Betterblog

Hurrah, it's the final chapter of our esoteric trilogy of brain splurges. This one is frankly unlikely to make any sense unless you've already checked out parts one and two. Onwards! Next up, we have Faust’s Tea Party, a social narrative concept which I have illustrated by cackhandedly photoshopping a teapot into a picture of Faust and Mephistopheles.

Voila. And now over to AK, who understands this one much better than I do:

AK: Faust's Tea Party is a particular flavour of social action. A simple Faust is something where you take a hit to get a benefit: like the Laudanum storylet, where you reduce your Nightmares but your health suffers. Faust's Tea Party is a social action where both parties gain something or lose something (unless the person invited refuses, in which case nothing happens). A 'Let's Get Drunk And Get Tattoos' storylet would be a Faust's Tea Party: goodbye Connected: Society, hello Connected: Docks, perhaps. A Faust's Ham And Eggs Party, by the way, is one where if the person invited refuses, the inviter still loses something, but gains nothing. Props to anyone who can explain why 'Ham and Eggs'.

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And so we move on to the Midnight Staircase. This is a relatively recent one, which messes around with the idea of grind. It’s a bit like a Questicle that you can complete any time you want. Say for instance that you are planning a daring burglary. You complete a series of preparation storylets – casing the joint, assembling your equipment and so on. Every one of these increases your 'Planning a Daring Burglary' quality. However, at this stage, you haven’t decided where the burglary will take place. As your 'Planning a Daring Burglary' quality increases, more potential locations will appear. Maybe the Brass Embassy, maybe the Watchmaker’s Hill Observatory, maybe even the Bazaar itself. The player can cash in their preparing quality at any time to actually perform one of these burglaries, or they can continue preparing, waiting for juicier targets...

We’re nearly done. Two more cool sounding names, that mean roughly the same thing:

This is a little harder to explain. I alluded way back in part one to the problems of building a multi-branching narrative tree: it causes your content to expand exponentially and you get the Encyclopedia Britannica. EB’s solution to this is simply to disconnect our various bits of story from each other. All the funky structures above give the player a sense of a complex and fairly coherent narrative, but when it comes right down to it, the way they actually approach that story is up to them.

Metaphor time: imagine a desert, seen from above. There are many branching paths leading to many villages. When travellers cross the desert, you can clearly see the route they take, where they stop off, and so on. But what if night has fallen? Then, all you can see are the little fires in the villages. Occasionally, travellers emerge from the darkness and sit by the fires for a while, and then move on. But the routes they take between those fires belong to them alone.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that, while we control the actual chunks of the story, the paths between them belong to the player alone, and that’s a big deal. Just as in a film the story is told through the edit, in Echo Bazaar, the story is told through the darkened paths between the fires. In cinematic terms, it’s a montage: we provide the shots, the player does the arrangement.

AK: Paul suggested referencing Lynch and Eisenstein in the talk. I chickened out because I thought I'd get laughed off stage. Here they are now though.

Several players have told us that they have dreams about Echo Bazaar. This is very flattering, obviously, but we suspect it has as much to do with the structure as the content. Dreams are disconnected things that flip through time and place, heavy with symbolism. So what we're saying is that EB, with its Tarotic cards, unnamed characters and disconnected storylets, loosely strung with controlling Qualities, is structured a bit like a dream.

And that's the end of a talk. You can throw things now.

Being the second installment of our dry, technical and somewhat diagram-infested discussion of storytelling within the casual browser game format. Part one is here.

So, where were we? Ah yes. Storylets: the basic building block of EB. here they are:

If you’ve played the game at all, you’ve come across these. They tend to be discrete chunks of narrative that can be played in any order, as many times as you like. Storylets are unlocked and controlled by...

Qualities! Or stats, if you want to get all beardy about it. However, qualities don’t just relate to your stealth, watchfulness, persuasiveness and, um, dangerosity. Every object in EB is a quality. If you have 4 Jade, your Jade quality is 4, and there are many others besides. The really important thing here is that qualities tell storylets what to do. For example:

This is a storylet from the tomb colonies. Qualities are on the right. Very straightforward: the first branch is controlled by the quality “Connected: The Church”, the second by “Connected: Society”. As we can see, the player has enough of the Chruch quality to play the first branch, but not enough of the Society quality to play the second, which remains locked. Both branches reduce a third quality, Scandal. Qualities also control...

Questicles!

I should point out here that Questicles is very much Alexis’s word. We had to gang up on him and sit on his head until he agreed to change the in-game version to “ventures”.

AK: They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother. When they said that man could fly.

Ventures is arguably less interesting, but it does have the advantage of not sounding like an heroic warrior gonad.

What is a Questicle? Simple: a series of connected storylets controlled by a quality. Chances are you’ve played these too. In the example above, Watchful unlocks the Questicle, and the player gains a new quality called Investigating. Playing the middle storylet gradually increases this quality to 5, at which point the conclusion unlocks, and succeeding there gives you another quality, in this case Cryptic Secrets.

Questicles give the player more of a sense of continuing narrative: they have the fundamental aspects of stories: a beginning, a middle and an end. But they’re still pretty limited. We wanted more complex structures, moral branches, social stories, and so on, so we had to find new ways for storylets and qualities to interact.

Right now, there are around sixty different kinds of narrative structure in EB. Let’s look at three of them.

AK: I am very, very sorry. I take full responsibility. I'll understand if I'm never allowed near a keyboard again.

You have to remember, this was the first pass, before we understood the awesome power of cool-sounding names. Let's try again...

Incidentally, I discovered while putting these slides together that if you add the words “Mark of Cain” to Titian’s Cain & Abel, the result looks an awful lot like a 1970s heavy metal album cover.

See?

Anyway, what is the Mark of Cain? Essentially, it is an exile quality. The Comtessa storyline, for those who have played it, is a Mark of Cain story. Once you’ve finished it, you get a specific quality (I can’t tell you what it’s called ‘cos of teh spoilerz). All the Comtessa storylines recognise this Mark of Cain, and if you’ve got it, they won’t appear. The upshot of this is that you can only play the Comtessa storyline once, and then it’s gone forever...

...and that's all we have time for. In the next and possibly final installment, we discover the secret of the Midnight Starcase, and round off with a crock of tree-huggin' hippy stuff about symbolism and dreams.

The Echo Bazaar team was in London last week for The Story, an informal gathering of folks interested in storytelling. As it turned out, several speakers decided simply to tell stories, which was a little worrying for us, since we arrived at the Conway Hall with a big old bag of narrative theory.

Anyway, since the event some people have asked us for the slides and an abstract of the talk, so I’ll attempt a précis. If phrases like “coalescent narrative structure” make you grind your teeth, or you’d rather not see beneath the bonnet, feel free to skip this post entirely. It’s going to be long and dry. In fact, it's so long I'm going to chop it into installments. There may be spoilers. There will definitely be flowcharts.

OK, here we go. Echo Bazaar is, essentially, a research project. We wanted to find new ways to tell casual but engaging stories in a browser format. Why? Partly to amass some data for Failbetter’s next big project, Prisoner’s Honey (of which more later) and partly because that kind of thing just interests us.

AK adds: "Research project makes us sound more organised than we are. Think of it more as one of those quixotic upstream expeditions in search of the source of the Nile, the kind that returns instead with malaria and a collection of interesting spiders. I would like you, in fact, to think of these slides as a collection of preserved spiders."

So, here we have spider number one. This is a slight exaggeration, but it’s fair to say that the majority of RPG browser games run on this simple hierarchical system: do a mission, succeed, do another mission, succeed, and so on. There’s little in the way of branching narratives for the player to follow, less still in the way of flavour. The pleasure is entirely in the grind rather than the story. Now let’s take a look at a typical Echo Bazaar playing session.

Clearly, this is a bit more complicated. The difficulty for us as writers and coders lies in keeping track of all this stuff while giving the player a coherent interactive story, one where they feel they are carving their own path. The trouble is, the more options that become available, the more tangled this web becomes. Imagine a Fighting Fantasy book where the player has ten options for each chunk of story – it would be the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

An aside: when we added the various fail state locations – prison, the tomb colonies, madness and so on, we made an interesting discovery: people really loved it when terrible things happened to them. We had players actively trying to get themselves thrown back into New Newgate, or exiled, or dead. They hurled themselves into situations that were clearly labelled as harmful without so much as a quicksave button. A few even climbed into Mr Sack’s sack at Christmas time, despite being told that it was a terrible idea).

So anyway, we were faced with this apparently intractable problem: how do we give the player an exciting narrative, with lots of different ways to play and choices to make, without making our heads explode? So here's what we did:

It might sound facetious, but this is a fundamental point. You can’t deal with a problem if you can’t describe it. Echo Bazaar, as I said earlier, is a research project for our next project, Prisoner’s Honey, which is going to have crowdsourcing narratives and a lot of shorter, widely branching stories. That's going to be much harder, especially for contributors who haven't tangled with this kind of thing.So our first job was to come up with a pattern language for Echo Bazaar’s narrative frameworks. Here are some of the terms we came up with.

and I'll get into what those mean in part two. Tune in next time folks!

Hi folks. The EB team was at The Story last week, talking about the difficulties of squeezing complex narrative structures into a casual gaming framework. Big thanks to the estimable @matlock for the invitation. Quite a few EB players were there (80% of them, according to one tweet...) but for those who missed it, I've uploaded the four page pull-out version of the Unexpurgated London Gazette that we did for the newspaper-style programme. I'm quite nervy about this, because it's the first time we've shown off the full-size map of Fallen London that eventually became the travel interface. We're still hoping to get it onto the site somewhere. We'll do a blog post about the actual talk soonish, complete with sexy flowcharts. yeah, that's right. Uh huh. Flowcharts.

Here's the pullout!

We're a bit vague about release dates for new content, because we're such a lean and frantic operation that it's often hard to know when we'll be done. Especially when we come over experimental. But we do have a big fat blurt in the pipeline, so I thought I'd post about it.

We went live with Mrs Plenty's Most Distracting Carnival. This is quite a departure from other areas: a smorgasbord of little fun snippets rather than the usual ladder to climb. As such it's an experiment. Props to @goatdance, who was creative lead on it and did most of the work, and to @emilystaubert, who is entirely to blame for Madame Shoshana. The early-access pass is also an experiment in revenue generation, so feedback on both the carnival and the pass are welcome. (We will possibly be dropping the price of the early access pass as we get closer to March - this depends on takeup, but we're as interested in data as in income on this really).

We have the first part of Book 2 nearly ready to go. This goes up to around 84, but again, we're experimenting with some different patterns for play on a couple of the paths, so the upper limit isn't as straightforward or obvious as it has been in some other cases... We'll probably run an early-access scheme on this too, but it should be open to the public well before the end of February.

If you've been following @huffam_esq, @mr_wines and so forth, you'll know that the Feast of the Exceptional Rose is just around the corner. This is Fallen London's take on Valentine's Day. I want to use it to road-test some enhancements to social actions that I've had bubbling away for a while. That should run, er, from Valentine's Day.

And the Ambitions are getting love. We need to go careful on these, because they tie so significantly into major background secrets and we try to make the prose a bump more sophisticated than the standard storylets, but you should soon be closer to satisfying your Heart's Desire and your need for revenge.

A more general point about upcoming content. We have arcs sketched out up until around 240 along each of the main tracks; we expect Ambitions to run up to about 150. All this is tentative and depends on player growth and enthusiasm. If we only manage a small hard-core of long-term players we'll end the arcs sooner; if we get a big long-term audience then we'll probably keep adding content until everyone's bored or dead. We do have some extreme ideas at the very top end that I think it's fair to say no-one has really ever done in a game, and I'm very, very keen for those to see the light of day.

One last point on that. You've probably noticed that the cost of increasing a Quality is the next level: 38 to go from 37 to 38, 39 to go up one more level, and so forth. The thought of a grind that required 100 or 200 change points to increase a stat has long made me a little ill. A couple of weeks ago we decided to take a stand on this, and capped the cost of increasing qualities at 50: that is, it will cost you 50 to go from 49 to 50, 50 to go from 50 to 51, 50 to go from 159 to 160, and so forth. I *hope* we will gain in player enthusiasm more than we lose in Fate sales at high levels - but more than that, the goal with Echo Bazaar was always to build a casual but compelling storytelling experience, not a straightforward grind game. We'll be looking at more ways to approach that ideal in the months to come.

-- Alexis

I've seen some comment on Twitter about the messages we encourage players to send. The s-word comes up from time to time. I want to clarify our position on this.

Echo Bazaar does not, by any commonly accepted meaning of the word, spam. We don't send unsolicited messages to anyone, ever. We don't ever use anyone's account to send a message without their direct and immediate consent. We do offer an incentive for sending viral messages, but it's quite a modest incentive and we only offer that incentive once every 24 hours. And finally, we allow people to edit the viral messages without any restrictions beyond keeping the fallenlondon link in. If you want to say, 'I diskard this silly game [link]', well, it's your Twitter account, not ours.

We do also allow people to send postcards and echo content if they like the content. This is their call, it's entirely voluntary, and it's really no different from any of the [Twitter this] links on any of a thousand sites.

Ultimately, some people are bound to find EB-related tweets annoying, but we want to limit that annoyance to, oh, the kind of annoyance I'll feel when the World Cup rolls round and half my friends start tweeting about bloody football. So if you think there's something reasonable we can do to reduce possible annoyance, let us know. If you find any hint that anything I've said about our tweeting guidelines is untrue, let us know straight away. We take this very seriously.

If you're a player, you might be wondering what's kosher to do by way of tweet edits. To reiterate what I said above, it's your Twitter account, not ours. But a few points below. Consider this a draft T&C section.

Things we really don't mind you doing

- tweeting for an action refresh and putting completely unrelated text in the other 100 characters. Think of the fallenlondon link as sponsorship. :-)

Things we'd strongly prefer you not to do, but we won't hassle you for

- tweeting for an action refresh, and then deleting it straight off. We considered penalising people who do that, but (i) it seems a bit aggressive (ii) if someone's protected their updates we'd probably be penalising them too. Ultimately we rely on the goodwill and enthusiasm of our players.

- tweeting for an action refresh and saying 'this game sucks.' :-)

Things that are potentially bannable offences

- linking to content that pretends to be EB content, in a way that's griefy or fraudulent rather than funny.

- misrepresenting what our tweet policy is in a malicious way: 'If you see this tweet then EB is spamming my account without my consent [link]'. Unless we've embraced the dark side, in which case, nail us to the wall, folks.

- and of course, anything that contravenes the Twitter TOS.

Ta for reading. Comments welcome as ever.

One of our players mailed me last night to ask why everyone in the EB art is white. I'm glad this came up, because it is something Paul and I have been mulling over.

A glib answer would be, there weren't that many Asians in Dickens. A glib answer to the glib answer would be, there weren't that many sorrow-spiders either. Then we get into the whole  business of whether ahistoricity in fantasy is important because it's about suspension of disbelief, or trivial because it's fantasy. And three sentences later we inevitably find ourselves embroiled in one of those Wikipedia-based internet arguments, which isn't something I want. As a position statement, the approach in EB has always been not to be openly anachronistic but not to be too fussed: so there's a music hall culture that's more of the 1890s/00s than the 1880s, we slip in and out of Victorian turns of phrase, we probably have hundreds of other mistakes, but we don't have electric street-lights or Marxist-Leninists. 

And yet, despite the powerful and pervasive chauvinism and homophobia of the nineteenth century, we allow players to pick a gender role and sexuality which suits them, and we treat characters of any gender identically in the storylets.[1]  We've stretched gender roles by depicting female or vaguely gendered non-player characters with a distinctly ahistorical degree of independence and sexual freedom. So that's pretty anachronistic, isn't it? The thing is, we can go on to use the casual sexism of the nineteenth century to help establish period (three ladies faint at your scandalous joke, and all that), but the presence of strong non-male characters and protagonists takes the sting out of it. Unfortunately it's hard to pull the same trick with casual racism. And it's tricky to present Chinese, African, Indian, Jewish or Gypsy characters without addressing, erasing or ignoring the racism of the time. Paul has suggested the 'RSC option', that is, we simply go colour-blind and randomly assign characters to ethnicities regardless of context, but we're not the RSC, we're a little game on the Internets, and players see our stuff in isolated dibbets. We have to steer between extremes: if we have a nineteenth-century black policeman it looks like tokenism, if we have only black servants it looks like prejudice. We don't have crowd scenes, so it's hard to manage a traditional US corporate diversity rainbow effect.

We feel it deserves attention, though. And there are certainly roles that don't fit neatly into society but that players find sympathetic and exciting - monster-hunters, bravoes, explorers, poets - which could be filled by non-white characters without it looking like we're labouring a point. So you'll probably see a less monotone cast of characters as time goes on. But we'd be very interested in what our players have to say on the subject. By all means comment below.

[1] Which has, let me tell you, made writing content pretty fiddly in some cases :-) 

[2] I think, incidentally, we're rather pushing the envelope by allowing player-characters whose gender can be 'not telling you.' I know this has been done in MUDs and other non-commercial contexts - how many genders did LambdaMOO have? - but as far as I know it's a first in casual social gaming.

It will, you know, barring the unforeseen. Have a little faith. Yes, I know what the date is. 

I thought I'd mention some of the things we've been doing while we were away.

There's a map. It'll change and grow and, yes, it'll be the navigation interface eventually.

There's much more content. Especially by way of Opportunities. The hidden areas referenced in the Ambitions now exist, too.

You can choose avatars. More to come. You'll be able to pick alternate avatars for a small number of Fate Points.

You can engage in social actions with your friends. Or with anyone, really. There's a limited number of these, and a consciously light feature-set, while we trial the framework changes we needed to support them. There'll be more. Feedback welcome.

There's been an economic rebalancing. We were very generous with rewards in the beta to make sure people saw a lot of content in a limited time...and on top of that there were some bugs and loopholes that allowed people to get *very* rich. It's all a bit calmer now.

There's a newsfeed so you can keep up to date with messages without relying on Twitter direct messaging. A bit primitive, we'll iterate.

There are now rare successes in some events - you won't necessarily see everything a storylet has for you first time round...

Content now goes in via a CMS rather than my crazy DSL. The way I put content together when I was testing didn't scale at all well to the task of updating content for the live site. Yes, all sounds fascinating, I know. What it means though is that you should see a greater variety, of, ah, narrative topologies, God I love saying that, in game events.

We've decided to stop taking Jack-of-Smiles seriously. I never liked serial killers.

And some bug fixes, scaling enhancements, styling changes that no one but us cares about.

Finally, there is a payment wall ready to go so you can buy Fate...but it's all feeling a little bit more beta to me with all these changes. So we're going to leave that off for the first week or so after we come back, until I'm happier we're bedded in.

Thanks for your patience. See you in there.

Some of the icons in Echo Bazaar took a mere twenty minutes to create from sketch to site, while others - usually the simple ones - took many days.  The most extreme example of this is the little button that gives a tweetable postcard of your location, which took two weeks, fifteen iterations, one very unprofessional huff and a semi-serious threat to replace the existing art with a pair of luminescent green breasts.  And after all that, maybe five people clicked the goddamned thing. Anyway, I thought it might be fun (and pleasantly narcissistic) to run through the evolution of a single icon. Typically, the process starts with a brief from Alexis. In this case:

“A wild-haired lunatic with eyes and mouth agape and a blood-dripping meat-cleaver. Sticky stuff dripping from his mouth. Expensive-looking clothes in disarray, evening dress maybe. Narcotic honey is the drug of choice downstairs. This gent has overdone it.”

Which led to the following, somewhat crappy sketch (done in ArtRage on a WACOM pad):