Game Books
I've just been "playing" Steve Jackson's Starship Traveller or as much as you can play these things without dice to hand. I'll come back to these books later this summer because I think (although it's a gut instinct not a rational thing) that these books are much more important to science fiction than we have realised.
Just playing this book through once I was struck by how almost all encounters turned away from people and towards objects, and this is even with a set of decisions which always chose people rather than place (I suspect boys at the time played it differently).
It's as if, stripped of the camoflage of true story, this book has slid along the spectrum to the very extreme of sf-non-involvement with the human.
Must muse some more.
posted by Farah @ 2/07/2005 01:23:00 PM
3 Comments:
Just as a guess, the tendency to move towards objects rather than people likely has more to do with the complications of dealing with NPC decision branches added onto the PC's decision branches, rather than any deliberate attempt to isolate the character from all human interaction.
For a counterpoint, you might try and find the "Freeway Warrior" game books by Joe Dever (author of the "Lone Wolf" series). It's perfectly awful post-apocalypse drivel, but the main character's goals do primarily revolve around helping his family and an extended group of survivors cross a hostile environment, rather than him adventuring off on his own for no particular reason.
This is very helpful. Like you I tend to prefer Occam's razor type explanations. The difficulty here is that this genre was so much written for boys and with a specific idea of what boys wanted, that we don't have much in the way of an equivalent to compare it to. I wonder what a teen romance game book would look like? Did anyone ever write one?
I've added your recommendations to my list.
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