L is for Lone Wolf

Cover of the editions of Caverns of Kalte that I had. 

a series on games I wish I'd played more of.

Sometime in late 1984 (long after I had been introduced to D&D via the Elmore red box and had played several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks numerous times) I was travelling with my family and at a Motorway rest stop paused to peruse a rack of books.

At the time, it was rare to find SFF novels on those racks - they were usually cheapo romances or horror novels, but there was occasionally a fun-looking title and they were also most definitely not the sort of books you came across in ordinary book stores or in the library.  The romances were too tame to engage teenaged me (come on, it was 1984) but I learned quickly that the pulp horror novels in Motorway shops or by the till when you stopped for fuel were a cheap and easy way to kill some hours on a long trip even if it wasn't my usual choice of reading material.

This is how (for example) I came to own copies of those classics The Rats, Lair[1] and Slugs [2], it was where I usually bought Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and on this occasion it was how I discovered Lone Wolf.

FF gamebooks will always be the "home cooking" of solo RPG play for me, if only because the world they painted was so vivid and wide open.  But I'll have to say that when I picked The Caverns of Kalte up on a whim during that trip it blew me away.

Oh, I died terribly and often - these books don't work very well as stand-alones, because there's a coherent narrative that spans the series - and that caused frustration that led to me putting the book down early on and forgetting about it for a while.

But when I came back a few weeks later on a rainy afternoon and tried to play it seriously at the kitchen table I was hooked.  The publication quality was high, I remember, and the mechanics were more sophisticated than FF, but the big thing was this world and this character.  The FF world was vivid, sure, but like a Heavy Metal cartoon.  Lone Wolf felt finer grained, silkier.  There was a richness there that I couldn't put my finger on.

Sadly, the Lone Wolf series was hard to find in the areas I found myself in after that, and I never did see books 1 and 2, but I did end up owning several of them (3 and 7 I remember, but I'm not sure about the others) and played them several times.

It was frustrating, not having a coherent series - you can really tell that the books are designed to "snap together" into a storyline - but they were very satisfying to play when an actual RPG session wasn't possible, in ways that the FF books couldn't achieve.

These books, more than any other "choose your own" series, made me think about how these sorts of games are designed and the effort that goes into them.  I'd played with text adventures before [3] but this sort of brought it to the next level.  This wasn't just an information space of you could explore at random to solve a kind of "locked room" puzzle - in the Lone Wolf books each book was a space for exploration, but in addition to letting you explore as you liked, there was a need to drive the story forwards, to tie in to the next book and maybe even the one after that.  

I never really got a clear view of how the books worked on the broader narrative level until long after I had given away my few Lone Wolf books and had passed on to other phases of life.  But I do wonder if this kind of gamebook has things to teach us about how to leverage modern interactive media for entertainment. [4]  It will never be much more than a particularly eccentric hobby for me, I imagine, but it's a fun thing to think about and neat to realise how being a bored teen on a road-trip with family decades ago is still influencing my behaviour today.

As it happens, if you're curious the author of the Lone Wolf series, Joe Dever, and several of his collaborators on art and later installments, have agreed to allow the books to be "reprinted" in various formats online.  See Project Aon to download and experience it for yourself! 

###
1. Both these were reprinted for the publication of Domain in 1984 - ironically I don't think I ever read Domain, but if not for that book I would never have discovered these two.  I'm not a big "horror" fan (not this kind) but James Herbert gets a bad rap for these, I think, as I actually enjoyed them quite a bit. Of course, this is teenaged me talking again.

2. Slugs is...not in the same class as The Rats, I fear, and the sequel Breeding Ground I recall being frankly atrocious.  However, it was still entertaining and there are the mandatory titillating scenes and gratuitously gory descriptions that keeps a teenage horror reader coming back.  Shaun Hutson deserves kudos for hitting that sweet spot so perfectly so early in his career - and as I recall, I also discovered that a lot of the biology he exaggerated for horrific purposes was actually basically correct (though I never admitted to my bio teacher that I wasn't really a terrific swot).

3. Inspired by things like old ASCII mags that had whole adventures you could type up in BASIC, or teaching myself to hack the databases in games like Dungeonmaster on my ZX Spectrum.

4.  To a large extent Lone Wolf is behind my thinking in experiments on Twitter and elsewhere as I fumble toward some kind of multiplex storytelling in those media.

F is for Fighting Fantasy

A series on games I wish I’d played more of.

Pretty much anyone my age who was into fantasy and science fiction back in the 70s and 80s will remember the Fighting Fantasy books.

Superficially, these seem to be pretty light entertainment and a novelty that emerged briefly and then essentially disappeared, but few people know that the idea of a branching path story was first pioneered by Jorge Luis Borges[1] in the 40s in a pair of stories that featured fictional books with branching paths in them.  In one, A survey of the works of Herbert Quain, the main character is the author of a book split into three parts, and has two branch points, and is thus able to tell a total of nine different stories.  The other story, The Garden of Forking Paths, [2] contains an element that is much more like the adventure game books we know and love: this story deals in part with a sinologist who has interpreted an ancient Chinese work written by a man tasked to design a maze and to write a book, but in the end produced only a riddle – a book that is a maze, with the reader needing to determine the order in which the sections need to be read in order to navigate the contents.

The “self-directed order of reading” concept manifested as a real type of book in the 50s when it was used by Skinner and others to develop learning materials – in these kinds of books, students selected a question’s answer, and were directed to another page based on that answer.  In some senses, these are the precursors of the online training programmes that a lot of institutions use internally – you read a text (say, the company labour dispute policy) and then have to answer multiple choice questions on the content.  With each answer, you are either moved on to the next question (if you’re right) or redirected to a more comprehensive explanation of the concept you got wrong and offered another question to see if it stuck yet. [3] This aside though, there were a series of “branching path” self-study books published during the 50s and 60s that were used to present a variety of subjects, and in fact these books were acknowledged by the creators of branching path fiction and adventures as a strong influence. [4]

Following on from these directed learning books, branching path fiction really came into its own in the 70s, when “choose your own adventure” and similar types of adventure fiction books started to gain in popularity – right up to the first Fighting Fantasy book published in 1982 by Penguin: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.

I had read choose your own adventure books of various kinds in the past, but although they were interesting they never really seemed to have much re-readability.  The Jackson and Livingstone conception took the idea to the next level though, and in the early 80s I was a big fan of their Fighting Fantasy series of fantasy solitaire adventure gamebooks.  I think I actually started with Island of the Lizard King, and I seem to remember my second purchase being Deathtrap Dungeon [5], but in the end I had a shelf with about 10 of the books on it, and even started branching out into series like Lone Wolf – I never really played many of the Lone Wolf books, but the art in that series was gorgeous and it had the rather interesting twist that the books constituted a coherent narrative. [6]

This was an interesting time for games, and one that I kind of wish would come back.  Computer and console games are a sort of extension of the idea [7] but if we’re honest it’s not the same thing – computerized RPGs are quite a different experience from either tabletop playing or the gamebooks of yore.  With the advent of tablets and smartphones, there’s the potential for a comeback, [8] but as far as computer gaming goes, the closest analog to the old gamebooks is probably text adventures like Zork. [9]

By this point, you’ve probably gotten the impression that actually I’ve already played gamebooks quite a lot, so may be wondering why this is in a list of games I wish I’d played more of. 

The answer is actually quite simple: I cheated.

Like many other youngsters playing these books, I looked ahead to see what the consequences of different choices were and thus navigated the books relatively easily. I wish I had played the books more honestly, or that I had payed more attention to how they were organized.  By cheating, I cheated myself of even more fun (and they were plenty fun even cheating!) but I could at least have learned something about game design while I was at it.

Oh, make no mistake, there were TV programmes and books and magazine articles on how these books were designed and made [10] so I learned a lot about their structure – but I was a callow youth, and I wasted the opportunity when it was right in front of me, so I sometimes wish I had played more of them – or at least played them more effectively.

But then, I can play them now if I want to.

###

1. The influence of Jorge Luis Borges on modern fiction is incredible, and he was a celebrated master of the short form – indeed, anyone who aspires to write fantasy short stories needs to know his work, and his influence can be seen in the works of other masters like Umberto Eco. http://www.egs.edu/library/jorge-luis-borges/biography/

2. Both of these stories are available in the collection The Garden of Forking Paths which is unfortunately a bit expensive, but the story The Garden of Forking Paths is often available online as scanned copies, as it’s a popular text in Borges courses.  The story is also included in the collection Labyrinths, which is more reasonably priced and has the added bonus of an introduction by William Gibson.

3. I’m not convinced this approach actually works, but it certainly is popular.

4. Although I doubt the value of this sort of approach to things like corporate training, I do wonder if the approach could be better leveraged for online education programmes – surely the idea could be adapted rather easily to create apps that are essentially primers to certain basic subjects?

5. Which, incidentally, really was a deathtrap.  I played it over and over, but only ever managed to defeat the book without cheating once.

6. Actually, I think that was what prevented me from buying more than a couple of them – you needed to play the books in order for them to really make sense, so it made it hard to just pick up a book at a Motorway rest stop or at an airport. The books were playable as stand-alones, but not very satisfying because it was obvious you were expected to know things that had happened in previous books. FF books on the other hand were mostly stand-alones, though that didn’t stop me and my friends trying things like making a character and trying to use the same one all through the series.

7. Indeed, there were adaptations for a few of the early FF books into games for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, though I only ever played the Spectrum version of Warlock of Firetop Mountain and found it a bit unsatisfying.

8. Actually, if only the Kindle e-ink platform allowed for clearly defined pages, the fact that it supports HTML would make it dead easy to run choose your own adventure type books – and I’m sure that the platform could be made to do things like roll dice and keep track of your character for you. Thinking about this sort of thing is always enough to make me bemoan the fact I stopped keeping up with programming when I stopped using a Unix terminal at university – if I had the time to do it, I’d teach myself and write kindle or tablet based gamebooks with great enthusiasm!

9. Which, by the way, you can play online here. You didn’t need to sleep tonight anyway.

10. If you’re wondering about the web pages, I can only respond: “What! You egg!” and suggest that you go entertain yourself while your elders compare arthritic pains and twinges from long-forgotten wounds.