never got to be read and your game left the player with a feeling that it was too short, regardless of the fact that it had 100 sections. God forbid, you tried to sell it too! Can you imagine the reviews: "I paid too much money for such little satisfaction as I finished the adventure in 15 minutes. Beware, the large number of sections is just a marketing tool as this gamebook was made to look bigger than it actually is". Not so good, is it now? The other extreme, "straightforward story line", could be just as disappointing. It will be a chain of Logical Conclusion Choices without any Treasure Hunt and therefore absolutely no surprises, but you will still have to write bunch of bad outcome or instant death sections. Again, waste of time for you and very boring and upsetting for the reader. I've made that mistake a few times on my first couple attempts at writing a gamebook adventure.

The Diverging Diamond approach creates the perfect balance between the "branching paths" and the "straight forward story line" styles of writing, because it puts the control of the game in the hands of the player, but at the same time it keeps the element of surprise in the adventure.

I borrowed the name "Diverging Diamond" from the Science of Highway Engineering. However, to adapt the meaning to the terminology of games, I have to explain that a "Diverging Diamond" in Gamebook Theory would be an intersection of branching paths (each one of those paths is completely independent with its own quest or adventure) ultimately merging again to form the beginning of another diverging diamond or to lead the player to the final skillcheck of the adventure.

For an example: if we had to write a short gamebook story, where a medieval hero has to defeat an evil wizard, who is terrorizing the village, the adventure starting location would be the village (point A - top of the diamond) and the hero's final destination would be the wizard's tower (point B - bottom of the diamond). We would branch the path at point A (the village), creating a fork of different paths, but note that they all lead to the final point B (the wizard's tower). If the author decides, he can intersect those paths somewhere in the middle of the adventure and give an option to the reader to switch from one path to another. That creates a diagram that looks like a diamond. It is also possible and game designers should feel encouraged to create smaller diamonds inside the main game diamond.

To create a simple to understand example, we should take just the outline of the diamond diagram. That would give us two paths at the intersection right outside the village - left and right. Remember, that was the archaic approach of the gamebook writers back in the 1980s. As we discussed earlier, we would replace "left" with "forest" and "right" with "wetlands". Neither one of the paths leads to an instant death and both of them merge at the end of the diagram at the wizard's tower, but each one of the paths includes a different battle encounter and only one of them contains the item necessary (lets just say that it is a magical amulet protecting the protagonist from the wizard's magic) to complete the final skillcheck at the end of the adventure. If you create a very diverse path structure, it would be a good idea to have more than one way to finish the adventure, so it is not too difficult. I think the magic number here is 'three': an average gamer should be able to successfully finish the gamebook in three attempts at the most (33% chance of success at each try).

No, I am not saying that this is the way to write a gamebook! I am just giving an example of what a "Diverging Diamond" looks like and I am explaining the basic principles of the "Treasure Hunt" approach. Later on, we will talk about how to mix this technique with the Logical Conclusion Choices in order to create a compelling gamebook adventure for our readers.

Some of you may ask "Why not call the diagram a simple grid, just like it is in most games?" and they could show me the map of "The Forest of Doom". I must point out that they are correct and the map of the game looks just like a grid, but the truth is that movement in the gamebooks is rarely horizontal. Most of the time, even if you simply choose between "left or right (east or west)", once you make a decision, you move one step closer to the end of the book and it is (almost always) impossible to go back and explore the other direction and therefore the move on the map could have been horizontal, in the sections diagram of the adventure the move is also vertical. When you combine horizontal and vertical movement, the result is actually a diagonal move, just like it is in the "Diverging Diamond" diagram. The conclusion is that the map looks like a simple grid, but the actual diagram of the adventure is still in the form of diamond with a lot of diagonal movement.

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"

 

Make your game even more interesting: Emotional and Moral Choices

Two posts ago, we discussed the mechanism of creating a Logical Conclusion Choice step by step. Today I'd like tell you how to add another layer of involvement for the reader through attacking his emotions or his moral.

Before I give you the details of step 8 of the Logical Conclusion Choice process, I would like to remind you once again that in order to create truly interesting choices, all of the options given to the reader should have mixed positive and negative consequences just like it is in real life: gain one thing at the expense of another. Example: To avoid being hit by a lightning in the fast approaching thunderstorm, you decide to run for the caves in the distant giant cliff structure. You lose 10 points of health due to exhaustion and the fact that you get soaking wet before you are able to take cover. However, you find an artifact. A magic sword with special abilities, for an example.

Step 8: Involve the player even further through adding a layer of emotional or moral reasons or consequences.

Example of Emotional Layer: in my Visual Gamebook Adventure that takes place in the Star Wars universe, you are told at the beginning of the story that as a little kid you witnessed the death of your parents by the hands of the imperial stormtroopers. Later in the adventure, you are given the choice to kill as many of them as possible to get revenge for your family's suffering. Of course, you want to kill them! After all, they murdered your family. However, given the circumstances at the moment, that is not the best choice, because you kill 10 of them and your blaster runs out of battery, so you have no choice but to retreat. That choice provides you the satisfaction of revenge at the expense of your laser gun, but it also gives you an advantage if you follow a certain path in the middle of the adventure.

Example of Moral Layer: I am going to quote Aston Saylor again here: "Consider this: The orcs have taken your friend hostage, and will kill him if you attack. But taking this step constitutes an act of war, and they must be punished. Will you attack (utilizing your combat skills) knowing they will kill your friend, but determined to crush the orcs once and for all and claim their valuable treasure? Or will you negotiate (using your diplomacy skills), suffering the humiliation in order to hopefully save the life of your friend".

Let me stress this out once again: Make your choices difficult with complicated consequences where you gain one thing at the expense of another! Only partially reveal the outcome before the choice is made and let the reader guess what the other consequences of his decision could be, but don't you ever cheat him into making the wrong choice! Just let the player be in the driver seat!

I personally love how sometimes in gamebooks the choice seems bad at the moment, because you lose something, but then later on in the adventure, that turns out for the better. Example: in the Star Wars Adventure, if you kill some of the stormtroopers, you have a bleeding fleshwound and a drop of your blood falls onto the scanner of the R2D2 robot, letting it recognize the fact that you carry the jedi gene. Another example: in the "Last Fortress" by Ashton, you lose the treasure of your people and your master blacksmith in an attempt to save as many of your people as possible in the snowstorm that comes through the mountains, but later on you are awarded much more as a result of that difficult choice. This technique creates great tension in the adventure, because you know that you made the right choice, but you still lost items and people and you are not sure if you are ever going to be rewarded for making the emotionally difficult, but morally right decision. I'll do another post on the very needed illusions of danger and achievement for every game, not only in the genre of gamebooks.

In this line of thinking, I must mention another very important idea here: the moral responsibility of the game writers and creators. One of my favorite slogans is "with great power comes great responsibility". Believe it or not, the media, the television and especially games install certain patterns of behavior in the kids and young adults through the process of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Check out the Power of Suggestion theory! We, the authors, have the great responsibility to make sure that we encourage the good and we punish the bad behavior. We are literally programming the mentality of our next generation, so don't encourage bad moral choices through rewarding immoral decisions in your games! If you decide to expose the reader to the emotional garbage of real life, at least make sure to clearly define the difference between good and evil in the adventure and properly reward only the morally good choices, so the message you send to the reader's mind is making him a better person. That way you are reinforcing his future success in real life and creating a better human society for generations to come.

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"

The fatal trap we all fall into and How to Cheat Death (in a gamebook)

Attention! A newer revised and better version of this post is available on LloydOfGamebooks.com

The previous post was about creating meaningful logical choices that put the input control mechanism in the hands of the reader and we explained how to create such choices step by step. However, the provided example included an instant death outcome and that is something that should never happen in a modern gamebook adventure. Today we will discuss the tools that can solve that problem.

A lot of authors feel that they are in a competition with the reader and try to cheat him into making the wrong decision on a regular basis. Even worse, some of the authors often kill the protagonist in instant death chapters not realizing that they kill the enthusiasm of the player instead. The only thing those writers accomplish is forcing their readers to cheat by going back to the section where they made the wrong choice (killing the satisfaction of eventual success) or if they decide to play fair by starting over from the beginning, the adventure becomes extremely boring, because they would be quick scanning the text of each section for the instructions on how to proceed, simply getting to the section of the wrong choice again (like this ever happens). In the worst case scenario, the player is going to put the book away as a result of unfair and unsatisfactory mechanics of the adventure.

Of course, in order for your choice to be meaningful, the consequences should also be in correlation with your decisions. The player should be rewarded for good performance and he should be punished for bad performance.

Lets take a look of three different bad consequence mechanics in the gamebook adventure genre:

1. Take stat points away from the player. This is the most common of the techniques and is probably the best one of them all. Example: "You fall down and hurt yourself. Lose 5 points of stamina". When you apply this mechanic, the reader wouldn't be able to successfully finish the adventure only if he's made too many mistakes. However, there are certain situations when such approach wouldn't make any sense. For an example: "The tree you are sitting under gets hit by a lightning. Your stamina goes down by 5 points". See, in the major event of being hit by a lightning, the only possible outcome is instant death and that brings us to the second approach.

2. Give the reader a way out of his certain death. Create tension by telling the player to roll a die and inform him that, if he rolls 1-3 a lightning hits the tree he is sitting under, but if he rolls 4-6 the lightning hits somewhere else (or you can ask him to test his luck in a fighting fantasy game). The stress of the possibility of killing instantly the protagonist communicates a strong message about being wrong and is a punishment enough by itself. You can even allow the player to re-roll the dice under certain conditions. For an example, you can have a stat, lets call it "blessings"! You can increase your blessings based on good performance during the adventure (if you help a monk find something he is looking for, he will most likely bless you for your good deed). If you get a bad dice roll later in the book, you can re-roll the dice at the expense of you "blessings" stat. All of a sudden, the chance of being killed instantly goes from 50% down to 25%, but it is at the expense of stat points that could be extremely important at the end of the adventure.

3. Losing an item or a good friend. A great example of losing a friend is "The Last Fortress" by Ashton Saylor where your personal guard saves your life at the expense of his own (only once in the adventure). A good example of losing an item is the "Sharkbait's Revenge" by Stuart Lloyd where you lose the "letter from the queen" if you jump in the water, because the ink just washes away.

That's all for today, folks! And remember: Don't ever kill your players instantly without giving them at least a small chance to redeem themselves from bad performance!

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"

Gamebook Theory: Logical Conclusion Choices and applying the "Fog of War"

We already explained the basics of a Logical Conclusion Choice. For the purpose of learning how to efficiently apply the 'fog of war' principle, we should use the same example from the previous post to demonstrate how to hide the possible consequences of a choice, so it is not obvious what the outcome would be. After all, if there is no way to find hints in the text to help you correctly guess what could possibly happen, the choice will be random (trial and error choice) rather than logical.

The following example is a courtesy of the fantasy style epic hero gamebook "The Master of Darkness" published in Bulgaria by George M George (a nickname of George Mindizov). Here it is: So, our medieval hero is in the middle of a wide open field. To the east, he can see a big cliff with visible caves carved in it. He takes a quick look to the west and he can see a thunderstorm front coming in. A few feet away from our hero, a lonely tree stands tall with it's big branches forming a nice solid crown of green leaves. Do you want to hide under the tree to keep dry until the storm has passed? Alternatively, you could run for the cliff and take cover in one of the caves there, but you can't reach them before the storm hits.

What all that text distills down to is the sentence "there is a thunderstorm coming through and a tree is going to be hit by a lightning", but you can't write that, because it is going to be obvious that hiding under the tree is the wrong choice. Instead, the author took the real danger (the lightning) out of the text and he provided the reader the exact conditions under which a lightning occurs. Lets look at this process of applying hints step by step here:

1. Decide what the danger is going to be: a lightning


2. Take the exact wording of the danger out of the text: don't mention a lightning in the text


3. Provide a few clues that are well known to be associated with this specific danger: wide open field, thunderstorm, the tree is the only tall object around


Again, this is the most simple form of the Logical Conclusion Choice and the principle of 'fog of war' as the clues are presented in the same section as the choice and the outcome is simply either good or bad. I do not recommend using such simplified kind of choices in your adventure, so lets make it a little bit more complicated applying some historical clues to the already existing instant hints.

We can make the choice more difficult if we move the hints to one of the previous sections. May be you will notice dark thunder clouds moving very quickly from the west shortly after you left the village. In this case, there will be no mentioning of a storm front moving in at the very section when you feel pretty tired and have to choose between resting under the nearby tree or continuing to the tall rocky cliff in the distance. To make the right choice even more difficult for the reader, we can warn him that due to his exhaustion, it will actually cost him 10 points of health if he doesn't rest under the tree. Of course, it is better to partially lose health than to suffer an instant death. However, the choice now is even more interesting, because it is not a simple good or bad outcome, but is rather about choosing the lesser of two evils. Please note that we are now at the very fine line of almost tricking the reader into making the wrong decision, so if we make the choice any more difficult by applying even more 'fog of war', we will be crossing that line, which an author should never, ever, ever do. All that being said, step number four, five and six in the above process are: 

4. Move some of the clues to previous sections of the gamebook adventure: inform the reader of the conditions in a conversation with another character or while he is at a different location


5. Partially reveal what would happen if a certain choice is selected, but present only half of the outcome: tell the player that he is going to lose 10 points health if he doesn't rest (tricking him to make the wrong choice, so be careful with this one!)


6. Make the choice even more difficult by forcing the reader to choose between two bad outcomes: losing 10 points of health or getting hit by a lightning (the choice is obvious if he deciphered all the clues)

This is now a difficult enough choice for any gamebook. It is actually a little bit too complicated to be put in the very beginning of the adventure as the difficulty should grow from low to high as the reader makes his progress through the game.

We can once again adjust the difficulty level of this choice to make it a little bit easier by providing another clue in an earlier section. Lets just say that an elderly villager told you earlier about a legend of a hidden artifact in a cave somewhere in this land. If the reader remembers that, he should have another reason to choose going to the caves instead of resting under the tree, making the correct choice a little bit more obvious than before.

7. Apply a clue related to the choice with the positive outcome if you wish to make the decision easier for the reader: an artifact is hidden somewhere in the caves


 Mix and match positive and negative clues as much as needed to adjust the difficulty of this particular decision, but make sure that there are enough clues to support the better choice, so the outcome is the result of a logical conclusion instead of pure luck.

Of course, you can apply the 'fog of war' not only to dangers, but also to positive consequences. As a matter of fact, try to provide more of choose the greater good and choose the lesser evil encounters in your adventure, so the better choice is never too obvious!

At the end of this post, lets take a look at the different kinds of hints available to the authors:

Each hint is either instant or historical: An instant hint is a clue that is present at the very section of the choice it is related to, while a historical hint we call a clue that was given to the reader earlier in the adventure, but is related to a later choice he will eventually have to make.

Also, each hint is either a storyline hint or a general knowledge hint: A storyline hint is a fact that is revealed to the reader in the course of the adventure such as the information that there is a hidden artifact in the mountains while a general knowledge hint is constructed by conditions that suggest the occurrence of a well known event from the general knowledge of the average person such as the fact that during a thunderstorm, a lightning occurs and it hits the tallest object in the nearby vicinity.

There is also the separation of clues to real and false hints: Revealing possible consequences doesn't necessarily mean that they will happen for sure. Sometimes the application of a false clue is required to make the choice more difficult or to guide the decision of the reader in the opposite direction. However, it is unacceptable to cheat the player in the wrong direction by applying too many false clues. They should only be used to make the choice more difficult or simply not as obvious.

The more you mix and match hints of different kind along with clues about positive or negative consequences, the more interesting and involving the choice becomes. Don't forget that the forcing the player to choose the greater good or alternatively the lesser evil outcome, always makes the dilemma more difficult. It would be even better idea to include some moral or emotional consequences along with all the hints provided to the reader (see the post on Difficult Choice by Ashton Saylor). But whatever you do, don't ever make the reader feel that a negative outcome is the unjustified result of pure chance rather than good performance based on strong logical conclusions!

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"

Gamebook Theory: The importance of Meaningful Choices and how to create them

In the last post, we covered the basic structure of a game: input - test of performance - feedback.

Choices are the only possible active gamebook mechanic. The other ones, such as flipping pages to find the next section, throwing dice to add some randomization, or adding numbers for a skillcheck, are technically a passive form of input, because they don't allow the gamer to actively influence the outcome of the adventure.

The choices, being the only active input mechanic, become the most important thing in a gamebook adventure. You can have a great story to tell, but without the proper choices presented to the player in a meaningful form that influences the outcome one way or another, your adventure is not a game, it is just a story. Of course, the exact opposite, bunch of choices without any story, is just as bad as narrative is a great way to provide feedback for rewarding or punishing the reader (we already covered that topic in the previous post).

It is easy to provide many choices to the reader. I remember reading an article that was mentioning the urge to give the player too many choices as one of the major problems of new writers. I've always had the opposite problem: It's always been difficult to me to put enough choices in each section of the game, because I want every single one of them to have a meaning and consequences that affect the adventure in some way.

See, having a choice that is changing the immediate narrative path for the reader without having any consequences down the road, is not necessarily a gamebook mechanic. What I am trying to say is that a gamebook that has no good or bad choices is no longer a game, because it simply becomes an interactive novel. In order to have a game, we must have a final goal that the player is trying to achieve through overcoming bunch of other obstacles. If there is no way to fail, there is no game in the story.

Speaking of good and bad choices, we must stress out that the outcome, positive or negative, should be the result of strong logic, calculated risk, educated decisions and the reader has to be given enough information to draw that logical conclusion on his own. This is the tricky part. Providing too much information to the gamer makes the choice too obvious (cake or death choice), but not presenting enough information forces the outcome to be a matter of luck, not a logical consequence of good or bad performance (which door choice) and therefore making this piece a story with multiple alternative endings, not a game.

This is where the "fog of war" (terminology by Ashton Saylor) comes in place. The writer must hide the possible consequences, but should also leave enough clues in the narrative, so the reader can guess the outcome if he was paying close attention and was drawing the correct conclusions.

My favorite example of a Logical Conclusion Choice is one, which I found more than 20 years ago in the fantasy style epic hero gamebook "The Master of Darkness" published in Bulgaria by George M George (a nickname of George Mindizov). I was playing a fantasy style hero and while on the correct path to accomplish my quest, I was put in the middle of a wide open field during a thunderstorm. I believe that there were two options available: 1. Hide from the rain under a tree or 2. Run for the tall cliff with visible caves in the distance. My thinking was that I didn't want to get soaking wet while fleeing to the caves and I decided to go under the tree. Needless to say, I learned a very valuable lesson: lightnings hit the tallest object around and unfortunate for my protagonist, that was the tree I was hiding under at that moment. I was upset about that instant death, but I also felt that it was fair and justified. The "fog of war" hint was in the word "thunder" before the word "storm". The immediate danger of a lightning was not even mentioned, but it was completely logical under the circumstances of the situation.

Now, keep in mind that this is a very simple example of a "logical conclusion choice" and I believe that presented just like that, it no longer has a place in the modern gamebook adventures because the outcome is one of two extremes: life or death. Please remember that an instant death is the worst thing you can do to the reader and should almost never happen. Instead, you can punish him in a different way such as losing health points, losing an item and so on. Death in a gamebook must be the result of multiple gravely mistakes (when your health runs down to zero) or the outcome of the last battle skillcheck in the adventure. If you ever decide to break this rule, please have the instant death in the very beginning of the story before the reader has invested much time and effort, so starting over wouldn't hurt as much.

However, regardless of being a bad example of a choice in a gamebook adventure, this is the perfect example for the purpose of explaining the basic principles of the "fog of war" technique, but more on that I will discuss in my next post.

Before I close for today, I have to mention that while the "Logical Conclusion Choice" is arguably the best one of all narrative choices, it is not the only one and it should be used in combination with the rest. Also, when implementing this kind of choice in an adventure, it is a good idea to inform the player if he's made the right choice or not. That could be done by writing a short explanation of the author's reasoning for the punishment or the reward in the beginning of the next section.

If you remember anything from this post, that is the rule that a writer should never take away from the player the satisfaction of the feeling that his achievements are a direct result of his good performance!

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"

Gamebook Theory: mechanics of GAMEbooks (input - test of performance - feedback)

Attention: a newer revised and better version of this post is available on LloydOfGamebooks.com

As I mentioned in my previous post, some people believe that there is something wrong with the genre of gamebooks and they think that it is impossible to write a good one due to the lack of game mechanics to be used. I admit that there is some truth to the limitations, but the article narrative is not a game mechanic is entirely wrong and in this post I will explain exactly why that is.

Before we start talking about Gamebook Mechanics, we should first recognize the very basic elements of any game. In theory, a video game (or any other game) consists of two major events: input and feedback. In simple words, the player takes any action such as move the mouse, click a button, move the pawn in a board game, etc and we call that input. For every input, there should be positive or negative feedback such as moving the character on the screen, hearing a sound or something else that provides the player a clue if he or she is doing well or not.

Here is the basic structure of any game: input - test of the input (performance test) - feedback

I already said that one of the most disturbing articles I've seen so far is the one named narrative is not a game mechanic by Raph Koster and based on his theory many people consider that games and story don't mix coming to the wrong conclusion that it is impossible to write a book which is also a good game.

Just take another look at the basic elements of any game! Narrative is a form of feedback, isn't it? I think that, not only narrative IS a game mechanic, it actually is the best form of feedback. Raph Koster argues that "games can and do exist without narrative". He is absolutely right, they do, but... Remember the old arcade games where the game at each level is the same as the level before and the only difference is the increased difficulty due to the faster speed of the game? Sure, that does make it more challenging, but how much closer to the final goal does it make you feel? You don't have any idea how far from winning the game you are, because you have no definitive final destination set. Kill as many enemies as possible and move on to the next level! That could be fun for a short period of time, but how much feeling of achievement do you have when you die at level 10 and you have no idea what the total number of levels is? Isn't it so much better to have the narrative feedback of "you just left the village and now you are in the forest. You are now one step closer to the mountains and therefore one step closer to finding and killing the evil wizard, who lives up there... Now you have overcome the wizard and you are victorious! The land is free of evil and everybody will live happily ever after"? Sure, a good narrative limits the replayability of the game, because you know exactly what is going to happen next time, but how many times do you want to replay the same scenario in the countless levels of a jump and run or a shooting game that doesn't have any narrative? The answer lies in the fact that we, as humans, like diversity and the feeling of accomplishment. It is hardwired in our brains by nature through the process of evolution (you can read more about that in my earlier post: psychology of games). Just ask your mother or wife to cook your favorite meal every single day forever! Eat it morning, lunch and dinner. How long do you think you can eat the same meal, even if it is your favorite one? We like diversity and we like having a final goal to reach, and the answer to that in the art of making games lies in providing the player with a diverse storyline and a clearly defined ultimate goal.

So, we have now covered the feedback mechanic in games and explained why the narrative of a gamebook is the best possible solution for providing feedback. Let's now talk about input in video games and the input mechanics of gamebooks!

For the purpose of this post, we will take an example of a jump and run video game and compare it to a similar situation in a gamebook. Imagine that the obstacle you have to overcome is a deep chasm. Negative feedback in both, videogame and gamebook, would be: the character falls into the chasm and dies. Positive feedback would be: the character makes it safely to the other side and the adventure continues. You can provide this feedback through video or through narrative, it doesn't make a difference for the outcome.

Leaping a chasm in a Video Game

In order for the game to decide which one of the two possible outcomes to provide on the screen, it has to test the input of the player. An artificial intelligence test of the input in a video game would look something like this:

1. if the jump button is hit too soon, Super Mario is going to jump, but will fall into the chasm before he reaches the other side;

2. if the jump button was hit too late (after he walked off the edge), Super Mario is going to fall down into the chasm, because he didn't jump;

3. if a wrong button was hit (such as the run button instead of the jump button), Super Mario is not going to jump at all and he will fall in the chasm.

4. ideally, Super Mario is going to jump and make it to the other side if the jump button was hit somewhere between too soon and too late.

Leaping a chasm in a Gamebook Adventure

Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of testing coordination (which button was hit) and speed (when was the button hit) in a Gamebook Adventure, so we replace testing those skills with the only other available option. No, we are not going to ask the player if he would like to jump! Obviously, the character needs to jump, otherwise falling down to its death is inevitable. Instead of asking a stupid question, we are going to test the stats of the player. Example1: roll 2 dice and add the value of your strength. If the number is equal or greater than 10 then you succeed and you continue on your adventure. If the number is lower than 10, you fall down in the chasm and die.

This is where a lot of people get upset. Rolling the dice is not a fair gameplay mechanic, because the outcome seems to be a matter of luck rather than a consequence based on the skills and knowledge of the player. That would be true only if the author has done a bad job writing the game part of the book and he or she didn't give the gamer a chance to build up the strength value of the character earlier in the adventure. See, the input in this example shouldn't be the randomness of the dice roll. The input is the value of the strength skill that should have been increased earlier in the book by making a meaningful choice. Maybe there was an option to purchase a headband of strength earlier in the game or there was a section where you had to choose between eating a good meal or picking up a fight in the tavern where the outcome turns out to be increased strength stat from eating the meal or loss of strength points due to injuries suffered in the fight.

See, the input in Gamebooks happens in the form of choices and decisions. It is up to the author to make sure those choices and decisions are meaningful and that they are based on strong logic rather than random guessing due to lack of meaningful information.

There are two forms of feedback in Gamebooks: instant and delayed. In the example above, leaping over the chasm is a form of delayed feedback. A form of instant feedback is the instructions to increase your strength by 2 points after making the choice to eat the meal instead of picking a fight at the tavern.

As I already pointed out in my previous post, I am not claiming that Gamebooks represent the best of all game genres nor I am claiming that they are any better than video games. All I am saying is that due to the lack of other game mechanics, Gamebook Adventures provide the most diverse storyline and force the player to make the most meaningful choices, because they provoke critical thinking through forcing the gamer to assess the situation he or she was put in and then select the most rational action for the best possible outcome of the storyline and for the eventual success of the game character. I just wish that more of this kind of game mechanics, providing a lot of learning and personal improvement value to the player, would be implemented in video games. Just imagine how much more interesting and exciting an adventure like Diablo 2 would be, if it was putting the gamer in a situations that require certain meaningful and important choices altering the outcome of the story one way or another.

In the next post I will talk about the most important Gamebook Mechanic: Meaningful Choices.

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"

The great potential of Gamebook Adventures and what is wrong with them

Let me make it clear, I am not claiming that Gamebook Adventures is the best genre of them all nor I am saying that it has the greatest potential. I am simply stating that I have found Gamebooks to be teaching the most meaningful lessons of all the games I've played so far. This genre, probably for the lack of other game mechanics, puts the character in many different situations and the player is given a limited amount of possible actions to choose from. Making such a choice must be based on critical thinking, educated guessing and calculating the risk of possible negative or positive consequences for the character on the way to achieving the final goal of the adventure.

Meaningful choices haven't always been part of the Gamebook Adventures. Just take the arcade approach of the first Fighting Fantasy books for example! They are filled with "Which Door", "Cake or Death" and "Shell Game" choices (more on this terminology can be found in the blog about Gamebook Theory by Ashton Saylor) and the only way to get to a good ending in those books was to explore the adventure land, filled with countless instant death chapters and way too many battles (too much of the adventure outcome was left to pure chance), through trial and error until the ultimate path was eventually discovered.

Fighting Fantasy Book 1

Please, don't get me wrong! I have a lot of respect for the pioneers in the genre, the legendary writers Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. They laid down the basic foundation of something that captured the hearts of millions around the globe and has been keeping the love for adventure alive in many generations now. All I am saying is that gamebooks have come a very long way since the dawn of the genre back in 1982 when "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" was released in Great Britain. I believe that the ultimate example of how much gamebooks have improved since then, is the great work of Stuart Lloyd presented at the Windhammer Competition for Short Gamebook Fiction that is ultimately leading to his mobile platform game Asuria Awakens developed by the computer and marketing geniuses Neil Rennison and Ben Britten at Tin Man Games, for GamebookAdventures.com (not to be confused with my current project Visual Gamebook Adventures).

So, what is wrong with Gamebooks? While I was doing my research on the genre, I ran across quite a few posts that discussed the problems with Gamebooks and how we could fix them. Some were even saying that they can't be fixed and we should leave them in the past. Especially disturbing is the theory that narrative is not a game mechanic and therefore it's impossible to create a book that is also a game. Not only narrative IS a game mechanic, it actually is the best possible form of feedback! (see my next post)

This is what I have to say about it: There is absolutely nothing wrong with Gamebooks and they don't need fixing. The problem lies in the countless amateurs, who want to write a game, without willing to put enough effort into research and without willing to invest time in learning the techniques of a good adventure. That is exactly what happened in Eastern Europe in the late 90s when the whole genre there was brought to a halt, simply because there was too much junk on the market. The situation is the same with the mobile platform games of all genres right now. There is way too many mobile games available and most of them are just plain horrible, so the consumers often get lost in the huge variety and they become disappointed with the questionable quality. The bottom line is that the market suffers, because people quickly lose interest after a few failed attempts to find something worth their time, but instead they discover nothing else besides pure frustration.

There is another aspect of video games which I dislike very much nowadays. The "free to play" games with in-app purchases are the worst thing that has ever happened to the gamer, because winning the game is now based on the amount of money you spend rather than on the skills and qualities you learn and apply. These games are despicable money generating machines that focus on the economic aspect instead of rewarding the gamer for good performance. Put in other words, they could be "free to play", but they are definitely not "free to win" and I am very glad that this system can't be implemented in the genre of Gamebook Adventures.

To summarize this post, I am going to say that narrative and gameplay mix just fine, given that we have the right author to mix them correctly. Just take a good look at the amazing adventures written by Ashton Saylor and Stuart Lloyd and you'll see exactly what I mean. Both of them have excellent blogs on Gamebook Theory that I would strongly encourage you to read if you are planning on writing a short adventure or even a long gamebook. Their thoughts about how to start writing an adventure, how to approach the design process and what NOT to do to the player (such as instant death and many other bad things) are priceless, but for some reason they don't talk in detail about the mechanics of a good Gamebook Adventure. That is the exact subject of my future posts as I will be trying to build on the foundation Ashton and Stuart have already laid down for us.

Peter Agapov
Game Designer at AugmentedRealityAdventure.com
President and Chief Executive Officer of American Limo Naperville
Former Road Captain of Marine One at Operation "Welcome You Home"