Wordplay
The year’s best ebooks are games.
I work in digital publishing and I love what I do. Yet for fun, I “play videogames” as much as I “read books.” This still carries a stigma, as if I’m wasting my time with idle pursuits instead of bettering myself through literature. The fact is, a lot of the books I read are kinda trashy, but most of the games I play are pretty good.
I like to play videogames and read books, but more than that, I like to play videogames that are like books. As a little girl in the 1980s, literally the best thing that could happen to me — like, the event that would send me into paroxysms of delight—was the release of a new text-based adventure game. Adventure games were better than dolls, which I hated, or sports, which I sucked at, or movies or books, which were fine but clearly legacy forms of entertainment that, at age 11 or so, I already regarded as so totally over.
It didn’t actually work out that way, though. For reasons that are better documented elsewhere, text adventures weren’t the future of novels, CD-ROMs weren’t the future of non-fiction, and for a tiresome collection of mundane reasons, the meteoric rise of ebooks hasn’t been accompanied by a flowering of interactive experimentation from traditional authors and publishers.
But quietly, games have been filling that gap.
Versu
Versu (iOS, free with in-game story purchase) is a product of Richard Evans, a respected game developer specializing in artificial intelligence, and Emily Short, one of the most notable authors and programmers in interactive fiction today (and—disclaimer—the author of First Draft of the Revolution, which I sponsored and helped develop).
Edit 2017: Sadly, Versu is no longer available.
Versu is neither strictly game nor ebook: it generates stories procedurally, out of social and conversational rules. Typically you can play as any of the characters in the story, and there is no one desirable outcome. This is the only game engine in which the entire public corpus of work has been written by women.
In one Versu game — a deep dive into one of literature’s most socially awkward encounters—you can play as either participant in the painful scene from Pride and Prejudice in which the hapless Mr. Collins proposes to Elizabeth Bennett. I played as Elizabeth, and it was profoundly satisfying to refuse him not through polite demurral but by stabbing him in the thigh with sewing shears. (Another reviewer tried to be more tactful by simply knitting silently and forever, but Mr. Collins is made of sterner stuff.)
Versu stories feature job interviews threatened by uncomfortable flirting (I guess all games about social encounters devolve into awkwardness), comedies of manners, and unsolved murders. I was most satisfied with the take on Gothic mystery (as in Byron, not Bauhaus). I appreciated its wit and mix of dialogue- and plot-driven story; without some kind of forward momentum, the more conversational pieces tended to stall out for me.
Versu isn’t perfect yet: the game can get stuck in weird dialogue loops, and the conversations aren’t always naturalistic. But this is hard stuff, and any advanced procedurally-generated narrative system is going to be built on stepwise advancements. This is a big step.
James Moore, 2013)
Blackbar
Blackbar (iOS & Android, $2.99) was written by independent Portland, OR developers Neven Mrgan and James Moore. As a game, it is starkly minimalist: there is no splash screen, no saved games, and no hints. It’s all about the text, and that text is set in Courier.
Gamers supposedly hate typing, but typing words is the only input mechanism in Blackbar. The game could just as easily been developed on paper. In many ways, this is a crossword puzzle wrapped in a narrative.
The story is set in a dystopian 1984-esque world of ubiquitous censorship. The gameplay largely consists of decoding redacted text from subversive letters. Like most epistolary stories, the action happens off-screen; the reader is left to fill in missing gaps, both narratively and literally.
The game advances one missive at a time. Some letters are meant just to be read; these move the story forward or provide clues for future puzzles, like cut scenes in big league videogames. Most are redacted, with angry black boxes. Your job is to guess the missing words, and ultimately to restore hope for those who are resisting government censorship. Best of ■■■■!
I haven’t finished the story yet: it’s easy to get stuck, and the spartan UI doesn’t exactly call one back irresistibly. But I find myself admiring the restraint in the game design, and in many ways it’s classic interactive fiction: a good genre story gated by a series of puzzles that the reader must solve to advance the narrative. It’s a formula, but it works, and the game has been a critical and commercial success.
Blackbar would be trivial to implement as an ebook to be “played” in iBooks or Kindle, but few ebook stores support these kinds of works. That’s truly unfortunate, as interactive fiction stories have to compete on price with other game apps, where free or $.99 is the rule. By contrast, the average price of a completely static digital book is $7, a price that’s considered catastrophically low by traditional publishers.
Device6
Device6 (iOS, $3.99) is a stylish, paranoid, James Bond-meets-Dharma-Initiative mystery by Simon Flesser & Magnus Gardebäck of the Swedish game company Simogo.
This is the game that inspired me to write this post. Device6 is the most enjoyable 3 hours of fiction I’ve experienced this year. The game is a watershed moment for text-based interactive storytelling, and raises the bar in writing, coding, and production values. It shames every pundit who’s ever sniffed that multimedia has no place in storytelling. It’s the game I wish I’d written.
It’s plain that this was a labor of love for all involved. There’s attention to detail in every aspect of the game: typography, UI, layout, sound design, and imagery. It opens with a brash and confident title sequence; it’s a revelation if you’ve ever suffered through a book trailer (and if you aren’t in publishing, you likely haven’t). I was delighted when I re-watched the opening after finishing the game because of how cleverly it tells the whole story while revealing nothing to the first-time viewer.
Device6 is told through words, sound, and images—in that order. The soundscapes feel completely integral to the story. They are immersive and non-trivial. There are clues in the game that are only conveyed by sound clips, and the purely atmospheric audio enhances rather than detracts (and sometimes scared the crap out of me).
Fundamentally, though, Device6 is about words. The words bend, and twist, and dᴉlɟ;
walk ↘
down ↓
staircases
and, as in all good stories, don’t always tell the whole truth.
The narrative is divided into chapters. Like many interactive fiction games, it opens with the protagonist awakening in an abandoned facility, the victim of a serious bout of amnesia. It’s a classic scenario because it invites exploration and forbids answers to obvious questions. The player’s goal is always the same: I want to find out who I am, and then get the hell out of here.
As you read, you follow the story wherever it leads. Often that means rotating your device as Anna sneaks around a corner and the text takes a sudden 90° turn. Puzzles are solved by tapping buttons with cryptic labels that subtly (or not so subtly) transform the environment.
Device6 is creepy, and challenging, and most importantly, fun. I’m glad these works are made by gamers. I don’t care that they’re not written by “authors.” I prefer interactive-stories-as-games to hypertext-experimental-narrative because the former approaches the whole endeavor as entertainment, where the latter is concerned with “conveying a sense of spatiality and perspective unique to digitally networked environments.” I will happily pay $3.99 for one of those experiences, and the other makes me want to ■■■■.
I adored Device6. It reminded me why I love this medium, and how much potential there is for craftspeople to make beautiful, thoughtful works. These are games, but they’re also literature. They’re textual, but they’re also fun.
More, please.
