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Windhammer Prize for Gamebooks

The Windhammer Prize is a prize for short traditional-style gamebooks: distributed in PDF, but designed to be played with a pencil and paper and sometimes dice. Windhammer contestants have to be short — no more than 100 segments allowed — and the contest is run yearly. It feels a bit odd, especially now that the IF community itself produces so much choice-based literature, that there’s so little discussion of gamebooks or awareness of the surrounding community. So as part of my continuing mission to cover IF-adjacent material, I tried out a bunch of Windhammer contestants.

Some highlights follow.

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Three Fourths Home ([bracket]games)

Three Fourths Home is a choice-based interactive story about a young adult named Kelly driving home through the Nebraska rain while carrying on a telephone conversation with her mother (and, as Mom passes the phone around, other members of the family). With music, sound effects, and illustration, it’s more lushly constructed than the average Twine game, but offers the same general style of play.

The conversation is simple menu-based stuff, usually with two or three available options, but — a little like Coming Out Simulator 2014 — Three Fourths Home also uses animation and location imagery to remind you constantly of where you are, as your car slides down the road between corn fields and past water tanks and into gathering darkness. While you play, you have to actively keep driving your car, or the whole story slides to a stop. Driving only consists of holding down a single button, but I found this was a good physical representation of being slightly distracted by an ongoing task. Sound effects also present some environmental distractions.

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Loose Strands (Darned Sock Productions) and Mapped CYOA

Loose Strands is a choice-based interactive story app for kids ages 9+. It tells the story of Roland Bartholomew Dexter the Third, a boy who lives in an impoverished barbershop and is never allowed to go outside. His parents fashion clothes and even food out of hair leavings. Since he can’t go outside to school, he reads books about history and dinosaurs and airplanes, but these books have been so rigorously censored that they aren’t much fun. It never seems to be his birthday.

The only bright spot, if you want to call it that, is that Roland has unusually vivid dreams about the might-have-beens, the things that would have occurred if only he’d made a different decision from the one he did take.

Loose Strands is a story about regret: about being debilitated by the desire to erase the past, or, conversely, plagued by the inability to learn from our mistakes. It handles this with a kind of Lemony Snicket gloss. The villain is cartoonishly evil, the world a fantastic rendition of a totalitarian dystopia. The characters are charming, but not enormously nuanced. Now and then the narrator addresses the reader in a condescending Let Me Tell You About The World fashion, and the pacing around the end of part 1 felt a bit slow to me. Nonetheless, it’s a story about the nature of choices that makes a strong use of the choose-your-path structure.

Whenever you get to a choice point, you can swipe the page in one of two (or occasionally three) directions in order to proceed to the next portion:

And when you’ve made a choice, the book immediately zooms to the overall story map and blacks out a bunch of spots — showing you how your decision has prevented you from ever seeing certain possible futures. It’s partly a reminder that what you do matters, a “Clementine will remember that” tag — but it’s expressed in an explicitly negative way.

Likewise, you can sometimes use the map to go to an earlier page, but if you’re trying to rewind too much, you’ll get a message saying you’re not allowed to go back.

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if (Nicholas Bourbaki)

“This author sent me a review copy of his CYOA novel.” I took the book out of its wrapper and held it up.

“Nicolas Bourbaki doesn’t exist,” my husband said. “He’s an invention.”

Someone had handwritten the enclosed note. I shrugged. “Maybe this guy really has that name.”

We were both wrong, as it happens; as this interview explains, Bourbaki-the-author assumed, with an extra h in the first name, a shadow of Nicolas Bourbaki the collective of pseudonymous mathematicians. His book, If, is a print choice-based novel — hefty, printed on thick paper, with “a novel” appearing multiple times on the cover as mark of both its multiplicity and its literary seriousness.

If sometimes embraces, sometimes rejects standard CYOA practice. It’s written in the second person, mostly, except when a first-person narrator crops up by surprise and many pages into the story: this first-person character is a bully, and for as long as we remember that he exists, the whole narration feels like a mean-spirited harangue against the protagonist. The main character also floats between characterization and Faceless Protagonism: he has a gender and passes through a specified series of ages, but some characteristics are intentionally withheld. On page 192, a character refers to him by name, though on page 194 we discover that this was a false identity anyway.

But having a name would probably pin the protagonist down in the wrong way. If belongs to that particular subgenre of IF whose overt hook is the opportunity to reach radically different life outcomes from the same starting point: works like Life’s Lottery, Pretty Little Mistakes (Sam Ashwell’s analysis), and Alter Ego (Jimmy Maher’s analysis).

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Detective Grimoire (SFB Games)

Detective Grimoire is a short (90-180 minutes, probably, depending how much you rush through the voiceover parts) point-and-click mystery adventure. It’s pretty easy — strong hints about what to do next and what you might have missed thus far, as well as a “sparkle” mode to draw attention to environmental object that you should really look at. (If you want a more classic pixel-hunting experience, you can turn the sparkles off.) The content is also reasonably kid-friendly; though you’re investigating a murder, the actual and hypothesized reasons for that murder are all kept fairly PG. Some other reviewers refer to these as “grisly” or “dark”, but I didn’t find them so; it seemed to me that the character motivations are either quite gentle or cartoonish or both. If you squint, there’s maybe a bit of an argument for preserving the wilderness, but even that is softly handled enough that it avoids any political bite.

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Weird City Interloper (CEJ Pacian)

Weird City Interloper is a parser-based conversation game by Pacian. Like some of Pacian’s previous work, especially Castle of the Red Prince, it largely does away with the traditional object and room hierarchy: here instead of navigating between places, you are moving from one interlocutor to another. As you go, you accumulate an inventory of characters you know about and topics you can discuss, and the point of the game is to discover the story by asking the right people about the right sequence of things. Because those options are always enumerated (and initially the list is pretty short), it feels as though the game could easily have been executed as a choice-based experience instead; this is an interesting one to look at if you’re studying the parser-choice borderlands.

The business of applying your topic inventory to different speakers sounds a bit mechanical, perhaps, and at some points it did seem as though I was just running around trying all my topics on all the characters. But at its best moments it felt much more organic than that, and several times it rewarded puzzle-solving leaps of intuition in a very satisfying way. The game also includes some well-timed help to give you hints if you seem to be lost, and this helped me past the couple of spots where I was feeling a bit stuck.

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