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 (amongst other things) about genre, reception, intertextuality and the creation of landscape architecture in the imagination.
That sounds terribly pompous. Erm, it's much more of a general approach than a way into the actual writing. I don't sit down and think, 'Right. I'm going to do a story about what happens when a Grubby Urchin gets hold of a trumpet. What tropes shall I weave in and how might the player understand which genre(s) the story may be attempting to emulate or redefine or subvert?' That would be stupid. (And that stuff's out of our hands, anyway.) What I mean is that I don't see what we do with Echo Bazaar narratively as being limited by its status as an in-browser casual social game. The player doesn't need to pay attention to it for more than a few minutes a day if they don't want to, but we can be as ambitious with our vision for the story as we like.
I'm not saying we're writing Ulysses bit-by-bit here, but it's not hubristic to say that EB contains entirely valid responses to and arguments about, for example, Victorian enthusiasm for Gothic literature, TS Eliot, contemporary film portrayals of serial killers, misconceptions about Victorian morality, ideas about what Freud might have meant, constructions of alternate histories, blah blah, &c, blah. And when we sit down to advance the story, be it writing little individual plots or long narrative arcs or weaving in bits of the overarching secrets about Fallen London that you don't know about yet, we're working from within a cultural and intertextual context that is rich and complex. It doesn't have to be conscious, and it probably shouldn't ever be too self-
conscious, but it can't help but inform the writing and give it depth, not any more. We're stuck with it now. It might be barely visible in an individual storylet about robbing the lead from a church roof and nearly getting eaten by a spider in the process, or flirting outrageously with an impoverished artist in order to annoy a social-climbing rival, but I think it works a bit like paint; thicker and darker in places, more transparent and barely-there in others, but there's always colour.
Nigel's dropped tantalising hints about the Cheesemonger. Me, I'd like to say to those of you that are wondering where your nightmares might be leading you - please keep dreaming. You'll find out.