Today sees the launch of an exciting new project from book-peddlers Random House Publishing, the “Black Crown Project”, which makes use of the award-winning Failbetter Games’ StoryNexus platform, blurring the lines between the traditional fiction-reading experience and interactive gaming.
The mysterious world of the Black Crown Project sees reader’s adopt the role of a lowly clerk at the Widsith Institute in a dystopic and twisted land called Loss, steeped in curiosities and grim imagery. Your role is to work your way up the food chain and as you do so, some interesting things happen. In Loss becoming ill and disfigured are marks of one’s success so the higher up you go the more disgusting you become. Black Crown Project writer Rob Sherman calls the interesting paradox “reverse-zombification”, explaining: “status equals wisdom, power and influence but also transforms you physically and you acquire those status gains you start deteriorating.”
This is Rob’s debut piece and was inspired after a project during his MA course, where he and a group had to caption a series of German pictures from the 1930s. Rather than just trying to explain what could be seen, Rob wanted to contemplate what had brought the subjects of the photographs to that point in time – where were those people from? Who were they?
We enjoy building world’s that are dark and carry the richness and texture of a nightmare, that drew us to the Black Crown Project.”
Keen to explore new ways of story-telling and experiment with the new tools available to him as a writer, Rob went to a local junk shop, bought as many random objects as he could afford, and began to create a story around them to explain how all of these items could be connected. When he started writing the strands of story linking the objects and fleshing out the world where this story could take place Rob found that the project would lend itself to a digital platform.
That’s where Random House and Failbetter Games came in. Speaking to us at the Black Crown launch event last week RH Digital Publisher Dan Franklin told us that in the past couple of years Random House has digitised almost all of it’s back catalogue and seen digital become 23% of it’s market offering, and they’re now positioning themselves as a “total content publisher”, so they immediately saw the potential in Rob’s Black Crown Project and helped provide editorial and contact support linking with Failbetter Games to create the browser-based web platform for the narrative to take place within.
Playing through/reading the experience you are encouraged to make choices that cost you decision points and will take you on a number of different story branches, and if you’re really keen to delve deeper into the world of the Black Crown Project, you can use micropayments to get extra content, snippets of background and to hurry the story along a little. However, micropayments aren’t a necessity and the story can be experienced in full without paying anything, but if do choose to get some extra content we’ve been told the total potential spend on micropayments wouldn’t exceed the price of two books – “about £10” – according to the BCP creator Rob Sherman, so it’s not extortion by any means.
Random House has digitised almost all of it’s back catalogue and seen digital become 23% of it’s market offering.”
The first instalment of the book – of which two more stages are currently pencilled – should provide up to four months of story development, with new story fragments being added over the coming weeks and a second phase three times the size of the first already penned. But what makes this project particularly interesting is that it will encourage reader’s to share and to discuss what they’ve discovered and thanks to the StoryNexus platform, the writer will be able to see what elements of the story are working and what are not and will be able to craft the story development accordingly.
Speaking about the gaming aspect of the Black Crown Project, Alexis Kennedy from Failbetter Games, said: “In this experience there is no fail state or conditions, those are outdated and wouldn’t make the content more interesting. We enjoy building world’s that are dark and carry the richness and texture of a nightmare, that drew us to the Black Crown Project. But the challenge of interactive projects is people tend to poke around through the bits and say, yeah, that was cool, but [some people] don’t see them through. The intention of a StoryNexus project like Black Crown is that you see the progress you’ve made as you go along, so what you end up with is possibly an ending, but certainly a result and a sense of achievement.”
The Black Crown Project creates the sense of a waking nightmare, you dip into it, make some choices and in time you discover how those actions impact an extraordinary world as it reveals itself around you.
If you’d like to get involved in the experimental, grotesque and curious experience of the Black Crown Project, head over to http://www.blackcrownproject.com and sign up for work at the Widsith Institute!
