Writing for games

In a thread at a new forum I spent time in (The Diving Bell Adventure Pub), someone mentioned it might be a good idea to let would-be novel writers create the stories for casual games. I don’t think that would be a good idea and here is why. And it’s here, because it is about writing rather than about gaming.

As a would-be novel writer (and I’ve no problem with that label – I’m not published yet, so I do not consider myself a ‘true’ novelist), I see a couple of problems with that idea. I have, quite some years ago, tried to write and program my own text adventure (I don’t have the necessary graphic skills to create sprites, animations and backgrounds). Even writing the story did not work out well – let alone the programming part.

Adventures and RPGs need very flexible stories that can be pushed and pulled in various directions and still stay in shape. You can do a lot of things differently or at different times in a chapter (or the whole game), so the story has to ‘play along’ with it and allow the game to put in cut scenes in different order (because you first finished chain two instead of chain one, each adventure contains a certain number of intermingling puzzle chains that need to be finished in order to move on to the next chapter – the same is even more true for RPGs with their side quests). A novelist (or a would-be novel writer) on the other hand fights very hard to find the perfect order for all the scenes in a story.

HOGs get a story to motivate the player to go on. You can actually have a HOG without a big story, if it’s a straight HOG (no IHOG, a HOG with adventure elements). But most HOGs tell a story and they do so in dialogues between the levels. That’s not a lot of storytelling, even with the odd cut scene here or there. Unlike adventures, HOGs do not contain puzzle chains that are intermingling, so you don’t have to care about a flexible story that much. But if you dare to put in more than just a few lines of dialogue between levels, half of the players will say ‘that’s a bad game, I don’t like it’, because they don’t like reading that much. (For instance, the game “The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was bashed for containing actual pages to read that continued the story between levels – I found the game and the storytelling great, most people didn’t.) But you can’t tell a very difficult story with lots of plot changes and intrigues in just a few lines of dialogue. So, not a place for a would-be novel writer (or professional novelist), either.

Other casual games (TMs, Match 3 and so on) put even less emphasize on a story. It’s just something that connects the levels in most of them. People want to beat those games, to get an expert score or beat the clock, that’s why they play – not because of the great story.

The only kind of ‘game’ that you need a very good story for – albeit one with a lot of dialogue, but dialogue is good in a story – is the Visual Novel I’ve written about before. It’s a novel you play (and even they need a branching story – a story with different paths towards the end or even different endings depending on the player’s choices), but it’s above all a novel.

In addition, most casual games are made with an option for a sequel, provided the game does well. You can’t really ‘finish’ the story – although there should be some sort of closure – and have to give the player the little ‘this isn’t over yet’ scene in the end. This is something a novelist could work with, but it doesn’t make telling a complicated story any easier.

You can write a novel based on a game, you can make a game based on a novel (such as “The Great Gatsby” which I might cover over in my main blog soon), but you can’t apply the rules for writing a novel to writing the story for a game. Therefore you can’t just take a novelist (or a would-be novel writer) to create a story that works with a game.

Wordl Art

I was a bit bored yesterday, so I went to the Wordl site and got one for every blog I have. This one is for this site:

Interesting collection of words, isn’t it?

Snark Hunting and Asian Masterminds

I have already written about “Forgotten Books” and I probably will mention the site and the books I get from there every now and then in the future. This time, I will talk about the first novel I got from them and about a very long, but very interesting poem. I will talk about “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu” by Sax Rohmer and “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll.

I’ll start with the Snark, though. Years ago, during my Star Trek phase, I found an excerpt of the poem (in eight chapters) in the novelisation of the second movie, “The Wrath of Khan”. The novel (which was not about a Snark or Lewis Carroll) only cited a few verses, but it was enough to stick in my head. Unlike “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”, though, “The Hunting of the Snark” is not all that well-known in Germany.

Naturally, when I had all those books on the site at my disposal, I went hunting for the Hunting. And I was successful, even though this book merely is a scan (like a few others I’ve found) and thus a bit harder to read than those that have been set anew for the publication as PDF-file. Still, the e-book contains not only the text, but also the illustrations, both of which were taken from the 1876 edition of the book.

I started reading the poem (even though it has about a hundred pages as an e-book, it’s still one poem, not a collection of them), looking for the few lines I remembered about the characteristics of the Snark. (Admittedly, playing a casual game called “Snark Busters Welcome to the Club” before help to remember this poem … ahem.) But the more I read of it, the more amused I was. I read it out loud and found it great. It has its own rhythm to it (but that’s what rhyming is all about, isn’t it?) and flows perfectly.

I enjoyed the poem and will surely re-read it from time to time to be amused (about the Baker who forgot everything, including his name, when he arrived on the ship, about the blank map and about the Beaver and the beaver-specialized Butcher). Thanks to Forgotten Books I have had the chance to get to know it. I really appreciate it.

Now on to someone less benign than the common Snark (when it’s not a Boojum, of course). Gaze, oh gentle reader of this blog, on the cold and scaring face of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

I will start writing about him by admitting that I had my first encounter with the doctor and his methods before I read the novel. I happen to be a fan of Christopher Lee and in the 70s he played the doctor in a couple of movies (most of them with a partly German cast). I own a DVD collection of the movies and it mentioned the original stories in the booklet.

Still, the mention of a novel in a booklet isn’t the same thing as reading the novel itself. The novel was first published in 1913 (though not as a novel, but as a series of shorter stories which now make up the novel). It predates the German equivalent of a dangerous doctor by about ten years, as the first “Doktor Mabuse” story was published around 1923. Still, I found it easier to read than the other story.

It’s not a very complicated story, but a very good adventure. In every chapter (in every shorter story once published separately) there’s the usual action sequence: a threat, a reaction to it, a murder, a dangerous situation, the heroes win, but Dr. Fu-Manchu is not apprehended. This makes it a good, short read.

I can understand why even the contemporaries claimed it was racist, there are a lot of prejudices against people from Asia in the story (not just the doctor himself, but also his helpers, willing and unwilling). But I understand a novel (especially one that close to a penny dreadful) as entertainment. That might include prejudices (older novels include a lot of prejudices against women, for instance, picturing them in a very one-dimensional way) about which I don’t care. This only goes for novels, though, not for any non-fictional work.

As far as novels go, this one is a quick read. The style isn’t glorious, but easily readable, even for someone who can’t claim English as her native language.

Reading old books that are not widely know can have different results. In this case, it had great results and make me look for quite some other books as well. Anyone should at least try it sometimes.

Found a booklover's dream

Quite a while ago, I ordered a reprint of Bram Stoker’s “The Lair of the White Worm” over amazon. It came from a publisher I had not encountered before, but that happens every once in a while.

Today, while surfing the net and waiting for my desktop pc to be done with a defragmentation, I got the idea of checking the site of Forgotten Books. That was the publisher I got Stoker’s novel from. Now, forgotten Books isn’t just a publisher, they do much more. For a one-time payment, you gain access to their much better membership e-books (pdf-files which you can also read on your computer) of all volumes they keep on their servers. And there’s lots of stuff on their servers... You can download all of them in a low quality without any payment, giving you the chance to read the classics which quite often are hard to get otherwise today. You don’t need space on a bookshelf for them (I love books, but I’m running very, very low on space for them by now). You can check out books without having to buy them, read them on the whole and then decide whether you need a paperback (which you can then buy over amazon).

And it’s not just fiction, there’s also old science texts, philosophical ones and many, many more. Given the fact that the membership isn’t all that expensive, it’s quite an idea for me. A hoard of texts I’ve always wanted to read lie ahead of me.

Evil under the Sun

Actually, this is my favourite Hercule Poirot story. Most people know “Murder on the Orient Express” better, but I prefer this one. It has a lot more to offer and there’s a lot more to take into account when solving this crime.

“Evil under the Sun” takes place on an island (well, in the novel it is a land tongue that is cut off from the main land at all times but low tide), so the stranger who arrives unseen to murder the victim is out of the picture quite soon. Apart from only be reachable for a short period of the day, there’s a guard at the path people have to take to get there.

This, of course, leaves the reader – and Monsieur Poirot himself – with enough suspects on the island who have a reason to kill Mrs. Marshall, the murder victim. There’s the former lover from whom she has taken an expensive jewel. There’s the husband who knows she’s cheating on him. There’s the stepdaughter whom she bullies at every chance she gets. There’s the current lover’s wife who has to watch the two of them flirt. There’s the owner of the hotel who is secretly in love with the husband and could want the wife out of the picture. They all have alibis – but one must have done it.

I will not spoil the solution here and tell you who did it (and how and why). If you want to find out, either go and read the novel or watch the very good movie with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. I will, though, give you a few hints if you want to solve the murder yourself:

First of all, the time of death is not as clear as it might seem.

The bath which nobody took is important, as is the bottle that almost hit one of the guests on the head.

Some of the guests are great actors.

Not all alibis hold up to a good test.

The reason for the murder is not the one everyone is expecting.

Always keep in mind the first thought about bodies on the beach that is uttered in the novel.

But now back to the story itself. Why do I like “Evil under the Sun” more than the big classic, “Murder on the Orient Express”? There’s various reasons.

First of all, in the big classic you have a very classical setup (a wider variety of the locked room). The murderer has to be someone on the train, because nobody could have entered or left it unseen and without traces during the time at which the crime occurred. It plays a lot with the question of “who did it?” and then gives a surprise solution: everyone (except for Poirot, of course) did it. And they all appear to have no reason to kill the man – until Poirot finds the motif and all falls in line.

“Evil under the Sun” presents the reader with a lot of possible suspects and a victim that surely has done nothing to prevent bad things from happening. Arlene Marshall is not a nice person, she is vain, self-serving and rude towards others. Still, even she doesn’t deserve being strangled. (And compared to the kidnapper and baby murderer killed in “Murder on the Orient Express”, she’s a nice person, indeed.) Despite the same cut-off setting, “Evil under the Sun” has a different scenario. We’re not talking about a train wagon here that holds room for fourteen or so people. It’s a complete island with a hotel on it, three beaches and a lot of free space. People will find it a lot harder to have an alibi on a island than inside a train wagon that’s stuck in the snow. Still, at first all of them have an alibi, it seems. The hotel owner has seen the husband type, the stepdaughter has been swimming by a beach on the opposite side of the island from the crime scene, the wife of the lover was with her. The guy whose jewel she took is the only one without an alibi, it seems.

As the story unfolds, the alibis mostly disappear. Everyone, it seems, has either lied or was mistaken. So, who was it? Why did she have to die?

The solution Poirot presents at the end of the story is logical, even though most people might overlook one clue or two. As with many mysteries, the secret of solving them is paying a lot of attention to details.

The same, of course, goes for writing a mystery novel (which brings us back to why this post is in the “Writer’s Block” blog). You can’t just pull the solution out of a hat like a stage magician. You need to know it first, then build the story around it. You need to drop hints for the reader, even though they might not recognize them at first. You need to make all of the characters interesting – including the victim, the investigator (whatever his or her job might be) and the criminal. You need to create false leads (red herrings, as they’re called so nicely in English, German misses such a nice word for them). You need to give the reader various suspects, give them all good reasons to commit the crime. There will be false alibis and true ones (and people without one).

At the same time, try to stay away from clichés – unless, of course, you want to play with them. The locked room has been used a lot and most readers will know the obvious solutions (such as stabbing through the keyhole or locking the room with a strange device while leaving or the victim locking the room after being attacked or a device inside the room killing the victim). If you can find a novel way to use one of those concepts, go ahead and use it. Just don’t recycle old ideas and think people won’t realize.

Writing a mystery is a lot like solving one: You need to look at everything from every angle and pay a great attention to details. But if you like that kind of thing, it’s a great way to spent some time.