Seon Ji (Dawn)
asked
Sam Bowring:
I love the idea of your CYOA book for kindle. I just got it on Amazon and haven't started it yet. I suppose one has no choice but to read it as a man character. Do you anticipate doing another for women? Or to have the option to choose the gender?
Sam Bowring
Hi Dawn, thanks for the question. You are correct, in Butler to the Dark Lord you have to play a man. I did think about making it possible to be a man or woman, but eventually decided not to for various reasons. Some of them are boring and technical, and basically involve struggling with an overly and increasingly fractal-like myriad of choice variations (originally the ebook file was blowing up to untenable sizes due to a creation process that would take a couple pages to explain, and which I eventually abandoned anyway for a simpler method, long after the book was actually written). However, first and foremost, the decision was creative. The aim with Butler has always been to reward the reader with the story itself, and make it more involved than usual in this genre. I did not want basic descriptions (‘You see a tree’) and arbitrary choices (‘Do you go left or right?’) such as you sometimes find in gamebooks. I really wanted the reader to inhabit the story and get into the role. As you know, what sex one happens to be fundamentally changes a lot of things in life! – and in this case it would have changed the story in ways far beyond the superficial. Mr Artanon is not a blank slate for the reader to superimpose their own impressions onto, but rather a character in his own right. Thus giving the reader the ability to play a man or woman would have been a really big thing to implement, in order to make it a truly meaningful choice, and the book would probably have wound up twice as long.
To answer the next bit of your question, I would love to do more gamebooks, and actually have a plan in the works for the next one, in which I want the reader to be able to make the choice about being male or female. I have learned quite a lot from doing this first one, and it makes it easier to plan, going forward.
Good luck with the Butler, I hope you don’t get fireballed to death :)
To answer the next bit of your question, I would love to do more gamebooks, and actually have a plan in the works for the next one, in which I want the reader to be able to make the choice about being male or female. I have learned quite a lot from doing this first one, and it makes it easier to plan, going forward.
Good luck with the Butler, I hope you don’t get fireballed to death :)
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