Betterblog

This week, we are delighted to launch The Night Circus, our new interactive narrative set in the world of Erin Morgenstern's acclaimed, exquisite debut novel of the same name. Paul, Henry and I have spent most of the last couple of months building the site, and this is a bit of an emotional moment a... [More]

  [Continuing the discussion of writing style in Echo Bazaar. Part I is here.] Rule four is a familiar one: use simple vocabulary. Says rather than utters. Shouts, not vociferises. Argues instead of expostulates. These will give you prose that doesn't obscure what it's supposed to convey. A t... [More]

Last time I wrote about the writing process for Echo Bazaar. This time, it's about the writing itself.  We've spent a lot of time working on the Echo Bazaar style. We're constrained in several ways; firstly and most obviously, this is an interactive narrative. You-the-player have a relationshi... [More]

Bear with me. It’s time for a long, convoluted analogy about how we write content. Echo Bazaar is a garden. A vast, sprawling, ever-expanding maze of a garden, with lawns and vegetable patches and greenhouses and a pond and walled formal rose-gardens and pockets of wilderness and rockeries a... [More]

Last week, as part of an ongoing effort to educate me even just a bit about games, Alex lent me Tom Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. I've not played many 'proper' video games and most of my relationships with them have been at one remove. By which I mean I've spent a lot more time lazi... [More]

****WARNING: this post contains SPOILERS for the Comtessa storyline in Echo Bazaar, found in Ladybones Road at Watchful 25+. READ NO FURTHER if you don't want to know what happens. SRSLY.****   The other day, EBZ's writing team sat down over breakfast in a posh central London hotel spent a da... [More]

Nigel talks about how well his experience as a writer & player of tabletop roleplaying games fits with writing content for Echo Bazaar. I ought to admit right now that I don't have the first clue what a tabletop game even looks like. I'm a classicist; Echo Bazaar for me has always been (amo... [More]