Welcome

Welcome to this blog.  Who starts a blog in 2022, anyway?  Someone with a very specific idea, that's who.  The specific idea for this blog is to post graph-theoretical analyses of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks.

I'd assume you know what a gamebook is and what Fighting Fantasy (FF) is or you wouldn't be reading this.  But for the sake of completeness I'll explain that FF is a series of trade paperback books, each of which contains a game (hence, gamebook) played by reading, making choices, rolling dice, and keeping track of the game state on a piece of paper.  It falls somewhere on the nerd literature continuum between the elementary school gimmick of Choose Your Own Adventure and the junior high-to-rest-of-your-life gimmick of Dungeons & Dragons.

I was but a wee lad when I got my first FF book back in the '80s.  I had three or four of them by the time I grew up, stuffed my kid junk in a box, and embarked on more sophisticated kinds of fun like higher education, having a career, and raising my own kids.  I still have them though. I generally don't throw out books, and I have a soft spot for nerdy, game-type books.  Somewhere in my crawlspace is a big box stuffed with first-edition D&D hardbacks and modules.  These things aren't necessarily accessible in my more-or-less mature, sensible middle-aged world, but I still have them, and revisiting them from time to time is another way, along with listening to Motorhead CDs, that I revisit the carefree joys of my youth.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of Googling "fighting fantasy" and stumbling across Murray's excellent blog, Turn to 400.  It led me into a small community of FF enthusiasts who mostly communicate in the blogosphere which, like FF, is quaintly outdated.  But it got me thinking about FF again.  I dug out my old books and had another look.

I'm a bit of a collector, so it wasn't long before I had collected a bundle of vintage FF books to supplement the meager few I had growing up.  Seemed like everyone with an FF blog was bequeathed a wine box full of books by a friend.  Having the wrong kind of friends, I was forced to hunt for mine on eBay.  I opted to collect the UK volumes (having better cover art than the US versions) with the lime-green spines and the zig-zag banner at the top.  I picked up most of these from a guy in Canada.  No wine box, though.  I don't have the entire series, just the first couple dozen volumes, which are more than enough for my purposes.

When I was a kid, I found my FF books in carts at the grocery store with the front covers and first few pages torn off.  I didn't realize it then, but I now understand that someone at the store had ripped off the publisher by intentionally damaging the books and selling them anyway -- an old trick, and one fortunately not seen as much these days.

I can't say I've ever played much FF, at least not playing in the sense of rolling dice and keeping track of stats.  I more or less just read through them.  Most of the other FF blogs focus on what would happen if one did play the books as intended.  I thought it might be fun to make my own blog but I didn't want to simply follow that format.

What interests me most is the nonlinearity of the storytelling.  I'm a fan of nonlinear books like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.  I'm also a fan of interactive fiction (IF) like Zork and the other titles that Infocom produced in the '80s.  I'd argue that gamebooks are IF, albeit the kind written on paper rather than served up by a computer program.  Imagine if a contemporary author like Stephen King or Neal Stephenson made an adult-oriented gamebook with a couple thousand entries.  It wouldn't be "fighting fantasy," no dungeon-crawling combat, but might involve navigating corporate intrigue or solving a murder.  Infocom had success with IF across different genres.  I think there's a lot of untapped potential there.  Regardless, I'm interested in the idea of a gamebook as being somehow more complex that an ordinary narrative.  It's that complexity, the nonlinearity, the hypertext-ness, that makes the format interesting.  Any book is its own portable world but a gamebook is a portable world that's interactive.

Years ago I went to grad school for computer science.  My thesis had to do with finding efficient algorithms to solve computationally-difficult problems in graph theory.  So as an adult, FF appealed to me in the sense that each book could be represented by a graph:  Each entry was a vertex, and each choice to move to another section was a directed (one way) edge.  It's clear to anyone playing FF that some books are more linear than others.  For instance, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (FF1) pushes the reader smartly along a string of fairly fixed encounters, while Scorpion Swamp (FF8) offers a richer world in which the reader can revisit locations with different results.  Sometimes books had obvious bottlenecks, sections you'd arrive at no matter what prior choices you made.   So I started to wonder about the shapes of these stories.  If one could see the graph, it would obviously be a map of sorts, an opportunity to cheat, or at least a way to determine the shortest path to the winning section (typically 400, hence the name of Murray's blog), but it might also offer insight into how the authors made these books and how they implemented game mechanics.  It might be an interesting, new angle on gamebook appreciation and analysis.

I hunted for free graph visualization software and came across Graphviz.  A couple hours later I had modeled Deathtrap Dungeon as an adjacency list in the .dot file format and was looking at a beautiful 400-vertex directed graph that did, in fact, offer some insight into the story structure.  I'll post the graph and my thoughts on it shortly.

Today, the Internet offers a variety of cost-free tools to help aspiring gamebook authors keep track of their stories.  I wonder how Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson, and the other FF authors did it back in the day.  Seems to me there is quite a bit of bookkeeping that would have had to take place, minor details that aren't evident until you really dig into the mechanics of gamebook creation.  For instance, was there a rule that no two linked sections could appear on the same page or on facing pages, to preserve an element of surprise?  If so, how did they ensure that in the pre-digital era?  Were the sections randomized in some way?  In other words, did they have a scheme to shuffle the sections while preserving the links?  Was there a way to identify and prevent orphaned sections?  Did they employ play testers?  Were there standards in place for these things, or did each author handle them in their own way?  This is the stuff I wonder about.

So, that's why we're here:  To study the FF books using graph theory.  In the spirit of nonlinear narrative, I'll study them in no particular order, starting with Deathtrap Dungeon, for which I've already produced a graph.  I'll write up my thoughts on it shortly.  More to come!