Bletchley Park, 1942. A component from the Bombe machine, used to decode intercepted German messages, has gone missing. One of the cryptographers is waiting to be interviewed, under direst suspicion. Is he stupid enough to have attempted treason? Or is he clever enough to get away?

Available now is a new short interactive story, The Intercept. It’s a culmination of several different ideas, systems and projects that I’ve had floating around for a while. It’s playable online, and also downloadable as an ebook for Kindle devices, using the new inklewriter to ebook conversion we just announced over at inkle. (If you’ve no idea what that means, please take a look at inkle‘s own site).

The Setting

The first thing about The Intercept is the setting – Bletchley Park. This is a stately home in England that was used by the military for code-breaking during WWII. They recruited a team of brilliant, awkward scientists using all manner of baroque tests and competitions (a crossword in the Daily Telegraph was used at point) and here, locked away from the War, this group cracked the “uncrackable” Enigma code and developed the world’s first computer (if you don’t count Babbage’s calculating machine).

This isn’t the first time Bletchley’s appeared in interactive fiction – there’s an Enigma breaking sequence in Graham Nelson’s epic Jigsaw - and it’s a great section, even if it does require the player to actually decode an Engima message. The Intercept is somewhat lower tech – it’s a play-by-choices, and the code-breaking is strictly a metaphor at play, rather than an actual challenge.

The Mechanics

The core interaction in The Intercept is an idea I first tried out in Flaws and rather fell in love with, even though that story doesn’t use it much beyond the shock-value opening.

That game opens:

…and offers the player what I find is quite an intriguing two-dimensional choice –  do you want to save the character, at the risk of being deceitful; or do you want to find out what’s going on in the story, but possibly at the expense of the main character?

I find that in one swift move this knocks away some of the props of interactive storytelling. It says, explicitly, up front, that you aren’t going to see every way this story can pan out, that your choices will matter, and that you’re going to have to do the best you can with the limited information you’ve got. This is not an optimisation problem.

I hope you think that’s as interesting as I do, because The Intercept takes that idea and – more or less – rolls it out into a full-length game, though here the choices are usually “Yes”, “No”, “Lie” and “Evade”. Again, there are trade-offs to be made between what the protagonist knows, and affecting the situation around you. Though in this story, it’s somewhat internalised – the protagonist is admitting things to himself as much as to his interrogator, and those choices of “Lie” and “Evade” are as much instructions to lie to himself, or dodge a truth he doesn’t want to recognise.

Structure

The structure is a bit accretive, with replays adding to your knowledge, a little bit strategic, but since it’s all choice-based with no parser, replay is hopefully not too painful an experience. Underlying this is the metaphor of a cryptogram – the classic method of solution is to guess a correspondence of a letter based on hints and clues, and follow it through until you reach a solution, or a contradiction, in which case you back up and try a different path.

So it’s Make It Good meets Flaws with a bit of the Mulldoon Legacy thrown in.

Inklewriter

It’s also been written in inklewriter, inkle’s free, online web-app for creating branching stories. It’s the longest, heftiest use of the software that I know about, with around thirty variables in a mixture of flags and counters. It tracks some emotional state data, what you’ve done and what you’ve seen, has loops, branches, and text that varies depending on what you’ve seen and done so far.

It was originally written partly as a test-case of our “convert to Kindle” service (built on the Kindliser script that’s up on this site). This works in a slightly bonkers fashion, playing every single possible game, then crunching down and optimising duplicates. The inklewriter version is a little smarter and employs some pre-optimisation, which takes the number of unoptimised compiled pages down to 50,000 from, um, several million. (The final book is a mere 5000 pages long, which compresses to a natty 1.6mb Kindle ebook file. The Kindle itself doesn’t even blink).

Links

For those of you who get this far, here are the “how to play” links over again, so you don’t have to scroll back up.

• Play online
• Download the ebook for Kindle devices

Enjoy!

The problem is this: if we’re tracking what the player chooses, and using that to alter how events play out, then how do we decide when to cause, and how do we decide when to affect?

There’s a conversation going on here – the reader says something, and the author says something back. The best interactive writing matches the author’s reply to the reader’s comment so perfectly it feels like there must be a human being inside the machine, typing furiously away.

But how do we decide who gets to hold the talking stick at any given moment?

You Are Being Watched

To be specific – the project we’re working on tracks a few, emotion-based stats. Are you friendly, or surly? Are you selfish, or generous? Are you hasty, or cautious? When you take decisions early in the story, each of these balances is tipped until we start to get a sense of what kind of character you want to be.

Let’s take the last one as our case study. At the start of the game, you can get up and straight on with your task – or you can take a while, exploring and finding out the groundwork first. That adjusts the stats we track. When you approach the first location in the journey, you can scope it out, or go straight in, and that adjusts the stat again.

Then we use that stat to alter things in the story and the game-world. Do you sense a trap coming in advance of it being sprung? Does the stranger you meet feel inclined to be friendly towards you because you’ve got that kind of face? Does your gut feeling about his trustworthiness match the reality of the situation?

Me vs The World

This is the simplest model of player-tracking: a straight conversation between reader and author. The reader picks their option, and the author adjusts the story to match. Want to be surly? Then every character who meets you will be grumpy. Want to be flirty? Then every character who meets you will like you, except the married ones, who’ll find you oddly threatening. Want to be sneaky? Then everyone who meets you will be surprised to see you.

Every interactive story should have a bit of this – it feels responsive when the game nudges, winks and says, I saw what you did there. But if that’s the only way the player’s choices get used, the results can start to feel a little uncomfortable. After all, if everyone in this world hates me, and I hate them, why do I keep getting the option to give them flowers? (Even if, when I do, they throw them back in my face).

In the real world, it’s true that we can change our mode of being on any day we decide to, if we try hard enough. But in a story, characters are not allowed to do that. They have to be true to themselves; whatever that might mean.

So shouldn’t we, at some point, be locking down the options the player gets as well? If we’ve decided the player is a hasty kind of player, shouldn’t we stop offering them cautious options? If they’re a friendly player, shouldn’t we take away the option to be miserable and rude?

If we don’t, we get something a bit like the LA Noire problem, in which the detective flips psychopathically from being polite and gentle, to furiously interrogating, perfectly innocent bereaved housewives — with somewhat comical results, (not to mention making the game rather harder than it should be).

Set up and Punch

There’s a need for a model here. How about, “set up and punch”? We can use the beginning of the game – the first scene, the first act, whatever – as the set up: allow the player to outline their character, pick their sides, lay out the land. Then for the rest of the game, we play those choices out. For the first scene, you get to choose whatever you like, whenever you like. From that point on, we start to edit what choices you get to the kind of character you are.

The Choice of Games games do this explicitly, with RPG-style character creation choices that remove later options.

This is good, because it matches what should be happening in the scope of a story anyway. To begin with, details are important. How does the protagonist talk to people? How much care do they take over what they do? But by the second act of a story, things should be hotting up. It’s no longer about how they do what they do, it’s about what they do, and the repercussions that their actions are having. The main character is still integral, but the reader is now learning about the world, and not the character.

But in the interactive context there’s a downside, as the game will inevitably feel more and more railroaded, as though the writer simply “gave up” on making the story adaptive. (Of course, the far-spectrum alternative is the game feels arbitrary over the long term, with the character contradicting itself from moment to moment, and that’s no good either).

It would seem that set up and punch works well for short stories, but starts to suffer over the long term.

A Series of Ever-Increasing Boxes

One solution might be to think of each act as a separate bit of gameplay. In Act 1, let’s make choices that define if the main character is friendly or moody. In Act 2, let’s use the results of those choices, and now decide if the character is brave or cowardly; and also if they’re physically or mentally inclined. In Act 3, let’s set all of those results in stone, and start deciding if the character is interested in self-promotion, or helping those around him, which will take us to the final turning point – save themselves, or save the city?

That’s how film structures often work (the above is, loosely, a description of The Dark Knight Rises). Looking back on it now, I can see that’s what Dave Morris was doing in Frankenstein – the early parts determine Frankenstein, and his monster’s, empathetic outlook. Later parts develop new models, with the final, most intriguing one being does the narrator trust you, the reader, to make his choices for him?

If Life Is Just A Highway…

But a structure like the one above means there are certain stories you can’t tell – namely, stories with a long scope but a tight focus. If you’re doing an epic about the life of Emperor Claudius, the respect his peers have for him is constantly in the balance, as is his own pride and selfishness. The interactivity should be driving these elements the whole way to the end.

So perhaps there’s room for a more flexible model. Something like driving on a many-laned motorway: at any moment, the player is in one lane or another. Their choices are determined by that lane – they can keep going as they are, they can move in a lane and become more extreme in one direction, or they can move out and move the other way. Swapping lanes isn’t the result of a single choice, but a build of several choices, but once it happens, it’s a definitive switch in the character’s temperament and the options available to them.

At this point, a player reaching Act 3 as a disrespected, prideful despot still has time to save their soul — but, just like getting off the motorway when the slip-road is approaching, they might be running out of time to do it, and it might require some drastic actions to get there before the end arrives.

Of course, from the point of the view of the author, this is a lot of work: by the end of the book you might be supporting five or six variants of a particular action, depending on which “lane” the player is in. But there are ways to handle that kind of thing elegantly, of course: it’s not like every level the character finds themselves on needs to be a different story-thread all of its own. Sometimes, the same material can be reused and just have its language altered.

What’s it all about, anyway?

Underneath all of this is the related problem of telling the reader that any of this is happening. And the key to that is probably not about interactivity, or logic, but rather, about theme. Whatever it is that’s being tracked, followed, and adapted to had better be core to the themes of the book. A reader should either be customising the nail varnish or rewiring the spinal cord of their story: anything in between is going to pass by unnoticed.

(Or you could just simply showing the stats, but that doesn’t necessarily solve anything – if your text doesn’t match what the numbers are doing, then your numbers will start to look fake).

So if your novel is about spies, track loyalty and betrayal. If your novel is about love, track, um, loyalty and betrayal. If your novel is about religion, track faith and despair. If you novel is about an epic journey across a wilderness, track… well, I’ll let you know when we’ve written it.

First up is the game I co-wrote with Ian Finley for Textfyre, The Shadow in the Cathedral. It was nominated for 5 XYZZY awards when first released in 2009, and follows the adventures of 2nd Assistant Clock Polisher Wren in the Abbey of Time, who has one day to stop a deadly conspiracy. Set in a world of clockwork churches, it’s full of action-set-pieces and puzzles.

Get it here!

Secondly, Black Belt Games have created an engine for the Z-machine, allowing them to put out Z-code games for Kindle. (If that meant nothing to you, read: “next up!”) Their first release is Insight, a science-fiction detective story. A genetic designer from Mars is accused of committing the planet’s first murder. But you can prove it?

Get it here!

So how is the experience playing on a Kindle? When I first saw the device I thought this was the <i>perfect</i> home for playing IF, and I still think it’s a better fit than using iOS devices, for which typing is just a bit too horrendous. The Kindle-with-keyboard is a lot nicer to play with, and while it never quite becomes quite as invisible as playing with a real keyboard, there’s a certain magic to playing in the palm of your hand.

There are more games pending, too, so watch this space…

After four months development, inkle‘s first project, Frankenstein, written by Dave Morris and published by UK publisher Profile Books, is now available to buy in the App Store.

This isn’t my own writing, but it’s my – and inkle co-founder Joseph Humfrey’s – design for how the UI works, how it guides the reader’s eye and helps keep the interactivity unobtrusive. Big shout-out to Undum here; no-one designs from scratch, they just 1-up the last best thing.

We also designed the back-end authoring format: I hadn’t really realised before quite how much the writing tool affects the kind of story you tell – the ink format is great for providing quick branching and rejoining of stories and flexing the text around based on the minutiae of the choices you’ve made so far (the game remembers everything you ever did).

Dave – author of a huge number of gamebooks, including a couple of Fighting Fantasys and the Knightmare books – took our format and ran with it, producing an entire novel’s worth of content, that alters, rearranges and bends as you influence the story’s two central protagonists. This isn’t so much about number of endings, although that number is greater than 1; this is about numbers of middles.

(Last night, for fun, I tried running the source through the Kindliser tool, which produces static gamebooks; the result was a file 4Gb big, containing ~3.5 million paragraphs, and it hadn’t finished.)

It’s possible in the ink format, but a bit more work, to make object/state-based puzzles: Frankenstein has none, but our next release, due in a month or so, has a few, and our late 2012 game has a lot.

But more on those later. For today, I’m going to sit back, and watch some analytics.

If you do play Frankenstein, please let us know what you think, either here, or on inkle‘s own blog page.

For fans of the genre, Black Static gets consistently great reviews from around the horror zine scene, so it’s an honour to appear there. The big question will be, will I have the nerve to read the rest of the issue?

In other fiction-writing news, my story from last year Sleepers has been picked up to appear… elsewhere. Details on that when it comes out.

It’s something that anyone who’s worked on long projects can sympathise with. Projects can be easy or hard, but every project ends with that final 5%: the final 5% that nearly kills you.

I’ll be honest, this post is really about Frankenstein, inkle‘s first interactive novel app, which is out on April 26th. This is a project I’ve been working on full-time since December and designing, in a way, since I wrote My Angel back in 2000. Frankenstein is high-quality interactive storytelling built for a mainstream audience. It’s beautiful visuals combined seamlessly with great writing and a smooth, slick, gets-gone interface. It’s a lovely piece of work.

Almost. Really, very, almost. There are just a few last touches. Just that final 5% to get perfect.

Part of the problem with that final 5% is the injustice. It shouldn’t be hard to finish a project. After all, by the time it’s 95% complete, you finally know exactly what your project is. You know how every part will come together. There are no unanswered questions, no unexplored corners, no hidden problems. The clarity of vision can be dizzying after months, or years, of working on a project where the end is just a distant dream.

I remember, as I came to the end of Make It Good, the unreality quality of it. It was inconceivable that my to-do list on that game had shrunk from a 2,000 line text file to a set of three points, one of which was a bit of pharmaceutical research that – you know what? – I never did. After ten years of work, all the individual pieces were there, and not only that, they fitted together.

(And then the bug reports came in. That was Make It Good‘s final five – all the testers who did things ever-so-slightly off the order I’d thought of, and brought the complex, intricate logic crashing down. The bugs are gone now, I think: I’ve not had a report for Make It Good in two years beyond a few typos, although I get letters from players most months. But there was a moment there when I thought, this is it, it can never work…)

It’s particularly special, here at inkle, because we’re not just in the final 5% for Frankenstein, but also for inklewriter, our web-based writing tool which just needs a little bit more polish, and for an as-yet-unannounced HTML 5 project which is almost wrapped up.

It’s enough to make me want to start something else long and complicated, just so I can remember what it’s like to be free to make things up, unsure if they’ll work, or be worth doing at all. (Actually, we’ve got that covered as well, now that I look at my notepad).

But there’s no avoiding it. Starting something else is just prolonging the problem.

The trouble is, that final 5% looks like a small amount of work, and it actually is, but it’s exhausting and takes all the skill you have to get right because, being the last thing you do, you don’t get as much chance to revise as you did with the rest of the project. There’s no new information coming around the corner: no revelatory moments where you gain sudden new perspectives. The final 5% faces you up against the purest challenge. Here is the project, here is the problem, and either you can do it – or you can’t.

A lot of projects don’t make it through. The final 5% can be the thing that kills a good idea dead and leaves the audience bemused, underwhelmed, or throwing their pads against the wall. For games, it tends to be bad balancing, or a puzzle early on that’s too dull or too hard. (Heavenly Sword‘s cannonball sequence. The dodgy aiming in Uncharted 1. Hell, even Ico had that bit with the bomb and chandelier and the pillar.)

For novels and movies, it’s that missing “wow” factor, that ropey ending, that over-long edit. The final 5% is the polish and tightness that ties an okay story together into a fantastic one. (And it is only 5% – compare Blade Runner and the Director’s Cut.)

For TV shows like Battlestar, there’s a particular final 5% that rears its head when the series is running out its budget. (And Battlestar jumped the shark on its final five so determinedly it’s almost like the writers simply drew lots to see just how badly they could wrap things up. The Lost guys did the same a year or so later.)

For software like inklewriter, it’s what happens when you press the Escape key, or the up arrow, or hit Tab. It’s the two or three places where it runs just a bit slowly.

For IF it’s the place where the user types HYPERVENTILATE and the game understands.

For Frankenstein, it’s the transitions – you’ll know what I mean when you read it.

Of course, the only way to get through the final 5% is the same way you got through the rest of the project. You make a list, and you do the list. You put one foot in front of the other and keep going. You make the best decisions you can and test out what you’ve got. And you keep faith because, in (time of project so far / 19) more days, it will be done and it will be awesome…

And when that happens, your reward will be to start something new. And it’s not like starting stuff isn’t really difficult too.

The last light has gone. The stars are coming out in the black sea above. Many are hidden by ice-fingered winds. My father is still not returned and the fire is almost gone.

But this is how life is: always an edge. A thin sheet on a diving-deep pool.

I hope he will return soon. I cannot summon him.

A Colder Light is now available to play online.

A Colder Light is my first released game since 2009′s Make It Good and The Shadow in the Cathedral. This one is considerably shorter and easier than both of those. It’s also my first text adventure to use no keyboard input. It’s a short tale of magic, courage, animism and ice.

No save is implemented, although the game is short enough that you shouldn’t need it.

The game doesn’t work nicely on phones, but should play okay and runs dog-slow on an iPad.

Comments in the comments, and bugs to the address in the help text, if you please!

So what? you might think. Most books are read once, most DVDs are watched once, most Christmas cakes eaten once… But I don’t mean finished, I mean played. The majority of console games are opened, installed, booted up, played for a single session (possibly of several hours), then never booted up again. Even though games can afford tens of hours of entertainment; and even though games cost four times as much as books or films.

And that isn’t true of books, or DVDs, or Christmas cake. So why the difference? Is it just because people can get stuck on games?

I don’t think so. I think it’s deeper than that. In fact, I’m not sure there is a difference between the consumption pattern for a DVD, book or a game. I think instead that the difference is in what we mean by the word finished. (And, what is inkle going to do about it?)

The length of a game can be a tricky thing to measure at the best of times. Many games provide a variety of play-modes, from different difficulty levels through to different characters, storylines and abilities to try. Some games don’t even end, like the eternally popular multiplayer side of games like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

So when has a player “finished”? I’d argue a player finishes when they’ve learnt all that they expect to learn: that is, when the game ceases to surprise. The moment when every damn level is the same as every damn level before, that’s the moment when the game is finished. From there, a player either trades it in, or keeps playing in that trance-like addictive state that parents find so worrying. (Or in some rare cases, keeps going to see what happens in the story. But those cases are really pretty rare.)

The best evidence I have for this idea is from playing Assassin’s Creed II. The player takes the role of a member of a secret assassin’s guild in a rich simulation of medieval Florence and Venice. The cities are modelled on their real-life counterparts, and the player is given the task of navigating their streets, crowds, rooftops and canals to complete a variety of missions against the powerful ruling elite.

It’s a game which is remarkable for being almost entirely one long tutorial. The game features a staggeringly large number of things the player can do, but they’re all introduced gracefully so that the game is still teaching new mechanics at 70% complete (the pistols, the extended jump). By that point  most normal games have settled down into a familiar rut and are simply ramping the difficulty curve.

This constant learning made for good fun – each new mechanic introduced a new challenge, opened up a new route, or provided a new way of interacting with the simulated crowds. But despite the breadth, most people I know gave up on the game without reaching its end. And most gave up around the same point – the Venetian street carnival, an extended sequence of (none-too-difficult) challenges in which no new mechanics were introduced. People said, “They felt they had seen all the game had to offer.”

Assassin’s Creed, a very beautiful game with remarkably few assassinations in it, is a great demonstration of the parallel draws of novelty and mechanics. The mechanics in the game are not great: the stealth is fussy, and the running away sequences poorly balanced and quite repetitive. The first game in the series relied on these mechanics, and it got quickly very dry. But the scope of the world in the sequel, and the amount of novelty it is able to offer, is very large, because of the breadth and depth of its simulated cities and citizens.

By way of a quick contrast, Valve’s game Portal introduces a novel concept (creating spatial portals linking the world together in Moebius-strip fashion) which has lots of subtle depth (arising from momentum, angle, timing, that kind of thing), which it then develops with even more novelty in its level design. It’s a great example of the two aspects of a game working together in a mutually supportive way. And most people, I think, played Portal through to its end. (In fairness, of course, it was short, rewarding, and superlative.)

Most games are built squarely around repeatable mechanics – that is, a limited set of things that the player can do, which cause reasonably predictable consequences in the world of the game, with modifiers depending on the luck and skill of the player. It’s certainly true that a game with good mechanics will last, and a game with actively bad mechanics will fail.

But I think there’s another way, and that’s the direction we’re taking over at inkle for our Frankenstein project. A game – or rather, an interactive experience – can instead have simple mechanics, and be founded more on its content, and on the novelty and discovery inherent in that content. You know; the way a book is. It can be built in such a way that to be finished means to be completed rather than merely to be understood.

We hope that when people read/play (“relay”?) Frankenstein, they’ll all get to the bit where it says The End. (And then they’ll sit back, sigh, think, ‘what a great story,’ and post or tweet a nice review someplace.) If they don’t replay it that won’t be a fail. But if they play only the first chapter, think, ‘I get it,’ and put it down, then we will have missed out mark.

On a few months now until we find out!

I had the puzzle structure worked out before I coded a single word. I’m now 80% of the way through, but then I got distracted, adding hyperlinks.

I just turned off the actual text prompt thing. It seemed so… retro. There are just these buttons now. It feels kinda okay.

Building on my IF and Undum work, inkle will make interactive stories for mobile devices, and do so in a beautiful way.

Our first project, Frankenstein, is being published in association with award-winning London-based publiser Profile Books; and is being written by Dave Morris (author of Mirabilis) and Jamie Thomson, super-talented writers with a long history of gamebook work.

Right now, the visuals are under wraps, but if you want a taster, check out our interactive press release.

There’ll be a lot more features going up on the site soon, so please follow the blog if you’re interested, or watch us on Twitter.