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[This is the second of two posts about King of Dragon Pass. We don't have any kind of business relationship with A Sharp, who make KoDP - we just really like the game. Below, Chris explains why.] When King of Dragon Pass was released on the PC and Mac in 1999 the gaming press didn’t know what to make of it. A genre-blind title from an independent developer, spurning 3D graphics for text and pictures, and set in one of the most bewildering worlds ever forged in the white-hot nerd-fires of tabletop roleplaying? You could practically hear the shrug. It’s a shame, because it’s an exceptional game and an even more impressive achievement of narrative engineering. It sounds like it’s going to be a strategy game. You steer a clan of Heortlings – people something like Celts and something like Anglo-Saxons – from newly-arrived stick-pickers to tribal kings. You’ll tell them what to build, who to befriend, when to raid and how to pray, while behind the scenes whirrs a merciless simulation of an iron age society. This is a game that tracks your herds down to the last sheep, which is different, do you see, to your last cow and also to your last pig, because in KoDP they are entirely separate resources. Its attention to detail could be terrifying, but it’s not – it’s texture. Because most of your time in-game is spent on screens like this one:  Every other turn or so, you are confronted by an event like this: a slice of story and a set of responses, like an Echo Bazaar storylet. The art is beautiful. The text is clean and urgent, deftly distilling conflict into a single gripping decision. Each choice has its consequences and can trigger follow-up events, with some stories unfolding over decades of play. The temptation in strategy games is to treat everything as a resource. Effective strategic play means taking a dispassionate, high-level view of events. But King of Dragon Pass’ parade of feuds, venality, romance and nobility keep your feet firmly planted in the soil of Dragon Pass. You’ve no choice but to roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty in the day-to-day troubles of the clan. While Echo Bazaar saves proper names for a select few characters, preferring the plausible deniability of ‘the Melancholy Curate’ and ‘the Dashing Jewel-Thief’, King of Dragon Pass names everyone and everything: ‘Thanes and priests from the Tree Brother clan come to accuse one of your young carls, Yanioth, of secret murder. “We found our revered god-talker Brenna dead in the temple, a dagger in her back.”’ The game never misses an opportunity to remind you that a clan is composed of people, not statistics. Take a look at the bottom of this screen: Those faces are your clan ring: its chief and advisors. They’re present on every screen in the game; click on one and they’ll talk to you about whatever you’re looking at, their advice based on their skills, their position, and their patron god. Brilliantly, they never, ever agree. As time passes the faces age and eventually disappear, to be replaced by younger clan members who bring their with them their own voices. King of Dragon Pass' other great strength is its setting. Glorantha is never less than strange. This is a world whose physics are literally myth. When you choose your clan’s ancestral enemy at the start of play, one of your options is winter itself. Key to your long-term success is heroquesting: sending one of your clan ring into the spirit-world to re-enact the myths that made the world. The risks are vast; the rewards irresistible. You’ll walk through the underworld and see its horrors, wage war against the chaos creatures that broke the world and – if you’re clever and lucky – return from the god-realm with treasures. Glorantha never stops surprising, charming and scaring you. The game treats its world with absolute conviction, refusing to suggest it’s anything but a real place. You are never permitted even a peek at the maths busy beneath its skin, and are only given information that would be observable to your clan. You can know you have 159 hides of pasturage because you can send some poor housecarl out in the snow to measure it with a stick, but if you want to know about the mood of your weaponthanes you’re limited to a rough description like “resolute” or “unhappy”. Its focus on people and the world they live in is what elevates King of Dragon Pass from an empire-building game to an enginethat creates satisfying story. Reading back over your clan's saga feels like reading an actual history, only with more dinosaurs and the occasional creature with a hand for a head, because Glorantha is funny like that. No other game has so effectively combined simulation and narrative. King of Dragon Pass has recently been polished, streamlined, and rereleased on iOS devices, a medium that fits its turn-based gameplay and morsels of narrative better than a big old PC ever did. Popping it out to play a few seasons on a commute is entirely satisfying, and when you’re done you get the unlikely pleasure of slipping a whole world into your pocket. It's not a casual game, nor an easy one, but it rewards the investment you put in. You can find it on the App Store, or get more information here.

[This is a guest post by David Dunham of A Sharp.  David has been creating digital games since he was in 7th grade, as well as a variety of other software. He's written about revising his most ambitious game at http://kingofdragonpass.blogspot.com/ .King of Dragon Pass was an important early influence on Echo Bazaar and our other work: so we thought it would be nice for him to cross-post about it here.] Humans seem to be hardwired to play and to appreciate stories. So why do so few digital games combine the two? Many, if not most, games do contain stories. But the two seldom meet. The classic issue is that play grinds to a halt and you get to see a cut scene advance the story. (Sometimes it’s the other way around, and game play keeps interrupting a story.) Nothing says that story and game play can’t be integrated. The early days of digital gaming were different, and in fact a game from the 1970s, Adventure, gave its name to a whole genre of story games. These were originally purely text, though eventually they gained a point-and-click interface. The most common game mechanic is puzzle solving. For whatever reason, this style of game hasn’t had much of a commercial market (at least in the US) for almost 20 years. There’s still a lively interactive fiction scene (I follow it at a distance via http://emshort.wordpress.com/) but not a lot of commercial activity. One reason games tend not to have integrated stories is that games are essentially about choices. Story choices typically end up with narrative branches. Do you insult the daughter of the rival house, or try to woo her? Romeo and Juliet: the Game would obviously have two very different stories. Perhaps the two options would somehow combine back into a single point, but the more decisions, the more branches. In this style of game, you need to create a lot of content that a player will never see. And unlike the early days, commercial games need art as well as text, which can be a big expense. So branches cost both in assets and testing (you may need to test every possible permutation through the branches). The rise in art production cost is probably one reason for the commercial demise of the adventure genre. But people respond to stories, and designers kept trying to figure out how to incorporate them into game play. One game that stood out to me was Castles, which was essentially a resource management game that occasionally slipped in small story situations. Your workers are terrified by rumors of a werewolf. Do you divert warriors to hunt it, send for a priest, or just bribe them to keep working? I don’t recall that these had a big impact on the game, and they may have only been interactive cut scenes which used text. But for me they were the high part of the game. And they led me to create one of only two games I’m aware of that are narrative-driven (outside the adventure genre). King of Dragon Pass - http://a-sharp.com/kodp - essentially has an underlying resource management game which serves as the skeleton that supports the stories. You play a clan of perhaps a thousand people, interacting with a fantasy world (the detailed, mythic world of Glorantha). Like typical strategy games (as they’re usually called), you have a number of resources to manage, and a technology track (in this case magic) to advance. Play consists of alternating resource-related actions, and responding to story scenes. These consist of an illustrated situation, usually with five choices. These may lead to secondary choices, but still within the same situation, until it’s resolved. Resolution may have specific later consequences, but typically influences the economic model of the resource management game. Parts of the story and setting are actually revealed through your advisors, individuals you pick to sit on the clan council. While you can lose the game through poor resource management (or bad luck), you can only win by story choices, so I think it’s reasonable to say the stories are key. (Strategy games are traditionally won by conquering your neighbors). The second narrative game is quite different. Echo Bazaar is essentially a story game built on the chassis of what on computer is called a role-playing game. You play a single character interacting with a fantasy world (the charming alternate Victorian city Fallen London). Like typical RPGs, your character has a number of statistics which your goal is to increase. Uniquely, the way you do that is by picking a story let (either one randomly available or one which your statistics allows you to play), and making a story choice. The consequence is a change in one or more statistic. It’s essentially a pure text game (though there are small, somewhat generic illustrations). The game is played online with a browser, and by design limits how much you can play in a day. (You can buy additional turns, as well as new story options, with real money.)  Interestingly, the two games have many design elements in common, probably because both wanted to be narratively sophisticated without running into the branching pitfall. Both track a number of unusual statistics designed to support storytelling. King of Dragon Pass tracks relations with other clans in great detail, while Echo Bazaar tracks your relation with individuals and organizations. Both games make small stories the basic unit: King of Dragon Pass’s scenes, and Echo Bazaar’s storylets. In both games, a larger story emerges depending on the choices you make in dozens of smaller ones, even if they seem at first unrelated. And the smaller stories are designed to be reused. In King of Dragon Pass, the context is almost always different, and some factors are random. In Echo Bazaar, new options may be available, or you may want to experiment with different outcome. Both games also reuse art to keep costs down. And neither game shies away from having true branches for narrative effect (though they’re rare). Occasionally longer stories are simply broken into pieces which are revealed only after much game play. Both games also tend to have stories which aren’t entirely black or white. The two games have actually influenced each other. Alexis Kennedy has said that King of Dragon Pass was an influence on Echo Bazaar. And after playing Echo Bazaar, I realized that you could have a worthy narrative without as much investment in complexity (the new scenes in King of Dragon Pass 2.0 tend to be much simpler than the original ones). Both games are fantasy games. This may simply be a coincidence, since fantasy is a staple of digital games. But both have richly detailed fantasy settings that get revealed as you play. Since both games use small episodes, they’re both easy to play if you have only small amounts of time (your browser is probably always open, and your iPhone is always in your pocket). And each player will construct their own overarching narrative by how they play through the episodes. At the same time, the elements are common, so players can discuss them. “What did you do with the Cheesemonger?” “Did Kallyr get to be queen?” The games differ in a few ways that aren’t related to their underlying genres. Most obvious is that Echo Bazaar exposes all statistics, and King of Dragon Pass is opaque. Arguably the game statistics break the fantasy, and the opacity can be maddening to players trying to learn how the game should be played. King of Dragon Pass also has a lot more random factors. I think this is driven in large part by their monetization models. Echo Bazaar is a free game, but makes money by selling specific game play. You had better have a really good idea of what you’re going to get before you shell out money, so everything is explicit. King of Dragon Pass was originally sold in a box and now on the App Store, so you’ve already paid all you’re going to. So the design goal of showing only values that would be apparent to game characters in an uncertain world makes sense. (The game compensates by explaining things in a detailed manual.) The most important similarity between these two games is that both succeed at being true narrative games. Hopefully they can inspire future games, and I’ll get to play more stories!    

[This is 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. This post is also about my ambivalent relationship with the tree as a model for how to think about interactive stories.] Trees (directed graphs, flow charts, all their cousins) are a natural way to think about stories. You make a choice, you make another choice, you make another choice... you reach an ending. You can trace your path back clearly from your final ending to the beginning. If you've ever tried to conceptualise or visualise a story from a height, you probably drew a tree. But only a minority of interactive stories (eg hypertext narrative,  the classic choose-your-own-adventure style of gamebook without the refinements of later gamebooks) are really just tree stories. Partly this is the notorious issue of combinatorial explosion: trees can't just keep branching indefinitely for the length of the story! So we merge some branches back into others (which only feels like a cheat when you notice), or we create some sort of state (Stamina, Dark Side Points, inventory items, ... Connected: the Duchess) that decisions can affect. Even quite tree-ish narratives are rarely pure tree. But partly it's because most interactive narratives are different in an important respect: you have a choice about when you make choices.  This is the fundamental property of a river story. In a pure tree, each choice is followed by a predetermined next. In a river, you have some degree of control over when you make what choice. It might mean that you're navigating a textual space where the use of verbs has some geographic texture, as in traditional IF, or exploring a map full of canned encounters, as in a classic CRPG. It might mean that you're picking from a menu of storylets, as in Echo Bazaar. This fundamental property often gets called 'non-linearity' in game reviews, and that often leads to disappointment. When we call something non-linear we suggest that it's not a story in the traditional sense, because a story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is very hard to make satisfying stories, interactive or not, that don't have a definite beginning, middle, and end. It's arguably not impossible: just difficult and not necessarily worth the effort.  The river, then, has a beginning, middle and end. The end may be multiple endings, but you're basically being funnelled through a similar landscape to everyone else on the river. That's all right. Your experience can be fundamentally different, just as the experience of a hundred people travelling the same ten miles of road can have be different, depending on who tripped over what donkey or who met their lover when or who was robbed and who hid behind a boulder. And your internal experience may be much more radically different, especially where the story is something that allows for interpretation. This is a significant tension at the heart of interactive stories. A story is a series of things happening in a particular order: it's the order that makes it a story. But in a riverine interactive story, you choose what order things happen in! Tree stories resolve this by not allowing you to decide the order. River stories keep their beginning, middle and end, and they also keep floes or islands of relative inflexibility in the middle. Of course I'm conflating different kinds of event here, I know: 'a wandering monkey punched me for five hit points of damage', 'I remember a monkey punching me in my youth', 'my beloved monkey punched me, ending our friendship forever', 'the inevitable monkey punch occurred in the pantry rather than the parlour', and so forth. Next time I'll talk about that, about internal experiences, and about city lights.    

Failbetter Games' own choices for EBZ casting [More]

In Summary: Welcome to Part Two. New inventory slots are now live. If you have Dangerous, Persuasive, Shadowy or Watchful qualities of 100+, watch for opportunities to meet the Ambitious Barrister and embark upon your journey to greatness. Ships! Home Comforts! Constant Companions! A few of these are live now, and many more will be available in the near future.   Welcome to Part Two of Echo Bazaar. We've just released a chunk of content for players at or near the content caps, including access to those new inventory slots that we teased you about a little while back. Look out for opportunities to meet the Ambitious Barrister: she will guide you to future greatness. If you're not quite so far on in the game, these things will lie in your future. Ships, home comforts and such are intended for players who have played through Part One of the game - the content that's been released to date. So you may have a chunk of delicious story between you and becoming a Person of Some Importance.  Of course, if you have a ship, you'll want somewhere to steam to. One of the important changes in Part 2 of Echo Bazaar is that more locations outside London will be available. They're not quite yet in the game, but be prepared for travels to the Iron Republic, the Presbyterate, the Carnelian Coast and other storied and possibly sweaty places. One of the issues holding up the Ambition storylines was that we didn't have a sensible way to get players to these exotic locations. They'll be along soon. But in the meantime, you can decide which ship you'd like - and there are some choice vessels available. Some of the new items, like membership of the Young Stags' Club, come with bumps to qualities like Persuasive and Watchful. But not all of them do. Notably, ships and transports are lacking these changes. So, why would you want them? Well, you'll need a ship to travel to far lands, of course. But each new item unlocks some content. This will often be a single opportunity, but may be more. And who wouldn't want a Clay Sedan Chair or a Voluminous Library? Impress your friends! Balance entire rooms on your mantelpiece! You'll not find any of these new items at the usual shops in the Bazaar. Not a one of them. We're introducing a new way of obtaining items, which for the moment we'll call 'Narrative Economics'. Rather than just hitting the 'buy' button, these items all have some sort of story attached to them. So there will always be a tale to tell of how you came by your ship or how you romanced your constant companion. The new items will require you to pick up the odd thing - a legal document, perhaps, or some labour. Perhaps the occasional bribe or some published research. Once you have finished the Person of Some Importance storyline, the Bazaar Sidestreets will be open for your perusal. Head there for your shopping needs when acquiring these new marvels. There are some choices to be made, too. You may have as many home comforts, affiliations and transports as you like. But you may only have one club, one ship and naturally one constant companion. Well, one at a time. Clubs can be left, ships can be sold and constant companions can be abandoned if you're that sort. Today, we are releasing only a small fraction of the wonders that can be acquired through the Narrative Economic system. Further wonders will become available in the near future. What marvels will grace your home? And which of the companions will you make your own?

The Profile, Journal, Scrapbook and Mantelpiece are now live. Click [Profile] from your Me page, visit any tweeted / Facebooked link, or go to http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com/profile/[charactername] .  As trailed elsewhere, this is like totally beta, dude. We've already spotted some bugs (including, aggravatingly, paging disappearing) which we're on. Do report bugs to ebbugs@failbettergames.com, and please go crazy with suggestions - but the best place for suggestions is feedback.echobazaar.failbettergames.com, not the blog comments where they may languish unseen. Protip: if you see a player with Mr Eaten's Name on their Mantelpiece, don't invite them over for tea.

Echo Bazaar tells stories to its players, but it also encourages its players to tell their own. Some of these are tiny and ephemeral, like the explanation you give yourself for how event x and event y stitch together. Some of these stories are shared and implicit, like the narrative that emerges out of social actions (he kept beating me at chess, so I snared him in my web of gossip!) Some of these are barely connected to the game, like the elaborate fan-fiction communities we've spawned. All this creative activity fascinates me - even when it's creative activity that never leaves the player's head. I love the idea of leaving gaps in the story for the player to make their own, or providing what Henry Jenkins calls a 'narrative architecture' that encourages the telling of stories.[1] Alice talked about something semi-related in this post. Anyway, the challenge is to give everyone enough of a story that they don't feel they've been given a pen and a paper and told to make their own entertainment. Very soon now, we're taking a step towards this with the launch of player Profiles: with the Journal, the Mantelpiece and the Scrapbook. Profiles first. We'll have a handsome new page you can link to that shows off your qualities and clothing and lodgings and whatnot. We'd like to thank the lovely Liam from http://www.chaoticcreations.co.uk , who did the design work on this for yuks and recognition. Recognise him. Journals. Right now, when you send an echo through Facebook or Twitter, it's as much viral as social. People do creative things with them, people like sharing content, but there's not a lot you can do. From now on, those links will go to the profile, where your journal records all the echoes you've ever done (and allows you to delete the ones you didn't mean). Want to comment on mysteries, tell a story, share theories, suggest themed bundles of content? We expect people to use the journal to do all this stuff. Mantelpieces and Scrapbooks. These are inspired by a suggestion by Emily Short in a review of Fable 2 years ago: "But what I really found myself wanting, as a player [...] was a way to mark events that I experienced, to tag them for later retelling and give some indication of what they meant to me. I wanted to be able to remember the catastrophe with my first, doomed lover. I wanted to be able to retell that story [...] Over the course of the game, I wanted to develop an inventory of the events that were most important to me and use them to reveal, explain, and persuade." We're not doing quite what Em was talking about, but we are beginning to allow you to signal which bits of the game are most important to you. You'll be able to display any one Item on your Mantelpiece and any one Quality in your Scrapbook, and they'll appear on your profile. What effect does this have? Nothing in-game. It's a choice that defines the stories you want to share. Perhaps you'll put your biggest weapon on the Mantelpiece. Perhaps you'll show off your Dubious Scarlet Stockings that you haven't worn in months, because they remind you of Veilgarden. Perhaps you'll want to boast about how high you've got your Intimate of Devils: perhaps you'll put Marked by the Eater of Chains in your Scrapbook, and if anyone wants to know why it's so important, they'll have to ask you for the story. (And remember this teaser post ? There's a reason we're planning to release both these things close together.) All this is very much a first pass at the final functionality. As so often, we're being experimental here, and we're really looking forward to your feedback. Coming, as they say, soon.   [1] confusingly, when we say 'narrative architecture' we mean something completely different, but Mr Jenkins is always a good read. Props to Josh Diaz for pointing me in this direction.  

Transmedia storytelling, Felicia Day and Dragon Age. [More]

We are accustomed to the fact that people we saw alive yesterday are still alive today. We remember the living and the recently dead with equal force. Sometimes it's hard to believe that the past is not a locked room that you could open if you just had the right key. You may have seen the trailer for Dead Island, Techland's upcoming zombie game ( http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2011/02/16/the-best-three-minute-zombie-movie-youve-ever-seen ). My has it got a reaction. The reaction breaks down mostly into (a) damn me that's effective. (b) damn me that's well-produced, cheap and manipulative. And tasteless. At Failbetter Games we don't do video or animation. We barely do moving images. We're all about the full-contact text. But that doesn't mean we *object* to any of these things. When I saw the trailer today, it knocked me squarely into category (a), and a number of folk whose opinions I respect, like the estimable @jurieongames, into category (b). Spoilers below as to why, so watch it first if you don't mind possible trauma. A little girl dies in slow motion; there's sad music. That's enough to get softies like me tearing up on a good day, and it justly puts it in the dock for manipulativeness. (If like me you have a small daughter, you're automatically 50% more susceptible to these things.)I don't think that's the point, though, I think it just provides the necessary emotional momentum to go on and make the point. The point is that we are accustomed to children turning into zombies and, on a bad day, biting their parents. That's the whole zombie drama in a nutshell: the hostility of the familiar, the loss of those still present. And the trailer explicitly references zombie games as well as films - the sunny holiday location from DR2, the hotel from L4D2 - so you see all that ridiculous gore in the context of a gaming playground. It takes a shake of the bottle to make those familiar elements settle into a different pattern, and Techland have used the shuffling of events to that end. What particularly gets to me is the reversed sequence of the father rescuing his daughter, reconfigured into release and abandonment. You can do this in any medium, and the trailer isn't even interactive, but the medium that's best at this kind of narrative remix is games. That's why the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up, one by one.

It's not hard to draw a line from Echo Bazaar back to adventure gamebooks. You know the stuff: "You are in the wizards tower. If you go down the clear, well-lit passage that certainly doesn't contain inescapable death-traps of any sort, turn to paragraph 278 you gullible fool. If you go through the door with the cheerful music behind it, turn to paragraph 40 and be prepared to throw the book against the wall in frustration." There are those of us with fingers worn thin - thin! - from spending hours reading with them lodged in a previous page as insurance should, say, turning left instead of right prove to have been the act of a reckless lunatic. Many of the form's most interesting experiments came from the minds of one or both of Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson. They and their collaborators played with making a solo hobby social, giving us co-operative gamebooks and competitive ones. They let us command armies. They made us kings. And in the mid-90s, right at the end of the hobby's craze, they released a series of books called Fabled Lands. Fabled Lands can be imagined as a primordial MMO, one without the 'M', the other 'M', or the 'O'. Rather than leading you through a pre-determined story, they laid a world full of trouble at your feet and expected you to dig in. Each book covered a different region, like Sokara - torn by civil war - or Golnir and its cruel fairytales. When your wandering feet took you across a border you just swapped your current book for the next one and played on. Connections between the books were frequent. A good deed in one would be repaid in another, or a map you found would lead to a treasure halfway across the world.  And they made that world your plaything. Adventuring was just one of the things you did in it. Go shopping. Become an initiate in a temple. Make offerings to win the blessings of the gods, or secure resurrection arrangements to insure against death. Buy a house. Buy another one. Buy twelve. Keep your spare stuff in them so that when disaster strikes (and disaster will strike) you've got a stash to fall back on. Buy a ship. Fill its hold with commodities to trade at far-off ports, or explore the furthest isles of the sea. Invest in the markets. Some of this peripheral activity was aspirational (who doesn't want to own a ship?) but all of it helped convince the reader that the Fabled Lands depicted a robust world; a place worthy of your time. It could stand up to a little poking. Actually, a lot of poking. The Fabled Lands remembered what you did. Through a system of checkboxes and codewords, the changes you made to the world were recorded. Free a wizard from his imprisonment and you could visit him at his home to call in the favour. Restore the true heir to the throne of a land torn by civil war, and see the character of his city change. Your actions had consequences. The paragraphs were short and punchy. The locations were vivid. The quests were inventive. The art focused on the places you travelled through, again contributing to that sense of a believable world. The whole series was illustrated by the incredible Russ Nicholson: the gentleman who illustrated The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and in so doing fixed what fantasy looked like in a generation of 10-year old brains.  A fair amount of that probably sounds familiar to our Delicious Friends. While Fabled Lands might not have been a massive influence on Echo Bazaar, for those of us who played it its lessons are lodged deep in our brains. There's a hundred other clever little things to talk about. How custom encounter tables are used to keep travel surprising and give every corner of the map its own flavour. The way all conflicts allow you at least two chances of success. The careful balance of risk and reward. The books stand up today as a remarkable achievement of interactive fiction. There’s nothing else quite like them. Sadly, though twelve Fabled Lands books were planned, only six were ever published. We never got to visit the City in the Clouds or the Underworld (so tantalisingly glimpsed when you sailed your ship off the edge of the world). Lately though, the first four books have been rereleased and are available through Amazon: The War-Torn Kingdom, Cities of Gold and Glory, Over the Blood-Dark Sea, and The Plains of Howling Darkness. There are murmurings that the Fabled Lands aren't done with us yet. Handy links and further information can be found on the Fabled Lands blog.