Betterblog

Today sees another content release, with a big pile of changes and enhancements to the economy. This is the next step in a long-term plan, and I wanted to talk a bit about what we're up to. Nearly three years ago I sat down at the PC in my spare room and started writing and coding Echo Bazaar. I can't emphasise enough what an experimental process that was. I'd taken a few months unpaid holiday from my day job to try to get it up and running (a month of which was already blocked out for paternity leave). I made it up as I went along,  but I had long-term plans. I even had a spreadsheet calculating likely player progress at five different levels of engagement (from 'flirting' to 'probably a bot'). A lot of assumptions turned out wrong (more on that in another post) but the most naive thing was, I did projections for a year... on the basis that we'd never do content that ran more than a year. That would just be crazy. I thought. But the tale, as it always does, grew in the telling, and almost three years on we're still probably only two-thirds of the way to the end. So we've had to adapt the fundamentals as we go. From the beginning, it wasn't about the economy, it was about the story. But the big lesson we learnt: you can't just dip your toe, economy-wise. Either it's a feature or it's not. If some stories require items, either those items are trivial to get or they take time and effort. If they take time and effort, people care about the details, and it's no longer just about the story.I wanted asymmetry and texture, not just a few resources: I wanted people to be able to go, 'ooh, this storylet needs 50 Cryptic Clues, I have those, cool!' 'This storylet gave me a Radical Okapi, oh I haven't seen one of those!' So we scattered a variety of resources around a variety of places. Of course as any long-term player of Echo Bazaar knows, this threw up all kinds of other problems.You don't know where to find that Radical Okapi when you really need one. A secondary issue is that when you've got one, you don't know whether to sell it because you need the cash, or hang on to it because you'll never see one again. The Bazaar is an exchange of last resort, of course. But if you could buy anything at the Bazaar, then every resource is the same as any other resource (although you'd always pay a sort of tax if we kept the difference between buy and sell prices). Getting good value is fiddly. A storylet that gave you twenty Whispered Secrets a few months back feels like poor value when your highway qualities (Shadowy, Dangerous, Persuasive, Watchful) are all north of a hundred. So there's generally a pressure to find better-value ways of getting it. Different players have different levels of engagement. Some players haunt and update wikis and take a keen interest in where to get a Radical Okapi most quickly... but a lot of players are much more casual. So if things are easy to find, it's not interesting for the economic enthusiasts, if they're hard to find, it turns off the people who are only here for the story.Our old friend the 'grind'. We need to pace story to stop everyone eating it all at once, and the traditional way to pace this stuff has been by requiring players to repeat the same action loads of times. In the medium term we have some quite radical solutions for this, but in the meantime we're gently tweaking the game to introduce more variety into the regular routine.These issues have built up over time, and changing the dynamics in a game the size of EBZ without breaking things is like trying to turn an oil tanker around in a multi-storey car-park... but we decided it was worth the effort. The current economy revamp is a move to address this. We're at about step three in an eight-part plan, and we'll change it and develop as we go. Here's what's happening today.Nearly all the items in the new Inventory categories - Wild Words, Luminosity and so on - are now usable. That's about fifty items in all. You can now buy materials from the Bazaar and create most of the items in these lines. If you haven't experimented with these yet, it works like this: with the right connections, you can trade large quantities of cheaper items to get small quantities of rarer items, until you reach the rarest wines or the deadliest secrets. The lines cross in some places, too, so eventually you can trade your huge cache of Whispered Secrets across to become Cellars of Wine. You'll often be able to find better ways to get them - maybe you'll happen across an opportunity that gives you access to a sudden bounty of Romantic Notions - but you won't be dependent on these ways.    And, because we're Failbetter, every one of these possible trades is its own storylet, with rare successes and other oddities, and every one of the categories teases or reveals secrets from the Neath's gigantic backstory. I think we're probably the first game ever to offer a crafting system which runs on characters and dialogue. We'll be adding more branches and variety and longer-term stories to item use; in the longest term, I would like most of the items in the game to be usable in some way.   We're adding availability information to quality tooltips, so when you see that Radical Okapi lock icon you can mouse over it and see 'You can breed Radical Okapis in the Hidden Coil of the Labyrinth of Tigers.' This means that detailed knowledge of the game world is still useful for finding unusual sources, but everyone has a clear and simple guide. We'll keep adding this to more qualities as we go.   We're tweaking requirements and rewards. Lots of these have changed, to introduce more texture, or make it easier to find better value. We'll continue to adjust as we go.   We're reducing costs in the Bazaar Sidestreets. The requirements are a bit more varied than they used to be, so you might need to cast around to find the materials, but it'll cost you fewer actions overall. We're adding variable action costs. We're tweaking carefully, but it means that some choices will have bigger rewards and bigger costs, so you just need to click the button once. You'll also notice that a few actions, like drinking Darkdrop Coffee, are now free.   This isn't the end! There are many more changes to structure and mechanics coming, and, of course, story content that we're itching to release. As ever, we do want to hear your feedback at http://feedback.echobazaar.failbettergames.com - we're releasing the changes incrementally so we can monitor and adjust as we go.   Thanks for all your enthusiasm, folks. This is a grand experiment, and we're glad you're part of it.  

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 as we finally send our baby out into the world. When Random House brought the book to us several months ago, we were immediately excited by the possibilities Erin's world offered. There's this vast, weird, constantly evolving circus, Le Cirque des Rêves, which is made of firelight and shadows and chiaroscuro magic. It has a cast of mysterious eccentrics and a sweet, poignant love story at the heart of it all. What was most interesting for us, though, was the space that opened up in Erin's lovely world for our own storytelling. The Night Circus has been like a playground for us - we've added new acts and moved the circus to five different cities around the world, and illustrated it with Paul's beautiful, enigmatic artwork. Above all, we've tried to tell stories that draw you-the-reader into the centre of your own narrative while meshing into the background fabric of the novel. This was an especially interesting prospect because Erin's novel is already halfway there. It's punctuated throughout by scenes that invite the reader directly into the circus - curious, spare, second-person vignettes that interrupt the narrative and guide you through various experiences that are just for you. All we needed to do was create lots more similar scenes and develop a narrative system that allows you to choose your own path through them. These vignettes are outside the plot of the novel, but they're part of the story of the circus itself - it has its own independent existence, and this is what allowed us so much imaginative space to play with. There's a long-established tradition of telling stories in other people's worlds, of course, and we're proud to have had the chance to continue this with The Night Circus. We hope we've managed to occupy Erin's circus with the love and respect it deserves. And we hope you enjoy visiting it with us.

Stagconf is the slightly alarming name of a conference where the speakers are to be decked with asphodel, transformed into deer and rent to gobbets by the frenzied audience. Wait, wrong PR notes. Stagconf is the slightly alarming name of a conference about storytelling in computer games. There hasn't ever been one of these before. I am deeply chuffed to have been invited to speak, not least because (a) there are a lot of better-known people in the lineup (announced so far: Richard Dansky, Margaret Robertson, Lee Sheldon, James Wallis, Stephane Bura, Hal Barwood) (b) it's in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. It's on the 27th September. I'll be telling war stories and talking about doing innovative storytelling on a small budget. You should really come, and I'm not just saying that because I'm hoping you'll buy me a drink. More here: http://stagconf.com/

Rambly, speculative, Sunday night blog post. Every interactive story is haunted by the ghosts of those choices not taken: and also, by every choice previously taken. Here's an academic sort of take on this and here's an enthusiastic one. This often means you've replayed the story, but it can also mean you've spoken to someone else who's played through, read an anecdote or a wiki, or seen a content glitch give you extra information. This produces some powerful effects, because you can know what might have happened in the halo of alternate playthroughs - but this is a semi-accidental product of treating it like a real story. So what kind of effects could we base deliberately on this kind of multiple, penumbral experience? A few sketches. Information that only makes sense in aggregate: This is a very transmedia sort of thing. We see the Red Constable paint his lodgings in pigs' blood, but we don't find out why unless we take a different route through his story - one that omits the pigs' blood ending. There's no way to fnd out what's 'really' going on without sharing informatin. Repetition as a sort of tone poem. A deliberate effect created through repetition: a mood or effect that doesn't work until you've seen the Stolen River rise three times and enjoyed the cumulative effect. Feedback story-tailoring. The simplest example of this is the visual novel with endings that are locked off until you've unlocked other endings. Metagrandfather Clock feedback. If characters make a point of different lines each time you go through, to show you different facets or alternatively a distinct story, that could be fun. Or unsettling. Oddly enough, GTA IV does something like this, with the repeated mission briefings. Something I've always liked. In Somoza's The Athenian Murders, there's an (entirely fictional) device called eidesis, which relies on embedding a message through events in the story that make no sense to, and are ignored by, the story's characters: events the reader can nevertheless assemble a secondary story from. (Ice-Pick Lodge's notorious Pathologic does something similar.) I don't know exactly how this would work. References to a red glow in the street, and a stench of burning, in three dozen unrelated choices. It becomes apparent eventually that there's an erupting volcano presented through eidesis, invisible except to multiple play-throughs. This is a special case of information that only makes sense in aggregate. I keep thinking there must be something else cooler to do with it. Our endgame strategy. One of the things that got me thinking in these directions. I can't say too much about that yet, of course... Other thoughts? Which ghosts should walk?    

After the BioWare seminar, we got a number of requests to do something similar back home. I trailed the idea on Twitter and got a promising response. So, here: http://complicity.eventbrite.com/ - a Failbetter seminar on narrative engineering, Wednesday 24th August 2011. But the really exciting news is that Emily Short, arguably the doyenne of traditional interactive fiction and a significant authority in the field, has agreed to do the seminar as a double-header with me. It's going to be a lot of fun. The venue is our incubation host, the extremely fabulous Ravensbourne. It's a sort of steam-cleaned minimalist futurist technoparadise. It's by the North Greenwich / O2 Tube exit in London. It's here: http://www.rave.ac.uk/about/maps-and-directions/large-map/ If you're interested, come along. If the ticket price worries you, get your work to spring for it! That link again: http://complicity.eventbrite.com/ Any questions, jump into the comments.     

Yasmeen has talked in recent posts about the process and style of our writing. I'd like to complement that by talking about some principles of narrative engineering. This is about game design and how we structure the various moving parts of a narrative, so do feel free to walk on by if you're just here for the tight writing and the threesomes. The principles that I'm about to describe have come through the experience of building Echo Bazaar. I'm not going to claim that they're universal across storytelling or gaming. However, they're useful for us and games like us. So pay attention if you're planning on building something stateful and built on layered micronarratives. Yes, both of you. Keep it Simple, Stupid This is a fine rule for any engineering endeavour. It was brought home to me when I did my first ever bit of complex-structured Echo Bazaar content. That happened to be the Watchful 60-85 content where the player is on the trail of a certain eye-watering alphabet. Now, a lot of people have enjoyed that content, and the alphabet in question continues to be one of the best-loved motifs of Fallen London. But let me tell you something. That content is fragile. Oh it works. Actions are spent, snippets of text are delivered and people get where they're going. But behind the scenes, the scaffolding creaks. Plaster falls on the stagehands and we approach the thing with care in case it comes crashing down. And why? It's too complex. Again, from the player's point of view, it's not really apparent. A bunch of things happen in a fairly sensible order. But there are too many qualities controlling things, too many assumptions about what will happen when. Quality based narrative isn't good at having a series of things that need to happen in order, unless they're controlled by a single quality. When multiple qualities are controlling a story where things need to happen in order, it quickly becomes difficult to read the structure, and unexpected behaviour creeps in. Happily, though, I've learned my lesson. I won't do that again. Promise. Parsimony of Qualities This one is interesting, because it is at once the oldest and the newest of our narrative engineering principles. Very early on in the life of EBZ, Alexis did a lot of jumping and shouting about keeping the number of qualities in any piece of content to a bare minimum. There were some technical and UI reasons to want to do this, but it just makes sense: it keeps things simple for authors, and minimises the number of things players have to remember to make sense of stories. But it has caused a bad habit, which is something we're just realising. We've been using a single quality to do different things in different places. This isn't really parsimony - and it has been causing us problems of consistency and exploitation. Not only do we need to keep the number of qualities down, we need to ensure that they are being used in a way that is consistent whenever a quality appears. There are a few occasions where that still isn't the case, and we might have to do some surgery on those bits of content to bring them in line. Still, it's good to know that we're still learning and still improving. I'll just do one more for now. But it's a juicy one: Show them the Implements Sometimes, we are rather unkind to our poor player characters. We shoot them or drive them mad or cover them in slug-slime. But that's all fairly expected in the two-fisted-romp parts of the game, and we're sure you wouldn't have it any other way. But sometimes, we're really quite unpleasant. Sometimes, we really want to hurt you. In our defence, you asked for it. You came back for more, despite the warnings. Yes, I'm talking about the seeking of a certain name. Anyway, for this sort of content, you expect abuse. And abuse you we will. But here's an interesting thing. If we're making you suffer, you want to know how long you're going to be up on that cross. It's no fun to just be up there and not know when we're going to let you down. So we're making a point in our more robustly unsympathetic content to let you know just how much more of this shit you're going to have to take. We're kind like that, sort of*. We've a few more buckets of this stuff, so I'm sure that a part 2 of this series will be along in a bit. *Not that kind. My initial plan for the end of the Seeking the Name story was to have it cost 1000 Fate and delete the character in question. The others were too concerned with being murdered in their beds to recognise the genius of this.  

In a moment I'm going to talk about Wilmot's End, the first of several content chunks we're releasing to bring a bit more joy into the narrative economy. It does some experimental things, so I want to talk first about experiments. We like to mess about with style in EBZ. As Yasmeen just outlined, we've harvested back some specific practices and techniques that work, but this is still unexplored, though not virgin, territory. And we're here to do interesting things. A couple of areas of interest first. Reuse. We don't just mean grind, although some reuse is grind. Interactive narrative will repeat content. It might repeat it as a room you revisit in traditional parser IF. It might repeat it as ambient remarks in a CRPG, or as a combination of repeat and alteration, as with this charming piece [1]. When it's done straightforwardly, it's just immediate repetition, which is one of the issues with some parts of EBZ. When it's suitably distributed among novel content, or content repeated along different patterns, it can become a leitmotif or a security blanket or an underlying rhythm or a chorus or a navigational tool. One of our players[2] once said that us adding a new branch to a familiar Opportunity card was like coming back to a well-loved café and finding there was a new piece of art in the corner. The second person. It's the default mode for any sort of interactive narrative: you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, and so forth. I'm not, I'm talking to you. He's not, she's not, those are someone else's adventures. We're not, unless it's one of those jolly confiding games of the mid '90s, or unless the Many are talking to you again. Don't listen to the Many. [SPOILERS next. You have been warned.] Of course this is partly a natural fit, and partly just convention, and either way it's good to mix it up. Yasmeen did this in the Stormy-Eyed layer on the Dreams, using the first person. (If you want to try this, pursue the dreams of What the Thunder Said... you'll see the signposts before you find the way in). The effect is quite striking, especially when it shows up unexpectedly in other places like the Royal Bethlehem Hotel or the House of Chimes. We want a particular effect of immediacy, urgency and slightly unwelcome intimacy, which wouldn't work without that shifting register. (More Stormy-Eyed is on the way, incidentally...) We use the first person in the tomb-colonies as well. This was a very early experiment of mine: I wanted to switch to epistolary mode to give a sense of time and distance, because the actual transition from London to the colonies and back is only a piece of text and a standard location transition. This was way back in the first beta, long before At Sea, long before the complex of alternate and interstitial spaces we use for the places around and between and beneath the Neath. I also wanted to do something consonant with repetition in the op cards: you're back in the tomb-colonies again, desperate to return to London, and once again you're surrounded by these sad revolting people doing the same sad revolting things... the feedback has been that the intended effect doesn't quite work. People like the epistolary effect initially, but you can't do much in the tomb-colonies, and successfully simulating a tedious context by establishing tedium each time... formally it works, but practically it would be better to leaven the boredom with other effects. I'll go back to it some day. In my copious spare time. But the reason I've come in is Wilmot's End. I won't spoil the stylistic effect up front, but ever since the first, groping, ladder-structure patterns on EBZ, we've been searching for ways to make reuse more than repetition: to write (as Yas said last time) with an eye to rewarding second and further visits, to allowing players to determine their own underspecified, coalescent personal narratives. I gave Nige a difficult and experimental brief here, and I think he's done a masterful and memorable job. It's all about espionage: clandestine meetings , characters with agendas, clues that might make sense eventually, answers without questions. Inevitably, I think this is the first significant appearance of tobacco in Echo Bazaar. Well, go see. Shadowy 110+ and wait for an opportunity card. You may even get some Bazaar components out of it. Note that this is only the first part. Enjoy, and as always let us know what you think on the feedback forums. [1] Incidentally Ian Millington, our co-founder on Varytale, is also the creator of the framework this was built on -  http://undum.com/, a light, slick clientside framework for interactive stories with some ideas drawn from EBZ and quality-based narrative. Take a look. [2] I forget who! feel free to claim credit in the comments.

I'm off to Canada tomorrow to talk to Bioware. As anyone who's been trapped in a lift with me recently can tell you. But I'm also doing some more public talks in the next month or so: GameHorizon conference in Newcastle, 28th June - 'Narrative architecture: managing complex stories' London Transmedia, 5th July - The Looming Menace That Is Varytale Develop in Brighton, 19th July - panel on 'New Stories, New Platforms' If you're there, say hi. And as a bit of self-discipline to discourage my wilder flights of unnecessary vocabulary, we are thoughtfully releasing the internal FBG pastime below. With a big old smiley:   Feel free to use it with any discussion, interview, talk about story in games. And use it as a rod to beat me with, by all means. --- THE GAME NARRATIVES DRINKING GAME when someone says 'unique' - take a sip when someone says 'infancy' - take a sip, unless the conversation happened before 1984 when someone says 'evolving' - take a sip when someone says 'mature' or 'maturity' - take a sip (take a shot if they use  both in the same sentence) 'medium' or 'media' - take a sip (take a shot if they say 'mediums') 'deep', 'immersive' or 'engaging' - take a sip mentions 'techniques' without describing any - take a sip says something generic about the strengths and weaknesses of games as a medium, without specifying any - take a shot says something generic about the challenges of the medium, without specifying any - take a shot says something general about the importance of unifying game and story - take a shot, but in a narrative way says we need to provoke an emotional response - take a shot is wistful about the 90s - take a shot complains about how graphics aren't everything - take a shot explains how better graphics mean better stories - take a shot complains that players / reviewers / developers are Philistines - take a shot, but first add a cherry compares games to early movies - take a shot points out games shouldn't be trying to emulate movies - take a shot complains about cut-scenes - take a shot. (If the speaker's game nevertheless ever takes control away from you and makes you sit through an in-engine cut-scene where you can just wobble your field of view a bit, then ask someone to hit you in the face with a golf club) says 'gaming's Citizen Kane' - take a shot says 'gaming's Citizen Kane', but ironically - take a sip actually says something specific about what made Citizen Kane significant - pass your drink to the left says 'from the beginning of time' or 'from the beginning of human history' or 'our ancestors' or 'stories around the campfire' - finish the bottle

[One in an intermittent series of posts about internal FBG terminology. Partly because we use these terms in the wider world sometimes, partly because it might have more general implications... partly because it's a good way to get my thoughts straight.] This follows on from the post in which I explained, to my own satisfaction at least, how trees / graphs aren't always the best way to manage your interactive story. Short version: trees are intuitively comprehensible, but fragile. Rivers are more robust, especially in a collaborative story, and allow players to decide in which order they want to make their decisions. Some folk suggested on blog comments or Twitter that the difference between trees and rivers is one of scale: that if you look at a river close enough, it's all trees. Floating in the current, perhaps. Well, *ish*. Certainly, if you break down a story far enough, the atoms are decisions. A storylet in Jonathan, the engine behind Echo Bazaar, is a single-level tree with a root, branches and leaves. Trying to use these as the basis for planning is (to over-use a metaphor I often over-use) like dumping out a bucket of mosaic tiles on a table and trying to assemble them without a guide. Sometimes (as with the later stages of the Jewel-Thief romance in Veilgarden) we do fit them together into a larger tree structure: sometimes, as with the earlier stages of that same romance, it's not a tree at all. It's just mosaic tiles floating downstream, loosely arranged in a constellation of things which are generally constrained to happen together. (In Varytale, as it happens, a storylet *can* have a more complex structure: we can branch and branch again, rather than needing to build a tree out of separate atoms. You could put a whole CYOA inside a single Varytale storylet if you really wanted. But you really shouldn't.) Anyway: I wanted to talk about different kinds of event. Compare 'a monkey punched me, bruising me badly' and 'my beloved monkey punched me so hard that I decided we part ways.' The first is always an explicit element in the story... the second may or may not be. Perhaps it's a scripted story event, but perhaps you simply get an unlucky Monkey Response roll and decide to sell the little villain, in which case it's an implicit story event, one you've decided the relevance of yourself. Implicit story events are the gold nuggets in the narrative mine. They're marvellously powerful because you've co-opted the player into the story; they're necessarily rare because they have to be heavily outnumbered by explicit story events. We're talking here about moments of imaginative freedom in a curated story, not a drama workshop or a tabletop RPG[1]. Implicit story moments are like a spark jumping between two explicit events. You can't guarantee them. Perhaps it's just going to be a gap. But you can work to induce them. This is what we mean when we talk about fires in the desert and reflective choice. A river story is a semi-directed montage. All narrative, even interactive narrative, is edited and arranged, but if you compare a traditional game to a film [2], or a texty game like EBZ to a book, there's always less directorial control over pacing. In a tree, you get substantially more control - that's one of the advantages - but fewer gaps and, consequently, fewer sparks. So river stories, as I said last post, are more robust in the writing, but they can also be more robust in the reading. By keeping the story moments in a more flexible arrangement, and by allowing space for moments of imaginative freedom, you encourage reader commitment and invite the reader to co-operate with you in the suspension of disbelief. If you want explicit story events explicitly glued together, a tree is a better choice, but it limits engagement: powerful, but brittle. We could go a step further than all this, to city lights. But I'll talk about that next time.   [1] And both those things are fine. They're just not what I'm interested in here. [2] It's fashionable to point up the differences between film and AAA games, and certainly the Michael Bay style of blockbuster has been a pernicious influence. But AAA games *are* more like film/TV than paintings novels sculpture theatre architecture... you can argue this is because they happen to happen on a screen, but then you'd also have to concede that their location on a screen for the last forty years has influenced the techniques and terms we use: cut scene, camera, bullet time.  

Long-time readers of this blog, or people who've been at any talk we've given in the last two years, will have heard us talk about Echo Bazaar as 'a research project'. Or perhaps more accurately, 'one of those enthusiastic Victorian expeditions where they'd send someone off to discover the source of the Nile and they'd come back with a suitcase full of interesting spiders.' In general terms, EBZ's purpose has been to find new ways to tell stories, and how to build games with an emphasis on text: games for readers. In specific terms, we've been working towards something that's sometimes been called Prisoner's Honey and sometimes been called Lighthouse but is now Varytale . Varytale is an open platform for building interactive books using EBZ-like mechanics. It's not built on the actual Echo Bazaar platform: it's built on something like that platform, squared, on steroids, and made of pure liquid sex. On fire. A lake of fire. Surfing on the lake of fire. In frightening Hawaiian shorts. Writ all over with quotations from Beckett and Shakespeare. To the tune of the Trashmen's Surfin' Bird. This was way beyond our resources, so we've partnered with some very talented technical entrepreneurs. How open is open? We're curating Varytale carefully to begin with, so we're initially limiting access by invitation to chosen writers with a proven track record. But ultimately, we're planning wider access. If you're interested, let us know at www.varytale.com .  Isn't Echo Bazaar, like, half a million words? And you want multiple Echo Bazaars? We reckon a million words by the time we're done, but no, most varytales will be much, much smaller. Short stories or even poems compared to EBZ's colossal doorstop tetralogy. Does this mean you're giving up on EBZ? God, no. We're still getting useful spiders from EBZ, we expect Varytale to feed usefully back into the EBZ project, and we're keen to see these stories through to the end. Speaking of which, watch for the Hound of Heaven and the War of Assassins... Tell me more! We will. Soon. When is it launching? Watch this space.