Let's play in books - what gamebooks are and which ones are worth trying
Learning English from games and books is nice and quite effective. And if the game and the book are combined into one mobile application, it is also convenient. It so happened that over the past year I slowly got acquainted with the genre of mobile "gamebooks"; based on the results of familiarization, I am ready to admit that this is an interesting, original and not very well-known general public branch of either this or that literature. In this experimental article for Skyeng, I will shake "igodzhurovoy" antiquity, making a review of the most interesting representatives of the genre and their publishers.
But first, a little history.
Long ago, in the last century, I used books and computer games to consolidate my knowledge of the English language at school. The time was before the Internet, so the books were paper, and the toys were floppy. These methods had their pros and cons. The books were relatively easy to find, in them a rich vocabulary, finally, they can be read anywhere and at any time; on the other hand, they have a certain non-obligation - if I didn’t understand something, I missed it, hoping to figure it out later: well, don’t get the same dictionary in the subway. Toys (and these were quests) did not forgive such disorder - if something didn’t understand, didn’t go further, lost precious machine time, as a result - maximum attention and much more effective learning new words. Plus, the team had to enter the text, so you can not err in the words. The other side of the coin is that there are less texts in games, their quality was not always perfect.
Now, when we have computers in our pockets hundreds of times more powerful than the good old 286s, we can read and play anywhere without any problems. And we have the opportunity to combine the advantages of learning the language from books and games, using the “gamebooks” - books with game elements. Here, after each chapter, you choose the continuation of the plot, and in order for the choice to be correct, you must understand what is happening. About them will be discussed.
Terminology question
There are two very similar genres - interactive fiction (we often referred to as “text quests”) and gamebooks (they choose your own adventure books, books with branching plot). Recently, these phenomena have almost merged together, but their roots are radically different.
Programmers came up with interactive fiction, and it all started with Adventure, which gave the name to the genre. After Adventure, there were Zorki, then Kings and Space Quest, and then it all gradually evolved into Full Throttle. In classic “text quests”, instead of a picture, there is text, instead of clicking on the screen, you need to type text commands (“open the door”, “take a shovel”), and they still exist in one form or another. Somehow I will write an article about their current state, but for now I can send people interested in my work twenty years ago to the magazine “Country of Games”, which can be found in one strange place (warning: many letters!).
“Geymbuki” appeared as a literary movement, they were invented by writers, they were sold in bookstores as early as the 30s of the last century. These are ordinary paper books in which the reader is given a little freedom to choose the plot development. At the end of each chapter, he decides what will happen next, and finds the desired page. In the 70s they also evolved, moving towards the board role-playing games, they had fights on dice, cards with moving chips and other game attributes, but the basis was a literary story (though not a masterpiece), which Adventure didn’t have at all .
This heredity led to another difference between IF and gamebooks. In IF, the player had a certain freedom of action on each particular segment of the game (he could inspect locations, move between them, use objects and solve puzzles), but on the whole the plot remained linear and sooner or later led to a single final. In gamebooks, there is almost no freedom of action within the chapters, but there is a need to make decisions between them that branch the storyline, and there are always several finals.
Now the paths of these two different directions intersect and intertwine, but for clarity in this text I will only talk about gamebooks.
So let's go!
Choice of Games
A small American company specializing in text-only text stories with minimalist design. The literary component here in the foreground is the most real books, where your decisions influence the development of the plot, but in which you cannot “lose”, you can only reach different finals. The consequence of this approach is a great attention to the quality of the plot and language. A side effect is that there is nothing to do here, if you do not understand what is being said, therefore, they are more likely to fit for the Advanced level of language skills.
Choice of Games has opened everyone to their own scripting language for writing such "branching books", and quite a significant number of people took advantage of this. Their books are sold or distributed free under the Hosted Games label.
Geymbuki are available for all platforms, and the first chapters can be read in the browser for free - which is convenient if you have our extension for Chrome: you can translate texts and add words to the study.
In general, all the books of Choice of Games are good. You can start with their first creation, Choice of the Dragon , and the philosophical Choice of Robots ; choose a couple of recommendations here is not easy.
Artwork from Hosted, i.e. written by a freelance author, but the author of this, Heather Albano, before she managed to write several "official" books CoG. A fierce and surprisingly successful hodgepodge from Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Jekyll with Hyde, classical fantasy, Victorian England and steampunk. The story is fascinating, full of unexpected twists and plot forks. A great choice to start exploring the genre that you have to re-read and re-read, changing the story each time. To add incentive to repeat passes, there are “achievements” unlocked with your particular actions.
A gamebook telling about the life of a cat (or cat) taken home from a shelter. You have to decide whether to spoil in a tray or in shoes, drop a vase from a shelf or purr on your lap, agree to eat food or wait for foie gras. It would seem that the life of a cat is hardly full of events, but this is the most voluminous gamebook in the CoG catalog: there are 600 thousand words, more than in War and Peace. Lovers of cats - necessarily.
Living a book
Mexican company that has invested a lot of strength and love in the development of the engine, but seriously lagging behind competitors in terms of content. Books (here referred to as the pathbook) begin with fascinating strings, from which you expect something large and interesting, but immediately after the string comes a sudden crumpled end. At the same time, the reader has not so many opportunities to somehow influence the plot - forks here are five or six pieces per book, they happen in strange places and their influence on history is not obvious. However, all these books can be read once (and sometimes more) for free, and their small size may be to the liking of the language learners. And there are gamebooks for kids!
Adults: Past Mistakes ( Play , Appstore ) - a noir from a dark future after the 3rd World War, the setting is somewhat similar to Dick's "Man in High Castle". Unfortunately, the setting ends there. Dark Forest is a story about a strange adventure in the forest, which, again, has nothing to do with the plot.
Children: The Monster and the Cat - a sudden demonstration of the fact that in a children's book an approach with a very short and simple plot works great.
Cubus
The creators of Barcelona, ​​engaged in, in addition to geymbukov, also interactive museum tours. We started with the classic “branching books” (Deadman Diaries), but with music and rich design, and now we have developed our own role-playing system with cubes and write fantastic action movies (Heavy Metal Thunder). Despite the fact that the third part seems to be planned, these militants do not work on the seventh Android, so I will not write about them. In addition, in the asset Cubus is a completely unmatched product without any combat systems and fights on random numbers.
The frankenstein wars
AppStore / Google Play
Perhaps the best gamebook in this collection tells about the alternative history of 19th century France, where revolutionaries got Frankenstein’s diaries, learned how to make monsters from fallen soldiers, and reanimated Napoleon’s corpse, turning it into Darth Vader in an aquarium. The two main characters are brothers who, by the will of fate, were on opposite sides of the front. Or who are on the same side - it's up to you, a lot in this work can drastically change the decision of the reader. And here there is a text-shootout, text tactical battle and a great soundtrack. Sometimes the timer turns on: some sections need to pass quickly; with insufficient knowledge of the language, this can be difficult.
Inkle
Young guys from Cambridge, whose creations by all means pretend to be “real” games, while remaining de facto gamebooks. There are a lot of graphics, animation, sound, effects and all the other bells and whistles that are impossible in paper books, but still the plot is subject to your decisions, and these decisions must be made based on the read text. Inkle actively collaborates with game makers and publishers - they make projects for Penguin USA, including, for example, an application for memorizing English poetry Poems by Heart , and also write dialogues for toys using their open scripting language Ink . Since the guys are young and trendy, their own games come first for iOS, and only then, if lucky, for other platforms.
The book is a game based on "For 80 days around the world", very freely dealing with the original source. Actually, from Jules Verne there are 80 days left, as well as a number of adventures from his different works. At the same time, the world in which Passepartu (you) and Fogg travel is taken from the steampunk tradition - underwater trains run from London to Paris, steam aircrafts fly, crews are driven by robots, and there are technological wonders everywhere that are shiny with chrome. Actually, the main feature of the game is the study of its world during the journey. You can lose, not having time to get to the finish line, or if you run out of money or health - but this is completely unimportant, because every new journey is completely different from the previous one, there are hundreds of possible routes around the world. And, by the way, this is the champion in the number of words in this compilation: there are 750 thousand of them here, almost one and a half "War and Peace"!
Adaptation of the popular classic book role-playing game of the 80s by Steve Jackson, part of the Fighting Fantasy series (written by Jackson along with Jan Livingstone, one of the founders of Games Workshop). The game elements here take up a lot of space, you need to monitor health and fight enemies with sword and magic, but the text is still the basis; Many fights can be avoided by carefully reading the story, and in battles you need to pay attention to textual hints to figure out which technique is best to use. Magic spells are made up of letters, there are many spells, and they have to be memorized; however, they are similar to words, which can be useful when learning a language (HOT - fireball, FOG - blinding, etc.). The four parts (there were also four books) are interconnected, so you should start with the first one. It may seem a bit short for five dollars, but the foundation is laid in it, and then it becomes more fun.
Well, the bonus is a free Ink desktop demo called The Intercept . This is more than a good gamebook for about half an hour.
Tin man games
Classics computer geymbukov - Australian company Tin Man Games. These guys on gamebooks ate more than one dog, and if Inkle somehow managed to get Sorcery !, then everything else from Fighting Fantasy is here, as well as many of their own games. And these are really role-playing games rather than books - they have a primitive, but role-playing system, the character has equipment, and he constantly gets involved in fights (they can be avoided, but for this you need to pump certain skills and throw dice again). At the beginning of the passage, you can choose the level of difficulty, from brutal without the ability to “scroll back” to “reader's”, where all battles are resolved automatically in your favor. I recommend to choose a variant in the middle (with an unlimited number of “bookmarks”) - the literary merits of these works are not too striking, but as part of the game they go well.
GA is the Gamebook Adventures series, the main product of Tin Man Games; games in it do not have a through plot, so it’s worth starting with the most recent one. The protagonist, a petty bandit informer, is sent to find out the circumstances of the ambassador’s mysterious disappearance in the neighboring principality; having arrived, he finds himself in the depths of strange events around the revival of the god Azuria. The game is big, the plot is well-written, and the setting itself is unusual (and it becomes increasingly unusual along the way). Well, and plus is a well-developed role-playing system of Tin Man Games, where you can try to stupidly chop everything up with an ax, or you can read the texts and look for workarounds. There are small uncritical plot glitches, but this is expected from such a large and branching work.
An unexpected appeal for Tin Man Games to the classics: the electronic version of the paper game book of Ryan North, for which he once very successfully raised funds for Kickstarter. Absolutely insane and unusually funny retelling of Hamlet, in which you can “play” for Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet’s father (predictably quickly becoming his shadow). This is a literary project, not a game, but the plot development options are vast. Knowledge of the classics is desirable for understanding individual jokes, however, for convenience, the “Shakespearean plot” on the selection screens is marked with Yorick's skull. In addition, there are more than a hundred endings, including the invention of Ophelia central heating and the underwater adventures of the shadow of Hamlet’s father, who suddenly decided to become an ichthyologist. By the way, the continuation of Romeo and Juliet has already been published on paper .
Delight games
SP from Washington, Sam Landstrom's Delight Games - a kind of "Tin Man for the Poor." This is also a book role-playing game, but the grass is lower, the water is thinner. But everything can be downloaded in one package in the “freemium” mode: one part of the series went through, accumulated “coins”, opened the next one - or bought “coins” for real money (they are also added if you run the application every day). Sam is a prolific author, he has a lot of episodes, and he also attracts people from outside. All of them are far from stars, so one should not wait for literary discoveries. But where else can you find at once so many gamebooks of various genres for the most diverse audiences, including children?
On this today's review I finish. Well, since this is an experimental article, I will be very grateful for the comments: we want to understand how such texts are generally interesting for Habr's readers. Should I continue?
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/445722/
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