Learning English from games and books is pleasant and quite effective. And if the game and the book are combined into one mobile application, itβs 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 too well-known branch of either games or literature to the general public. In this Skyeng-experimental article, I'm going to shake up the "gaming" old days by reviewing the most interesting representatives of the genre and their publishers.
But first, a little history.
A long time ago, back in the last century, I used books and computer games to reinforce my knowledge of English at school. The time was before the Internet, so books were paper, and toys were diskette. These methods had their pros and cons. The books were relatively easy to find, they had a rich vocabulary, and finally, they could be read anywhere and anytime; on the other hand, they are inherent in some optionality - if I didnβt understand something, I skipped it, hoping to figure it out later: well, donβt get a dictionary in the subway. Toys (and these were quests) did not forgive such carelessness - if you didnβt understand something, didnβt go further, lost precious machine time, as a result - maximum attention and much more effective memorization of new words. Plus, the commands had to be entered in text, so you canβt make mistakes in words. The other side of the coin is that there are fewer texts in games, their quality was not always ideal.
Now that we have computers hundreds of times more powerful than the good old 286s in our pockets, we can easily read and play anywhere. And we also have the opportunity to combine the advantages of learning a language from books and games, using "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 need to understand what is happening. They will be discussed.
Terminology issue
There are two very similar genres - interactive fiction (we often call it βtext questsβ) and gamebooks (they are also choose your own adventure books, books with a branching plot). Recently, these phenomena have almost merged together, but their roots are radically different.
Interactive fiction was invented by programmers, and it all started with Adventure, which gave the genre its name. After Adventure there were Zorks, then Kings and Space Quests, and then all this gradually evolved into Full Throttle. In classic βtext questsβ, instead of a picture, there is text, instead of clicking on the screen, you need to type text commands (βopen the doorβ, βtake a shovelβ), and they still exist in one form or another. Someday I will write an article about their current state, but for now I can refer those interested to my work twenty years ago for the Land of Games magazine, which can be found in (warning: many letters!).
"Gamebooks" appeared as a literary trend, they were invented by writers, they were sold in bookstores back in the 30s of the last century. These are ordinary paper books in which the reader is given a little freedom to choose the development of the plot. At the end of each chapter, he decides what will happen next and finds the right page. In the 70s, they also evolved, moving towards tabletop role-playing games, they introduced dice fights, cards with chip movement and other game attributes, but at the core there was a literary plot (albeit not a masterpiece), which Adventure did not have at all .
This inheritance has led to another difference between IF and gamebooks. In IF, the player had a certain freedom of action in each particular segment of the game (he could inspect locations, move between them, use objects and solve puzzles), but in general the plot remained linear and sooner or later led to a single ending. In gamebooks, there is almost no freedom of action within the chapters, but between them you need to make decisions branching the storyline, and there are always several endings.
Now the paths of these two different directions have crossed and intertwined, but for the sake of clarity in this text I will only talk about gamebooks.
So there you go!
A small American company specializing in exclusively text-based stories with minimalistic design. The literary component is in the foreground here, these are real books, where your decisions affect the development of the plot, but in which you cannot βloseβ, you can only reach different endings. 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 at stake, so they are more suitable for the Advanced level of knowledge of the language.
Choice of Games has opened its own scripting language to anyone who wants to write such "branching books", and quite a noticeable number of people have taken advantage of this. Their books are sold or given away for free under the brand name .
Gamebooks are available for all platforms, and the first chapters can be read for free in the browser - which is convenient if you have for Chrome: you can translate texts and add words to study.
In general, all Choice of Games books are good. You can start with their first creation , and from a philosophical ; It's not easy to choose a couple of recommendations here.
Artwork from Hosted, i.e. written by a freelance writer, but this author, Heather Albano, had previously written several "official" CoG books. A fierce and surprisingly successful hodgepodge of Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Jekyll and Hyde, classic fantasy, Victorian England and steampunk. The story is captivating, full of unexpected twists and turns. An excellent choice to start your acquaintance with a genre that you will have to re-read and re-read, each time changing the story. To add to the replay incentive, there are "achievements" that unlock when you do certain things.
A gamebook that tells about the life of a cat (or cat) taken home from a shelter. You have to decide whether to shit in a tray or in shoes, throw a vase off a shelf or purr on your knees, 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. A must for cat lovers.
A Mexican firm that put a lot of effort and love into the development of the engine, but is seriously lagging behind the competition in terms of content. Books (here referred to as pathbooks) begin with fascinating plots from which you expect something big and interesting, but immediately after the plot comes a sudden crumpled end. At the same time, the reader does not have so many opportunities to somehow influence the plot - there are five or six forks in the book, they happen in strange places and their influence on the story is not obvious. However, all these books can be read once (and sometimes more) for free, and their small size may appeal to language learners. There are also gamebooks for kids!
Adults: Past Mistakes (, ) is a film noir from a dystopian future after World War 3, with a setting somewhat similar to Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Unfortunately, the setting ends everything. - a story about a strange adventure in the forest, which again has nothing to do with the plot.
Kids: β a sudden demonstration that in a children's book, a very short and simple story approach works great.
Creators from Barcelona, ββengaged in, in addition to gamebooks, also interactive museum tours. Started with the classic "branching books" (Deadman Diaries), but with music and rich design, and now they have developed their own role-playing system with dice and write fantastic action movies (Heavy Metal Thunder). Despite the fact that a third part is planned, these action movies do not work on the seventh Android, so I will not write about them. In addition, Cubus has an absolutely incomparable work without any combat systems and fights on random numbers.
The Frankenstein Wars
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Perhaps the best gamebook in this collection tells about an alternate history of XNUMXth-century France, where revolutionaries got hold of Frankenstein's diaries, learned how to make monsters out of fallen soldiers, and reanimated Napoleon's corpse, turning him into Darth Vader in an aquarium. The two main characters are brothers who, by the will of fate, ended up on opposite sides of the front. Or those who are on the same side - it's up to you, a lot in this work can change dramatically by the reader's decision. And there is also a text shootout, a text tactical battle and a great soundtrack. Sometimes the timer turns on: some sections must be completed quickly; with insufficient knowledge of the language, this can cause difficulties.
Young guys from Cambridge, whose creations by all means pretend to be "real" games, 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 text you read. Inkle actively cooperates with game manufacturers and publishers - they make projects for Penguin USA, including, for example, an application for memorizing English poetry , and also write dialogues for toys using their open . Since the guys are young and trendy, their own games are released for iOS first, and only then, with luck, for other platforms.
A playbook based on "Around the World in 80 Days", which is very loose with the original source. Actually, 80 days remained from Jules Verne, as well as a number of adventures from his various works. At the same time, the world in which Passepartout (you) and Fogg travel is taken from the steampunk tradition - there are underwater trains from London to Paris, steam-powered airships fly, crews are controlled by robots and technological marvels are everywhere shiny chrome. Actually, the main feature of the game is the exploration of its world during the journey. You can lose before you reach the finish line, or if you run out of money or health - but it doesnβt matter at all, because each new trip is radically different from the previous one, there are hundreds of possible routes around the world. And by the way, this is the champion in terms of the number of words in this collection: there are 750 thousand of them, almost one and a half "War and Peace"!
An adaptation of Steve Jackson's popular 80s classic book RPG in the Fighting Fantasy series (written by Jackson with Ian Livingston, co-founder of Games Workshop). Game elements here take up a lot of space, you need to monitor your health and fight enemies with sword and magic, but the text is still at the core; many fights can be avoided by carefully reading the story, and in battles you need to pay attention to textual hints in order to guess which technique is best to use. Magic spells are assembled from 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.). Four parts (there were also four books) are interconnected, so you need to start from the first. It may seem short at five bucks, but it builds the foundation and gets more fun from there.
Well, as a bonus - a free desktop demo of the Ink engine called . This is more than a good gamebook for about half an hour.
The classic of computer gamebooks is the Australian company Tin Man Games. These gamebook guys have eaten more than one dog, and if Inkle somehow managed to get their hands on Sorcery!, then everything else from Fighting Fantasy is here, as well as a lot of their own games. And these are really more role-playing games than books - they have a role-playing system, albeit a primitive one, the character has equipment, and he constantly gets into fights (they can be avoided, but for this you need to pump certain skills and roll dice again). At the beginning of the passage, you can choose the level of difficulty, from brutal without the ability to "flip back" to "reader's", where all battles are resolved automatically in your favor. I recommend choosing the option 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 staple of Tin Man Games; the games in it do not have a through plot, so itβs worth starting with the most recent. The main character, a petty bandit-informant, is sent to find out the circumstances of the mysterious disappearance of an ambassador in a neighboring principality; upon arrival, he finds himself in the abyss of strange events around the rebirth of the god Azuria. The game is big, the plot is well written, and the setting itself is unusual (and gets more unusual as it goes). Well, plus - a well-developed role-playing system Tin Man Games, where you can try to stupidly chop everything with an ax, or you can read the texts and look for workarounds. There are some minor non-critical plot glitches, but that's to be expected from such a large and branching work.
An unexpected take on a classic for Tin Man Games: an electronic version of Ryan North's paper gamebook, for which he raised funds very successfully on Kickstarter. An absolutely crazy and extraordinarily funny retelling of "Hamlet" in which you can "play" as Hamlet, Ophelia and Hamlet's father (predictably quickly becoming his shadow). This is a literary project, not a game, but there are a lot of options for the development of the plot. Knowledge of the classics is desirable in order to understand 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 central heating by Ophelia 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 .
Washington DC based IE Sam Landstrom's Delight Games is a kind of Poor Man's Tin Man. These are also book role-playing games, but the grass is lower here, the water is thinner. But everything is possible in freemium mode: completed one part of the series, accumulated βcoinsβ, opened the next one - or bought βcoinsβ for real money (they are also thrown up if you run the application every day). Sam is a prolific author, he has a lot of episodes, and besides, he attracts people from the outside. All of them are far from being stars, so there is no need to wait for literary discoveries. But where else can you find so many gamebooks of various genres at once for a wide variety of audiences, including children?
This concludes today's review. Well, since this is an experimental article, I will be very grateful for comments: we want to understand how interesting such texts are in general for readers of Habr. Is it worth continuing?
Source: habr.com