Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Lets design the novel from scratch, for 2011.

cliffski

I have chatted to various people who dabble in virtual novels / interactive fiction. I hear not much money is made, but this surprises me. I am assuming that nobody has really done it right yet.

Take all this with a pinch of salt, because I rarely read novels, I prefer businessy / pop-sciency or historical reading. But here goes.

Firstly, a 2011 virtual-novel needs to be extensively hyperlinked. If I’m reading about a character, and I forget who the hell they are, I should be able to hover over their name and be reminded. I tend to read novels in short bursts. I always forget who is who. Especially in novels like catch 22, with 400 characters in

Secondly, a 2011 virtual novel should never, ever have me confused, or out of the loop. I guess the old fashioned way books handled this was footnotes, and I can see how they might have seemed a bit jarring in terms of layout. However, this is the time of hyperlinking, so we have basically solved all that.  Say your story is set is Rome, would it hurt to have a map of rome in the book? maybe a huge, detailed one?

Thirdly, the 2011 virtual novel should be a two way process in terms of feedback. Books really lack this. Shouldn’t it be trivial to send feedback to the author? The best example I have here is Iain M Banks. He is a great ‘big concept’ sci-fi writer, who is also a bit sick and twisted. Frankly, I hate the sick and twisted bits, and sometimes even skip them. I don’t want to read sci fi novels to feel scared or horrified, just amazed and interested is fine. I’d love to find an automated way to convey this to him. For all I know, EVERYONE reading his novels feels the same way, but they keep buying them, so he doesn’t know.

Fourthly, the 2011 virtual novel should have some sort of optional community interaction. Once I’ve watched a movie, I often surf to wikipedia or imdb to see what people think of it, and how it was described. Sometimes there are whole subtexts to movies I miss out on, or vital bits of background to characters that escaped my attention. I’d love access to that sort of post-novel discussion within the novel itself.

All of my suggestions are likely rubbish, but one thing is true. The novel will change as a result of technology, we just don’t know exactly how yet. What are your guesses as to what will happen?

9 thoughts on Lets design the novel from scratch, for 2011.

  1. Not sure how technology will change the novel but completely with you on the Iain M Banks thing.

  2. Have a look at Ted Nelson’s work on “Hypertext”. Hypertext as it stands now (unidirectional links) is something of a simplification/bastardization of some of his early work. He’s written a few books on it, also using the concepts in print form (honestly, with varying degrees of success).

    He’s tried to actualize it in various capacities over the years, but the concepts are all well fleshed out.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

    Enjoy.

    -ryan

  4. I think that many of these things will happen when readers become more prevalent, but that is assuming that they become useful. Already, my Sony PRS-600 will give me a dictionary if I double-click words and I’m sure links would be just as easy.

    I always thought it would be cool if there was a wiki site behind my novels and stories. Just so someone could click on a name and get the full story behind it, but obviously that requires a) fans and b) people willing to enter data. Of course, there is also the whole spoiler thing you have to worry about since someone might click on the name in chapter one of book one and see stuff about how they die in book four.

    I did see one of those “pie in the sky” where the reader had a GPS and the author could have special locations to see specials. I’ve already seen deleted scenes from novels in Kindles. And many indie authors I chat with seem to have forums and the like.

    I think it is already happening. Just not the hyperlinks because most hardcopy books have really lousy click processing. :)

    But, I still want the links because I want to see those maps, pictures, and fan-art. Plus, I think many authors would kill for the obsessive fans of say the Star Wars universe and their research.

  5. “All of my suggestions are likely rubbish, but one thing is true. The novel will change as a result of technology, we just don’t know exactly how yet.”

    Isn’t a novel unidirectional narrative storytelling via prose? Preceded by the epic poem, saga, aural myth, play, etc, all of which forms survive with only minor accommodations for the printing press?

    If you make technological changes you have something else (such as IF), which may be compelling but isn’t a novel, even if it’s novel enough to replace it.

  6. Hi Cliff, just caught your video on indie gamer development, fantastic if a little depressing but good to hear the reality of it all. Sent it round a bunch of people in the studio and it’s a bit of a talking point at the moment at LH.

    You’ve also managed to describe me exactly when it comes to someone who constantly develops tech for an indie game but never gets the game finished (BTW here’s even the latest vid for StarRaiders Armada, http://www.youtube.com/watchv=b2vIyndMy80&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

    Anyway, look forward catching up one day if you pop down LH (be great to see Garys face if you pop in ;-)) or Guildford or maybe GDC/Develop

    Marcus

  8. I hope you are wrong this time, Cliff. I have found that bouncing around the web surfing has noticeably shortened my attention span. After I read some studies that showed that it’s not just me, I decided to replace my surfing with reading books, as a way to retrain my brain to focus on one thing for an extended period of time.

    I purchased an eReader (Sony PRS-650 – damn fine product) and have replaced evening surfing with evening reading. So far, it seems to be working, which is great news for me.

    For a moment I worried that you were correct, and that novels would be replaced with some wikipedia-like set of links, but then I relaxed when I realized that even if this happens, I’ll still have thousands of existing works to pick from – more than I can read in my lifetime.

    It seems to me that exercising our brains, forcing them to remember plots and characters, and to follow a narrative, is a great way to counter-act the soundbite-driven media and “too long, did not read” impulses brought on by the internet.

    Hmmm … long post. Probably won’t get read. ;)

  9. I’m not sure if I agree with you here Cliff, I think the strong point of novels is the high imagination factor. A lot of times, even if I find myself ‘confused,’ or not being able to perfectly envision the environment surrounding the characters, my imagination fills in the blanks for me, making the novel experience ‘my own,’ versus something that’s fed to me through pictures, or hyperlinks as you’re suggesting.

    I think that’s one of the reasons that most pen-and-paper roleplaying folks are still pretty die hard about their pens and paper :)

    $.02 transaction pending.

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