My Love Affair with Lindenbaum - November 3, 2024
The Lindenbaum Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction
The Lindenbaum Prize competition was announced in 2021 as the spiritual successor to the Windhammer Prize, which ended in in 2016. Back then, I was neck-deep in writing my dissertation and Mark and I were working on Harrowing Adventures. Through that work, I got a job teaching video game development at St. Edward's University in 2018, and we took our game to NarraScope in 2019.Professor of Video Game Development
I was hired to teach game development thanks to my work with Harrowing Adventures, and getting that job, ironically, was the main thing that killed Harrowing Adventures. The video game development program at St. Edward's was being created from the bones of something else, and I was helping determine its final shape and developing classes to both teach and to hand off. But, I had degrees in physics and classical studies, there weren't even game development classes when I was in school. I was a self-taught. So, I needed to quickly figure out how to teach video game development to others, make a bunch of courses, re-imagine and re-design those courses as I discovered how to teach this subject effectively, get up-to-speed with professional tools that I hadn't been using, create tons and tons of tutorials, and then just iterate on that until it was all good. It was a gargantuan mountain of work, and I didn't do much else for years. Then, just as things started to slow down and I could think about being a developer again, the pandemic hit, and every course had to be overhauled one more time. Any momentum that Mark and I had had for Harrowing Adventures bled away. We made a few attempts to resurrect it, but none of them stuck. All the idea joy was gone, but there were still big problems to solve and lots of frustrating grunt work standing between us and the fun parts of that project.
With Harrowing Adventures effectively dead, I had a new problem: I was a video game development professor with no video game. We had made a demo that was generally very well-received, but then that project got canceled. In some ways, this is the most video game industry thing to happen, but I wasn't sure a tenure committee would see it that way. I started working on some prototypes to try to find my next big project, but even if I found one, it would be years before I finished a professional-quality video game. When I discovered The Lindenbaum Prize, I realized it could solve a couple of problems for me. The first was that it gave me a playground to experiment with all the ideas I'd been kicking around since attending the first NarraScope conference. Creating something for the competition also resulted in a short piece of interactive fiction that I could assign for my Interactive Storytelling class. Finally, I could be regularly producing something with a short turnaround time to prove that I was, in fact, being productive even though my main game might still be years off. So, I sat down and wrote a gamebook for the first Lindenbaum Prize competition.
Happy Fun Activity Book
Happy Fun Activity Book was submitted for the competition in 2021/2022. The idea came originally from a bug I had while working on Harrowing Adventures. That game was, at its core, a digital book that you flipped through, and while wiring it up, I created a bug where you when you flipped a page, you arrived back at the same page. That gave me this idea for a game where you're a wizard's apprentice who breaks the rules, takes peek at a cursed book, and becomes trapped in it. The whole book is full of 'illogic' puzzles that you must solve to escape. When the Lindenbaum Prize came around, I saw an opportunity to make a version of that idea.
So I had this cursed book idea and a whole bunch of questions that had been raised in talks I had attended at NarraScope in 2019. Some of these questions revolved around the separation between the player's experience playing the game and the protagonist's experience in the game. I was wondering what is the closest I could bring those two things. In games like Myst the player and the character are both trying to solve the mysteries of this island, but the player isn't actually there. But in Happy Fun Activity Book, both the player and the protagonist are playing the same gamebook, and they have their soul on the line.
I also wanted to experiment with new kinds of puzzles. I tried to keep some sense of the idea of 'illogic' puzzles, which often manifested as cleverly unfair games, but there was something else in there too. I had done some thinking about gamebooks as these creations that are trying to keep secrets from the humans that are required to operate their machinery. I explored some of the unintended consequences of that internal conflict and also the ripples caused by attempts to mitigate those problems. Winning pivots around those things. I also set this whole thing very firmly in a three-act structure despite assurances at the start of the gamebook that this was not the case.
The reviews were mixed, which was what I expected. Some people loathed it, a few loved it, most liked it with reservations. Overall, it was clever, but brutal. One problem that I hadn't anticipated was just that people had 15 other gamebooks to read for the competition, and they could either spend 45 minutes solving an unfair puzzle in my gamebook, or they could read three other people's whole entries. My wife absolutely detested playing it because of the mocking and cruel tone. Despite seeking to put the player and the protagonist in the same boat, I hadn't spent much time thinking about why we as players might prefer to just read about someone else's frustrating struggle from a place of comfort and safety. My wife did like the brief respites you get with the author, whose soul is trapped in the book, and she wished there had been more of those. My favorite bit of feedback I got from someone online was,
“The use of chain-mail tactics in an attempt to scare the reader into finishing the book was highly offensive. I refused to read it.”My next favorite was,
“The title and the opening tone seemed so cheerful at first, and then the contents rapidly grew unnerving. The puzzles took some serious deduction, and I'm glad there were both clues and interruptions from the "author" trying to help out! This was a pretty intense experience for a short gamebook — I had to take breaks as my brain got tired, haha — and I think it shows pretty well how much you can pack into fewer than 100 sections.”The rest of the feedback fell pretty squarely between those two.
Awakening Aboard the Anastasia
The next year I entered again. Awakening Aboard the Anastasia is a science-fiction/horror game where you wake up in an escape pod and try to piece together the story of what happened. In this gamebook, I wanted to revisit some ideas that had come out of that analysis I did for Happy Fun Activity Book. I started thinking about what could be done to help mitigate the shock that this was going to end in a grisly manner without spoiling the game. I used orphaned passages—passages that aren't actually reachable through playing the gamebook—and the idea that the player will notice shocking or dramatic things that they skim past to tell the player that this was going to get ugly. I also wanted to include time pressure, so I experimented with structuring the game to emphasize that. Finally, I wanted to explore what constituted 'winning' in a horror game where there is no happy ending. This work won a Commendation Award. If you do play this, I included some Easter eggs involving the main character's name.
What Lies Beyond the Standing Stone
For the most recent competition, I wanted to make a gamebook where the writing did all the work. My main goals were to get right to the heart of the story, to do some serious world-building, and to focus on emotional resonance. Many of the entries that I had seen from the previous years were extremely rules-heavy; a player might be expected to read and remember 10 pages of rules to play a 30-page gamebook. However, in the first year of the competition, someone else had submitted a game with combat where you learned how to fight by going around in loops until you found the right off-ramp to victory. I stole that idea outright. The mechanics of how to fight in the game come from looping around in these combats until you have learned something about your daughter or about alien anatomy.
The story takes place in a science-fiction/fantasy world inspired by ones like those in Heavy Metal Magazine from the early '80s. I describe the world from the perspective of the protagonist, so many things are never made absolutely clear. For example, it's a place that has suffered post-apocalyptic mass extinctions, so that there is only a single species of bird left, called ‘bird' and there is exactly one tree alive in the world, a giant redwood, so even the word ‘tree' is no longer in the vocabulary and it's referred to exclusively as ‘the verdant spire'.
I won a Merit award, which was a three-way tie for second place. The main feedback I got was that I just needed more line editing, which was unfortunate. This gamebook got squeezed between having a full-time job, buying my first house, and flying to Albuquerque to present at a conference. I had a weekend's worth of time, and so Standing Stone was written in two back-to-back all-nighters, and I didn't give it to anyone else to read over. I edited as best I could through bloodshot eyes and called it done. The second most common bit feedback I got was that there were no mechanics. They were there, but I had made a conscious choice not to assign them bolded keywords and to instead let them hide in the story. I knew that this just wasn't going to be the gamebook for players who wanted everything spelled-out for them. Instead of paying attention to the rules, I wanted people to pay attention to the world and the story.
What's Next?
I'm planning to do Lindenbaum again in 2025, and I have a couple of gamebook ideas. One comes from a place of story and another comes from a clever mechanic. I am leaning toward the mechanic idea, because it's something that could work well in this context. I guess we'll see.
I'm also thinking about Happy Fun Activity book more often lately. I think I have some ideas that could make it a worthy commercial project. It may seem dumb to take my most poorly-reviewed work to develop further, but I just can't shake the idea that there's something special hiding in there. Maybe that's the true curse of the book.
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