Dave Morris

TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF

I'm male, white, middle class, middle aged, and English. Hollywood's stereotypical villain, in other words. I like books (favourite authors Austen, Dickens, Graham Greene, Susanna Clarke, Robert Harris, Stella Gibbons, Andrew Miller), comics (Watchmen, B.P.R.D., Hellboy, Sandman, 100 Bullets, Lucifer, Hellblazer), movies (Blade Runner, Lawrence of Arabia, Rear Window, Tess, The Prestige, Dean Spanley, A Matter of Life and Death), TV drama (Fringe, Deadwood, The Shield, Breaking Bad, The Wire). And games, of which we will now speak.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO GAMING?

Professionally? Just out of college, I co-published a roleplaying game called Mortal Combat, it got the attention of the Games Workshop guys, I started doing some boardgame design for them. It was like being an unpaid and unsupervised intern, but fun. Then the gamebook craze came along and I wrote a stack of them, and more importantly smuggled a role-playing game in amongst them (that was Dragon Warriors), then moved into videogame design at Eidos initially with Jamie Thomson. For a while Jamie and I had our own games development company, now we're back in creative writing and design with our company Spark Furnace.

WHAT IS IT YOU FIND SO APPEALING ABOUT GAMING?

I guess it's a guy thing. I'm sure our wives and girlfriends don't get it when I say I have friends coming round for a game. “I'll cook a meal.” Nope, no meal, no talk, we just want crisps and sandwiches, thanks. Anything else is a waste of good gaming time. Then we get home and our wives say, “How was everybody?” and we all say, “Don't know really. They seemed fine. We only talk about the game.”

Seriously, I like solving problems, I like socializing, I like creative thinking and I like logical thinking. Games tick all those boxes. But actually I'm not that much of a gamehead. I get in a couple of game sessions a month, that's all.

Your question was about playing games, but working in game development fulfils the same needs. What I really like is when you have a really great team, and it gets to be like Fight Club - not the punching part, I mean, but the way it works as a group mind in the second half of the movie. When a game development project hits that gestalt it's exhilarating. But you need the right team.

SHARE A FAVOURITE GAMING MOMENT WITH US

There are many moments I could talk about, but you'd need to know the people involved for them to make any sense.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY PLAYING?

GURPS 4^th edition. I'd love to play Skyrim but I can't trust myself not to starve to death in front of the machine.

CAN YOU TELL US WHAT YOUR FAVOURITE GAMES ARE?

Roleplaying: Empire of the Petal Throne

Boardgames: Tales of the Arabian Nights, Condottiere, Adel Verpflichtet, Wise and Otherwise, Dune, Carcassonne, Gunslinger.

Videogames: Outcast, POP Sands of Time, Max Payne 1, The Witcher, Age of Empires, Warcraft 2, Grim Fandango, Alone in the Dark, Half-Life

Online: Fallen London, Uniwar

WHAT WAS THE LAST GAME YOU PLAYED?

Face to face: Legend (the Dragon Warriors world) using GURPS.

On a PC: Drankensang.

On iPad: Uniwar.

On Playstation: GTA Vice City.

WHICH PRODUCTS HAVE YOU HAD YOUR WORK PUBLISHED IN?

Other than published games and books, you mean? Develop, White Dwarf, The Huffington Post, Imazine.

THE VARIOUS WORLDS YOU HAVE CREATED HAVE A MODEST BUT FANATICAL FOLLOWING. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE CONCEPTS FOR THE DIFFERENT SETTINGS AND RULES SYSTEMS?

If I’m going to use fantastic elements in building a world, I want those elements to remain mysterious. That’s why Legend, the world of Dragon Warriors, is low fantasy. It is supposed to reflect the world the way a typical superstitious person in the Middle Ages would imagine it. I’ve never read Lord of the Rings, so I’m not drawing on a tradition of “Good” vs “Evil”, and I can’t abide the D&D idea of alignment, which just strikes me as ethics for the nursery. My characters do things for the same reasons people do things in the real world: greed, love, revenge, loyalty. I’m quite nice that, after a quarter century, George R R Martin has come along to popularize this whole murky, gritty, “realistic” strain of fantasy!

ARE YOU WORKING ON ANY GAMING-RELATED PROJECTS AT THE MOMENT?

I've just finished a reworking of Frankenstein as an interactive digital book. Not sure that I'd call that game-related. It's not a game, but I'm sure there's an element of “gamification” of the storytelling process. It reached the Top 10 in both UK and US App Store books, which doesn't normally happen to choose-your-own type gamebooks, so I must have done something right.

Next up, something different involving drama and interactivity, but not a game per se.

TELL US ABOUT THE PROCESS YOU USED TO RE-IMAGINE FRANKENSTEIN AS AN INTERACTIVE FICTION WORK, AND WHY YOU DECIDED TO DO IT.

That goes back a few years. Jamie and I realized that gamebooks would work well as apps because we could put all the nuts and bolts under the hood. That opens up a whole casual market that might be interested in interactive stories but who aren’t gamers and could never be bothered to keep tabs of codewords and items and hit points.

In pitching it to publishers, we soon found that they weren’t interested in the old Fighting Fantasy type of gamebooks. That’s fine by me – I’ve written dozens of those, don’t need to write any more, and they’ve been superseded by videogames anyway. I’d always rather do something new, and for the last ten years I’d been experimenting with a few TV dramas for Flextech and NBC that used interactivity to create a relationship with the characters rather than getting the viewer to make authorial choices or to play a character.

So my idea was to take a classic novel (the idea there was to grab attention for this, otherwise it would get overlooked) and to rework it so that the first person narration was directed at the reader. The reader’s choices would affect what the narrator reveals, and even steer his/her attitudes over the course of the story, but not fundamentally drag the plot off in a wildly different direction. Frankenstein was one of several suitable classic novels that I pitched to Profile Books.

Originally I thought that our company Spark Furnace would need to hire the coders too, but Profile found an app development company called Inkle who had written a markup language for gamebooks. This was great because it meant that I could define all the variables and put the branching options into the manuscript as I wrote. So I didn’t need to explain to a coder what I wanted, I could do it all the logic stuff myself. Inkle found some really nice pictures from the 18^th and 19^th century – I didn’t want any graphics that illustrated the text, just mood stuff. It’s a great way to write a book app like this, because five minutes after sending the latest version over, I would have it working in the app.

I shouldn’t say this, perhaps, but it also reminded me what I like about working on gamebooks, which is that, as the writer, you are completely in charge. With a regular novel, you get lots of editorial feedback from the publisher. But no editor could have read the manuscript and understood how it was all going to splice together – they would have needed my flowcharts too, not to mention twenty-eight years’ experience in interactive fiction! So I can point to Frankenstein and justly say that’s all me, from conception to design to execution. And it got into the Top 10 book apps in the UK and USA. Not bad going for a “gamebook”.

YOUR FANS WILL KILL ME IF I DON'T ASK THIS QUESTION: ANY CHANCE OF SEEING THE LAST 6 FABLED LANDS GAMEBOOKS, AND ANY CHANCE WE MAY SEE WAY OF THE TIGER REPRINTED IN THE NEAR-FUTURE?
“Reprinted” may be the wrong word. Way of the Tiger will definitely come out on digital devices, and if those are successful we will look at doing a collector’s edition in print that would collect all the books in one volume.


Fabled Lands books 1-6 will be released for iOS and Android quite soon – this summer, we hope. If those are successful, we’ll certainly complete the series. Whenever I say this, though, I get complaints from people who don’t want to read the books on e-readers. Fair enough, but the print market for gamebooks is never going to bring them back, and catering only to the nostalgia market of people who read these books as kids is a hiding to nothing. We have to go out and get new readers – a lot of new readers. Then, as with Way of the Tiger, we can issue a single-volume print edition of the whole twelve FL books for the collectors.


DO YOU HAVE ANY WEBPAGES OR SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNTS WHERE FANS CAN FIND YOU?

I find the concept of fans a bit scary. One of my closest friends is Tim Harford, whom I met originally because he was a player ofDragon Warriors, but almost the first thing he said to me was, “We don't use your rules, just your world.” So I knew he was safe to have as a friend. Anyone who is interested to see what I have to say can find me on Twitter (@MirabilisDave) or on my blogs(http://fabledlands.blogspot.co.uk/ and http://mirabilis-yearofwonders.blogspot.co.uk/ ) but they'll be disappointed if they come expecting it to be all about games.