The Game That's Literally About Writing a Novel

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Back before the general readership was savvy enough to know the works of fiction in their hands were just that, a lot of suspenseful, gothic literature had fun with the unenforced ambiguity.

Classical works often presented as a series of documents between individuals: maybe-but-probably not real accounts of a wolf-beast stalking around or wealthy houses being torn asunder by their own secrets (and ghosts and giant helmets). Lovecraft tales about out of town strangers recalling their baffling encounters read a little like the first long-winded Yelp reviews. These lived off the inkling that maybe whatever mysteries exist within the text lurk around in the world outside.

Aside from the occasional Blair Witch Project, the modern audience, generally, is pretty good at recognizing when their intended works of fiction is created. But toying with that cleverness can be fun, which is why virtual meta-texts and Creepy Pastas have accumulated such a cult following lately, as sort of reflexes to our kill-joy knowingness. Augmented reality narratives are those on top gear, stories which draw in as many different methods of interaction to blur the lines of reality into a The Game-like game.

Blue Lacana creator Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe are looking to marry the new and the old. A novel which conflates a printed book and augmented reality made available by your digital devices. It is called Ice-Bound.

"Our world right now is so fragmented," said Reed, "Telling a narrative this way seems like an interesting approach. I think honestly at least for me our inspiration comes more of the earlier traditions. Lovecraft wrote a lot in that style, books from the 50s and 60s."

In Ice-Bound, you are paired with an AI named KRIS. KRIS is a digitized version of the mind of an author, Kristopher Holmquist, who died a little peculiarly decades ago. You want to help put KRIS back together using relics created by the individual it's based on, because only KRIS can help you and the publisher complete Holmquist's strange final work, which was created (put your little Lovecraft bowtie on) in an abandoned polar outpost.

The game, or novel, or whichever direction you choose to lean with, is split between the printed tome and the accompanying program. KRIS will react specifically towards not only what parts of the book you feed it, but the patterns in the order of your input. If you select more depression excerpts it will affect the mood and results of where you're taken. How you engage with the text is how you play the game.

Augmented reality games have grown fairly popular over the last few years, but they are mostly a rich person's game to make. Unless you're only looking for a strictly local audience, it usually takes a lot of resources to orchestrate these campaigns. Aaron Reed finds it to be a mostly corporate entity at this moment, and wishes it was used for more ambitious projects than just helping people find the nearest Starbucks. But more methods within the technology is giving creators more options, which Ice-Bound takes advantage of.

"It wasn't too long ago that AR just meant you had these wacky QR codes," said Garbe. "If you wanted to register something to that you had to work within those design confinements. I think one of the things that makes augmented reality unique as a storytelling medium is the fact you can pull the story into dialogue with the object itself."

Ice-Bound won't ask you to hold the iPad camera steady while you lock in a square barcode. Some of the program's methods will be scanning dynamic colour ranges, meaning the team is pretty lucky that printer-error Dave McKean feels like such a fitting aesthetic for a gothic piece of cyberpunk.

"The game is based on narrative fragments that understand how they fit into a story," said Reed. "One of them might be set up so it only makes sense to happen after we've established that another character is angry about something. The system can try to prioritize pieces that mesh well what you've learned so far, assemble a narrative possibility space for you to explore based on that."

Ice-Bound is a story deep in a maze. The two say their work gets a lot of comparison to Danielewski's House of Leaves, while they also cite Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams' S. as an interesting recent experiment.

Even if we live in an at least slightly more enlightened age where we're able to deduce that Frankenstein's monster isn't actually on a rampage, that doesn't mean we can't make a fun trial out of our literature. Because if the printed book is going to seem like a relic to so many going forward, why not explore it like we would the pyramids.