The Rise and Fall of the Gamebook
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The Rise and Fall of the Gamebook Author: Anders Österberg The University of Stockholm 2008 Abstract The gamebook is an interactive book that became a huge commercial success in the eighties, with the Fighting Fantasy and the Lone Wolf series, which sold millions of copies worldwide. The interactive book has come a long way from the experimental novels by Jorge Luis Borges in the forties, to the gamebook in the eighties, when the whole idea of printed interactive books reached a creative and commercial peak. The subsequent decline of the interest in the gamebook in the nineties coincidences with the growth of the computer games industry. Since the computer games evolved rapidly, and became more and more sophisticated, while the gamebook as a printed medium no longer could compete with the rival, all gamebook series were discontinued in the nineties. The core of this inquiry is to make a comparison between the two biggest and most commercially successful series: Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf. Included in the paper is also a brief history of the interactive book, as well as an analysis of the renaissance the gamebook is currently enjoying, and a look into the future of the format. Spelboken är en interaktiv bok som blev en stor kommersiell framgång på åttiotalet, med Fighting Fantasy och Ensamma Vargen serierna, som såldes i miljontals exemplar världen över. Den interaktiva boken har kommit en lång väg från Jorge Luis Borges experimentella böcker från fyrtiotalet, till spelboken på åttiotalet, när hela idén med tryckta interaktiva böcker nådde sin kreativa och kommersiella höjdpunkt. Det efterföljande sjunkande intresset för spelböcker på nittiotalet sammanträffar med framväxten av dataspelsindustrin. Eftersom datorspelen evolverade snabbt och blev mer och mer sofistikerade, medan spelboken som ett tryckt medium inte längre kunde tävla med rivalen, upphörde alla spelboksserier att ges ut på nittiotalet. Kärnan i denna undersökning handlar om att göra en jämförelse mellan de två största och mest kommersiellt framgångsrika serierna: Fighting Fantasy och Ensamma Vargen. En kort historik över den interaktiva boken ingår också i uppsatsen, liksom en analys av renässansen som spelboken för närvarande åtnjuter, och en titt på formatets framtid. 2 Table of contents 1. Introduction 4 1.1 What is a gamebook? 4 1.2 Purpose 5 1.3 Methodology 6 2. The history of the gamebook 7 3. Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf – a comparison 12 4. From the present into the future 23 5. Summary 27 6. References 29 Appendices: Appendix A – List of Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf gamebooks 30 Appendix B – Covers 33 3 1. Introduction 1.1 What is a gamebook? What is a gamebook? The short answer is that a gamebook is part book, part game. The long answer is that the gamebook is a subgenre of the interactive book. The reader takes on a role of a character in a fictional world, usually a fantasy world, but there are some science fiction stories out there too, as well as several other genres. The difference between a gamebook and an interactive book is that the gamebook is a game. The gamebook consists of numbered sections; in most of these sections the reader is presented with a few choices, and then he or she proceeds to the corresponding numbered section. For example: if you are reading through paragraph 88, and are given the option to either take the right path or the left path, you either turn to paragraph 217 if you want to go right, or turn to paragraph 161 if you would rather pick the left path. In other words a gamebook, just like any other interactive book, is completely non-linear. If you try to read the paragraphs chronologically, i.e. reading 1, 2, 3, et cetera, you will not understand what is going on. All gamebooks start with paragraph one, and then continues to branch off in different directions. Although, branching is perhaps not the best choice of words as the paths have a tendency to converge every now and then, just to branch off in different directions once more. A better word to describe the process would be intertwining, since there often are certain fixed points in the storyline where all paths come together before taking different directions again. Even if all gamebooks start with paragraph one, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a gamebook must end with the last paragraph. The gamebook series examined in this paper, Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf, have only one end, but some other series have multiple endings. While the gamebook format originated from the interactive book they are most closely related to the role-playing games (RPGs), and are sometimes referred to as solitaire role- playing. The gamebooks and the role-playing games became big in the seventies and eighties, and attracted millions of young people, teenagers and college-students all over the world. The huge commercial breakthrough of the gamebooks in the eighties was primarily due to the interest of role-playing teenagers. But unlike the RPGs this trend would not last, as the 4 interest in gamebooks rapidly waned in the nineties. The main reason behind this is because the gamebooks, being a printed medium, were unable to renew and reinvent themselves, while the computer games, being an electronic medium, constantly evolved and became far more complex than the crude original computer games from the late seventies. 1.2 Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the gamebook a bit closer, by looking into the history and origin of the gamebook, and by making a detailed comparison between the Fighting Fantasy series and the Lone Wolf series. I will also make a prognosis of the future for the gamebook, as the gamebooks are going through a small renaissance right now, as both series are being reprinted again. Through the expository thesis my aim is to make the reader a bit more familiar with the concept of the gamebook; to show why the gamebooks are so attractive to many people; and to expose the differences between Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf. As for the author’s personal opinion on the subject I’ve had a passion for the gamebook ever since I first stumbled over the Lone Wolf books in Swedish in the mid-eighties. I grew up with these books, and they will always have a special place in my heart, especially the first books of the Lone Wolf series. The Fighting Fantasy books are also nice, but with the exception of a couple of them I’ve never had quite the same interest in them as I have in the first Lone Wolf books. So it’s quite possible that I may be slightly biased in my comparison of the two series. Admittedly, the main reason why I love the original books so much is because of pure, unadulterated nostalgia, which I’m not ashamed to admit. But it’s more to it than that. Unlike regular books I read at the time, like The Lord of the Rings, A Wizard of Earthsea, and so on, the gamebooks transported me to a different world completely. The story in a gamebook is told from a second person’s point of view. You are the hero, you make all the decisions. This ingenuous way of telling a story makes it easier to be completely immersed in a story as compared to simply reading about someone else’s adventures. In a regular novel you can read about someone discovering things, but in a gamebook you can make these discoveries yourself: you can turn every stone, search every corner, and travel along every path by yourself. It’s a wonderful feeling to investigate a world on your own, and not through a third person’s point of view. Furthermore, it has always intrigued me that the interactive book has a near endless potential to reinvent itself, albeit perhaps not in printed form. The computer game does not 5 suffer from the same limitations as the gamebook, and that’s why the computer game’s industry keeps expanding while the interactive book is close to its end. With that said it’s important to point out that the computer game by definition is interactive, and that it simply is a continuation of the gamebook in an electronic form. The primary aim of both the gamebook and the computer game has always been exploration and problem-solving; to find new ways to beat the game. That never changes. Anyway, to sum up, the three subjects I will examine in this paper are: 1. The history of the gamebook. 2. The differences and similarities between Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf. 3. What the future of the gamebook may look like. 1.3 Methodology The main focus of this paper is to examine the differences between Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf. For that reason I have created two categories: game value and entertainment value, to see how the two series differs in their aims. Simply put, the game value measures how challenging a gamebook is; in other words: how many times the game must be played in order to be solved. The entertainment value measures the freedom to choose alternate paths in the game, which means that the game can be replayed many times.1 The difference is that with the game value new paths must be explored in order to win the game; the entertainment value means that other paths are being explored after the game has been won simply for the sheer joy of investigating every path of the game. I will not quantify this game value versus entertainment value thesis because a book for book comparison would be far too extensive for a regular university paper of this size, and it would overshadow other aspects of the gamebook I want to examine.