Weather Factory

There’s never been a ‘codex’  (or encyclopaedia, or lore compendium) in any game I’ve written. I hope there never will be. Mystery is the robe of the numinous! Imagine Twin Peaks if you paused to consult a codex every scene. Imagine Book of the New Sun with every enigmatic phrase immediately defined in parentheses. Imagine a sunset with hyperlinks. OK, that’s grandiloquent, but imagine Fallen London or Cultist Simulator if the first time you met the word ‘Vake’ or ‘Bazaar’ or ‘Long’ or ‘Meniscate’ you could just read a codex entry explaining exactly what it is.

I’ll phrase that last bit more precisely, because you sort of can, actually, if you alt-tab out. There is a fan wiki for every game I’ve ever written. You can look up any of the words I mentioned above and radically spoil the intended experience of slowly marinating in the way the meaning develops over experience.. I can’t do anything about that – I probably shouldn’t even want to do anything about that, because people like different things. It’s a done deal. So to phrase it more precisely: imagine if I had written these games in the expectation you would have to use those codex entries. It means that without the codex, the experience would be incoherent, and it requires use of the codex. It becomes like reading a novel in a foreign language you barely speak, and being forced to long-press on the screen every tenth word to understand what’s going on. It is no longer about building an experience where the discovery sine-wave – mystery, confusion, aha! – requires thought and artistry on the writer’s part. That thought and artistry is either never applied, or it’s undermined.

Let me give a couple of examples of that undermining. These examples are from well-made, intelligent games which I enjoyed, and I’m not attacking them! They’re just, also, from games which took an established mainstream approach, and I want to talk about why we’re not taking that approach.

First example below. In Deadfire, Obsidian put considerable effort into their pseudo-Italian, in the expectation that people could piece together meaning from context and general Romance language etymology… and then the UI obligingly taps you on the shoulder and tells you the answer. Like giving someone a crossword already filled in. Meanwhile, Berath is the god who gave us our main quest in the first scene of the game. If a player makes it this far in and needs to be reminded who he is, they’re a lost cause. The rest of us feel intermittently patronised every time we see his name highlighted.

I’ll outline some of the excellent reasons why so many studios do this.

One reason is that a studio wants to address as wide an audience as possible, including people who are absent-mindedly playing the game while second-screening Sons of Anarchy, and they don’t have the indie luxury of appealing to an attuned and attentive audience. We, however, do.

A second reason is that a studio has considerable number of writers working on disparate parts of a game over years, and it’s harder to plan out a Dune-like osmotic context seep when people can do a hundred sub-quests in a thousand different orders. (You know Herbert spent five years rewriting and revising Dune? Those epigraphic chapter headings represent a lot of architectural work.) We, however, have exactly one writer.

And a third reason, relevant here, is that sometimes there really is an urgent practical need to introduce a complex background so people can appreciate the story. I think in an ideal sense, this is just never true. If the context needs explaining, focus on the bits that don’t need explaining and let people miss what they don’t need. It’s not a documentary!

But – example 2 below – if you’re making Owlcat’s (excellent) Rogue Trader – a licensed game in a forty-plus-year-old setting – and you need to appeal to both newcomers and veterans, you can’t just decide to cut out the less relevant background. And you really do need the tooltips.

So here, at worst. it’s a necessary evil. But it needs a codex behind it. And for many of us, seeing a codex entry like this sinks our souls in marshy fear. Have you done enough homework? Are you going to be ready to answer questions later?

 

Again, let me be clear, these are well-executed codex entries. They’re clearly written and attractively presented. And a lot of players – perhaps the majority – demand something like this. But as I said above, one of the privileges of being an indie is that you can aim your work at a minority audience.

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Travelling at Night is not a licensed game nor a forty-year-old setting. But it is an eight-year-old setting which has served two notoriously obscure games, where we need to cater to newcomers who won’t know what the hell an Hour is alongside Cultist veterans with nuanced opinions on the difference between Aspects and Principles.

So I’ve caved to the inevitable and we’ve added a feature to help orient the confused. But it’s not a codex. It’s not.

Okay, it’s got some codex-like features. You can search for a topic, for instance:

What’s that star-marker? Is it an ‘unread’ marker? No, because the search feature only shows things you’ve already seen. We want to retain as much as we can of that drip-feed artistry, and we don’t want to inspire that looming fear of homework. We’ll come back to the star-marker in a minute. It’s one of the (relatively few) ways in which our Footnotes differ mechanically from a traditional codex. The main difference is one of approach.

I can think of at least one wildly famous example of a narrative which prominently featured something you might call a codex. In fact it didn’t just feature it prominently; it was a central character.

Any ideas?

Click the blurred image below to see what I’m thinking about.

That’s the 1981 TV show version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which featured animated segments where the Guide itself glossed or riffed on or foreshadowed the narrative. Do take a minute to watch the animated bit of that video. It glosses and foreshadows the point I’m about to make. It’s also very funny.

My point is this. A game shows, a codex tells. Does that Hitchhikers segment show or tell? The only meaningful answer is ‘yes, definitely’. You can see something similar in Susanna Clarke’s pseudo-scholarly footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, or, to take it a step further, the metaleptic¹  commentary and index in Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

So Travelling at Night is going to feature animated codex elements? Or I’m going to write like Adams, or Clarke, or Nabokov? Thankfully we don’t need to do any of that. We just need to find ways to make the transition between text and footnotes² mildly entertaining, or otherwise make sure the two elements work together as parts of a whole intented experience.

I’ve just demonstrated a really, really simple way of doing that in the images above! You’ll notice all of them have captions, which make an observation or mention something semi-relevant. They’d be meaningless without the actual images.

Similarly, this is not really useful out of context, but the original link provides the context, and the concision means it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Or we can move away from the encyclopaedia tone of a codex entry into the first person, alongside some emotionally establishing commentary.

Sometimes it is really hard to avoid that encyclopaedia tone. I’ve rewritten this one a couple of times and will probably rewrite again because it’s still a little too expository, but there’s some basic information I want to make sure people don’t miss. Alt-history can be confusing. So we give people a small reason to care, and bend the flow back into the actual game experience:

That star-marker I’ve mentioned above is a signal that there’s a snacky on the other side of the link. (You don’t remember to take the choice right away – we don’t have ‘unread’ markers, but we do track ‘unrealised choices’ so you don’t lose them.)

And once we’ve established that mechanism, we can use it to foreshadow more significant in-game choices.

Or we can work with the player’s evolving understanding. ‘Tell me the Watchman is a Lantern Hour without telling me he’s a Lantern Hour.’

…or we can sidestep some basic expectations and engage emotionally and aesthetically as well as metatextually.

Was it all so bad? Always?

 

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¹ A nicely semi-obscure word useful for impressing people when you want to talk about ‘moving between different levels of narrative realilty, like in a Stoppard play or an Ice Pick Lodge game’

² ‘Transition between primary and secondary levels of narrative reality’: METALEPSIS, cool word

³ There’s no way to reach this footnote from the main text of this blog post. You’ve just read it because you finished the blog post or looked down after reading a real footnote. But I’ll mention in passing that the vibrant magenta link text is a placeholder colour – I just forgot to add the matching colours when I was styling the new version of the UI.