Inkle has curated an almost 800-page book of short essays (requested to be 1000 words or less, I gather?) from a whole boatload of game writers and narrative designers of various levels of experience. Print-on-demand through Lulu. They were initially saying it was too complicated to work out the rights for an ebook edition (or something like that?) but it looks like they just caved to audience pressure and added it.
Very reasonably priced: looks like the US prices are $9 for the ebook, $18 for the paperback, and $50 for the hardcover.
Also they’re doing a podcast where they invite the authors on to talk about what they wrote about and why, and wherever that discussion goes to. Looks like they’re doing about 45-minute episodes: there’s a short intro and two interviews up so far.
This looks great! I have massive respect for Jon Ingold and Inkle. His many YouTube talks and interviews are well worth a watch too (mostly on the GDC and AdventureX channels). I’ll definitely be getting a copy of this.
(screenshot of the ebook HTML source showing a phrase broken up into 12 links to different random-seeming starting articles: “Or open at a ran dom pla ce and read from there!” going to articles 16, 85, 105, 39, 27, 42, 48, 81, 76, 95, 101, and 125)
@zarf’s entry (When It’s Over) is (structural spoiler for a thousand-word article) a plea for more games to respect our time and give us some form of indication about how far through you are (as most other media does) – and then ends with a surprise bonus paragraph, which made me laugh.
Yeah, Jon Ingold’s intro plays that up somewhat:
There are now so many games writers that we can disagree vigorously over issues of craft. We can love games that are despised by our peers. We can be overwhelmed with jealousy and delight when something new and incredible is released out of nowhere to high acclaim, every couple of months.
I like thinking about differences in media delivery platforms, so I really liked Zarf’s article. I realized that I got fairly good at estimating how long a text adventure was based on the size of the story file. Oh sure, someone could add a bunch of padding, but Zork was about 90KB, Spider and Web about 215KB, Endless, Nameless is a 470KB .z8 file… just 3 quick examples, but I paid attention to every text game I’ve downloaded over the years. You can’t help but look at the file sizes when downloading these things and you get a sort of instinct about how much is “there” in a game over the years.
But that’s just text adventures. I bought the new Resident Evil game last week. Its price gives me some degree of confidence that it won’t be over in an hour, considering people aren’t taking pitchforks to the Capcom offices, but I have no idea if it’s going to be 5 hours, 20 or 80. That is crazy, isn’t it? I know there is some variation and there are sites out there that give you an estimate, but looking at the game as a product, there is nothing that easily indicates how much time they want you to commit. Great point, great essay. I’ve liked every one I have read so far. I am saving the rest of them for when my soft cover copy shows up. I think I am going to try to give some kind of indication of game length, in the manual, for my next game, at least.
You have a piece in the book too, right? I think I saw your name when I was skimming through the author index but I haven’t run across your article yet; I’ve mostly been hopping around following the chapter-end links.
