diversity

Gamebooks have come a long way. We’re enjoying a renaissance. in gamebooks at the moment, which give us an impressive range of choices to enjoy gamebooks with. There are gamebooks for most tastes.

I don’t want to write a history of gamebooks any more than you want to read one. There are resources that document that kind of history. One that’s beloved by many is the Fighting Fantasy-centric You Are The Hero. It focuses on a particular brand of gamebook, but as the biggest and longest-running brand, it’s arguably a crucial part of the history.

But the diversity of types and approaches of gamebooks is largely evolutionary in nature, so some of that’s unavoidable. Bear in mind that historical details might be wrong because I’ll just be giving you my experience, and I grew up in Australia, which is the other end of the planet from where it was popular and happening.

So let’s go back almost half a century to the early days of gamebooks. As a kid, I was a reader, and I was a very early adopter of the Dungeons and Dragons game that came out of America. I grew up in a remote part of the country, and it was impossible to get five friends around a table.

The Stranger Things image of kids playing it together was mostly a dream. I spent a lot more time reading the books and imagining how it would all work than I got to actually play for. That changed later when other kids discovered it and we could play during lunch breaks at school, but in the years before that I was thrilled to discover gamebooks, which presented a compact and portable solo approach.

I discovered something called Choose Your Own Adventure books. I read voraciously and sought all of them but they were far from my faovurites. They were designed for kids half my age, often in genres I had no enthusiasm for, and were shallow.

What do I mean by shallow? A book with just over a hundred entries and about a third of them are endings means that you’re basically telling about 30 very short stories that all start the same way. You feel more like you’re selecting a different story from some kind of jukebox than actually naking decisions to affect the outcome of a game you’re playing.

These kinds of books don’t have any stats or dice rolling. Combine that with the lack of depth and the very young target audience, and you’ve got something very shallow indeed. That’s why I get a little offended when people describe diceless books like mine as “like Choose Your Own Adventure” because the relative sophistication of other books doesn’t just come from adding a dice system.

TSR, the original company behind Dungeons and Dragons, came out with their own version called Endless Quest and these were much better but still in the same camp.

When Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone gave us the Fighting Fantasy books, I and loads of other kids like me got very excited. They had a simple version of the systems in Dungeons and Dragons, such as statistics and a character sheet to track them and a dice system to resolve combat encounters. It felt more like playing solo Dungeons and Dragons, and I loved them.

I wasn’t the only one. These came out of the UK and sold by the truckload. They are still reviewed and recalled fondly by nostalgic men of my age. Fighting Fantasy became the de facto standard of gamebooks. By now, I think there are about sixty of them in the series, mostly set in the same fantasy environment but spanning genres and featuring a range of guest authors, spanning decades.

The Fighting Fantasy books inspired others. Steve Jackson wrote a series called Sorcery! These were great. In addition to the dice stuff, there was a magic system, and you could cast spells. Even better, the four books were linked, and you brought the same character (with its experience and information and items) to the new books, so it had character advancement. So it felt like a deeper and more epic story. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t consider this series to be in their top five or top three.

Other series also introduced character progression and sequential books for that epic feel. Lone Wolf are another cult favourite, one of my own favourites, and had it all. A massive story (I think it’s up to something like 36 books at this point for a massive storyline) with character developing and progressing alongside the greater story. It also has special abilities, like spells, and special items.

Way of the Tiger also did it and introduced a strategic martial arts combat system for its ninja protagonist in an eastern fantasy setting. These were another favcurite of mine. They increased the scale of the stakes too, with the player commanding armies in an epic battle later in the series.

Joe Dever, who created the Lone Wolf books, also came up with two-player gamebooks. These were designed as a duel format, and some of them showed an image of what the player sees instead of text, for a videogame feel.

There have been other attempts at 2-player gamebooks, some of which are cooperative instead of adversarial. In a gamebook Discord server I joined there’s some discussion right now about how to do 2-player gamebooks.

I’m not sure they work that well, and I don’t believe they’re the holy grail some designers describe it as. We’re also in a golden age for tabletop roleplaying, where Virtual Tabletops (VTT) online mean people can play roleplaying games even if they can’t be in the same place or have never met face-to-face.

I feel this is a better option than some of the clunky 2-player books I’ve seen. I feel that the solo experience of a gamebook might not have the interaction of a tabletop role-playing experience, but it has a strength of unrivalled immersion that gets lost when people try to turn a solo gamebook into a shared experience.

But that’s just me. There are all kinds of gamebooks around these days. I prefer some over others. Uncanny Agency is representative of my tastes and preferences, but there are a lot of valid styles out there.

One relatively recent innovation has been the Open World approach to gamebooks. This is where the book offers relative freedom to move around and engage on their own terms. The idea comes from the world of tabletop role-playing, in which there is an ongoing tension between the extreme approaches of a fixed narrative and the provision of a large world in which players can choose what interests them.

These approaches are sometimes referred to as “on rails,” meaning the player is led through a story and not granted the agency to make choices, and “sandbox” or “open world,” which lets the player direct their attention where they want and engage with what they like.

I think both of these extremes are problematic, but mostly you’ll hear the players complaining about “rails” and extolling the virtues of sandbox/open world. I feel that this is because the sandbox approach is more about the player and obliges the person presenting moderating the world (in tabletop games) to manufacture the environment around those players in real time.

When it comes to games like Dungeons and Dragons, I don’t love the sandbox. I played a game like that last year, and I wanted a plot. I wanted a mission and a sense of urgency. I wanted a sense of structure and direction and goal.

Instead, I felt like the designer of that game just made a map and filled it with monsters instead of actually creating an adventure. I felt like everything we did was a mini-game or side-quest, all of which was mostly inconsequential. I’m not a fan of distracting mini-games and side-quests, and the idea that there was no core idea underneath it all bothered me.

Again, that’s my preference. I’m not saying that a fixed story with no meaningful choices is a good thing. That’s not a game. It’s a roller-coaster at best, hence the “on rails” reference. An easy way to identify those kinds of gamebooks, and gamebooks can easily err in that direction, is when there’s little or no value in replaying it. That’s when you realise you were a passenger, not a player, and it was a lot more like a novel than a game.

It’s a question of getting the balance right, and I like the structure of a story and sense of purpose. I try to put a sense of urgency and direction in my own books because it keeps the stakes high. I feel that floating around a giant sandbox looking for trouble is pretty low-stakes.

But that’s just me. There are awesome open-world gamebooks now. It’s not my preferred playstyle, but I’m amazed it’s possible at all, and some of them do open-world extremely well. Fabled Lands are possibly the best known of these and renowed for pioneering the idea. Another respected and enjoyable series is the Stream Highwayman series.

To give that big open world feel, they span several books, but they’re not sequential like Lone Wolf or Sorcery! books are. The most recent addition is New Tokyo 2130 which is massive. It’s something like 6 big books and a reference book, along with a lot of other knick-knacks because it uses a lot more than dice to resolve stuff. It has physical clues,maps, puzzles, all kinds of stuff. It’s an incredibly ambitious project.

I’ve seen other ambitious ideas that also try to go beyond the book. Some of them use QR codes for multimedia content. I’ve even heard talk of attempts to make augmented gamebooks that integrate with the real world, like Pokemon Go. I can imagine a day when writers fascinated with ergodic novels like House of Leaves that break the fourth wall will attempt something similar with the gamebook format.

Personally, I don’t know how any of it works, and I have no desire to play or write that sort of thing. One of my core gamebook philosophies is that what happens in the book stays in the book. I commit to having every story finished inside the book (instead of during a dice minigame that you lost while the book is put aside) and minimal reliance on dice or gadgets or anything else outside of itself.

But that’s just me and my project. I’m glad others are out there pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, expanding the medium and keeping it exciting. There are other takes on the platform. The DestinyQuest books attempt to bring “that video game feel” to gamebooks and emphasize game mechanics and open world. People are innovating all the time.

To me, the most exciting advancement is that many of them are designed for adults, such as the horror gamebooks of Victoria Hancox. Gamebooks peaked in the eighties and disappeared when computer games took over, but now the books are back in style.

Some of it manifests as notalgia, and a lot of people are revisiting the Fighting Fantasy books, but it’s not all about revisiting childhood. Modern gamebooks try to bring sophistication and humour, adult concepts, and strong character development. These are the kinds of innovations I’m most excited about.