intfiction.org

I totally see the criticism about abstractness. My favourite moments so far have been in failing terribly or narrowly succeeding in very unlikely one-off card events. I know that tactically if I want to get nicer lodgings and (I presume) be able to hold more cards at any given time, then I should grind cat catching or the poetry storylets, but I'm more interested in the one-off events.

Tactics never (much) enter into it ... After a while, once you get your sea-legs (if you stick around; it takes a few turns) you may find that you begin picking goals of your own (rather than the goals provided) and at that point, goal-seeking begins to produce some (small) satisfaction, but never very much, IMO.

For me at least, the sense of character definition became a genuine thing maybe five days in, but the real draw is the sketch-by-sketch worldbuilding. As a sandbox game, though (and it really is very sandboxy) I think everyone will find something a bit different in it (or nothing at all, as the case may be).

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Fallen London is about grinding, but it does *have* story.

Hello all. Ta for the feedback.

Abstractness: that drops off later. There are a lot of long, highly-specific, non-repeatable stories. It never completely goes away, because we wanted some stories to be repeatable, and because the inspiration for the very early game was the tradition of Facebook grind RPGs: and that's still in the bones of the beast.

The grinding. Guilty. At its best it works as a mechanism for drip-feeding and preventing burnout. At its worst it's left over from the original grindy inspirations, and it does help us keep the servers on. It was very hard to judge pacing when we were still learning how all this works. I know it drives some people crazy. We're toning it down for subsequent games, but FL (all 750K words of it) is much too big to retool.

Night Circus. The nature of the brief was that it was supposed to a a meandering, directionless sort of experience - but that, we realised eventually, was a problem in itself. And we've realised since that a purely random card draw, without any pinned / static cards, is just zero-choice design. There's some stuff we're proud of in there, though (not least the art direction).



You know we're opening up the platform for this, basically now? http://signup.storynexus.com/ It doesn't really allow rich interaction between cards, so I don't know how much of an Ascension-y game you could put together. But we'd be delighted to see something like that.

(edit: typo)

But we tell stories like this all the time. When a king offers a brave little tailor half his kingdom, we don't generally object that the particular kingdom is not specified, and nor is the precise acreage entailed by the contract. While Grimm contains few artists' models, it has plenty of love-objects that are just as abstract. The parable of the workers in the vineyard does not name any of its characters, or show us anything of the flesh and blood of labour negotiations; and when we read The Trial we are not meant to understand that Josef K is contending with a real legal system that could be quite clearly understood, had he only access to a better lawyer. In many kinds of stories, specifics are a red herring: when we're told that Samson killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, we're misreading if we ask who counted the bodies, or how the jawbone failed to shatter over so many blunt impacts. This doesn't make any of them bad stories, or non-stories; it makes them stories of a different kind.

(Specific characters do, in fact, crop up in Echo Bazaar, although they're almost never given names.)

To my mind, the point is that the modrons understand human story-telling techniques all too well, structurally speaking, but aren't very good at the veneer. (There's an advert in the background of a Buck Godot comic, where aliens are trying to sell human-style food to humans: "Fat! Salt! Sugars! Alcohol! We know what you like!" The joke isn't that humans don't like fat, salt, or alcohol; it's that we prefer them delivered a little more artfully than that. Sometimes that means more specific flavours! But equally, it can mean something that's just fats and sugar, beautifully made.)

Now, admittedly, one side-effect is that this makes Echo Bazaar, like many videogame narratives, a story about someone who, at best, is emotionally distant and doesn't really have friends, and at worst a sociopath. (Reading Against Nature is a pretty good preamble to Echo Bazaar-ing.) But it's very hard to accomplish anything else in a CRPG-like setup! Anybody who can show me a CRPG NPC who functions primarily as a friend gets approximately a million points. (Like Planescape:Torment, Echo Bazaar is pretty good at making a virtue out of a constraint.)

Finally, an entire chapter from one of my very favourite books:

Echo Bazaar isn't a very good story in the sense of an histoire, a relation of particular people and specific incidents. It's a perfectly good carousel of fantasies, though.

Precisely this. And I really should finish Torment someday ... I keep re-buying it with intent ...



My friend Tim once sat staring at a potato chip: "A slice of potato isn't really interesting. But turn it into a delivery mechanism for salt and fat? Bam."

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Sure, the unstated assumption of my argument was that if <em>Fallen London</em> is going for any kind of storytelling, it is going for what we may perhaps call psychological storytelling. That is not the only kind, and not necessarily the best kind. But I didn't see any traces of parable, or myth, or what-have-you in the narration, so the assumption seemed warranted.

Though it may not, in fact, be true.

(Note that Calvino is very different from <em>Fallen London</em>: he doesn't follow the structures of story at all when he is painting his cityscapes.)

As you get into higher levels in Fallen London, there's a definite sense (at least, I got it) that your character is not so much an actual, literal person as a walking legend, about as concrete as Sweeney Todd (a little less abstract than Spring-heeled Jack, but of the same water.) And the detachment from tokens (individual instances of a storylet) heightens the sense of types. For me, at least. But I agree that this sense doesn't kick in for a while.

To put it another way: it's not so much a story about a blackguard who seduces an artist's model, as it is a reminder that Fallen London is the sort of city in which artist's models are seduced by blackguards.

I'm interested to know what people think of the gameplay UI. When I tried it out the flow felt poorly organized, which turned me off to the game in general.

Am I just spoiled by text interpreters .

it's been a while, but I remember feeling that the UI was pretty frustrating. The main issue I recall is with the tabs: I remember clicking on a tab to try to find something interesting to do, and then returning to the tab I was just in, I'd find that the content that had been there before was changed. Perhaps you get used to this, but I felt as though the affordances for interaction thoroughly unpredictable.

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Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
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