The trouble, you see, is that between me starting the novel and finishing it, someone else went ahead and released a book called Clockwork Princess. Being as I don’t have substantial evidence to prove that I in fact originated the use of the words ‘Clockwork’ and ‘Princess’ in the title of a book, I guess my book’s title is going to have to change.

Cue the rather agonising process of picking a new name for it. I’ve been calling it ‘The Clockwork Princess’ for so long that the very thought of it being called anything else is terribly uncomfortable. Currently I hate all the alternative names I’ve come up with; there are about 50 or so. Eventually I will realise that it’s not really that important and just pick one, but until then, I shall agonise.

In videogames-related writings, I wrote a piece about Telltale’s The Walking Dead roughly a year after everyone else already wrote a piece about that game, having finally manned up and finished it, and criticism of David Starkey’s musings about Bioshock Infinite‘s accessibility led me to write about accessibility in games in general, which generated a fair bit of discussion over at Gamasutra.

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It began with a rumour.

Cultivated amidst the tumultuous commerce of the Docklands, the rumour travelled up the Great Chains all the way to High Kensington, where lips tightened in disapproval above perfumed jowls and china teacups.

It travelled downwards, past the chaos of the Circus and the civilised boroughs to the distinctly uncivilised Lowborough, where knuckles all too used to being cracked were cracked anew in anticipation of debts painfully repaid.

The rumour went like this: Skycaptain Edward Valens was returning to London.

It swept through the halls of Parliament, where finely-flossed teeth were gritted and terse orders were issued over the endless chatter of quills on legal parchment.  It reached the vaulted towers of the Gearmasters’ Academy, where Acolytes caught whispering it were beaten mercilessly.

Orders were passed down.  Officers were dispatched.  In the Docklands, the Constabulary and the Docksec corps actually put aside their long standing animosity to assemble a united force.  A skyship was seized, a vessel that appeared to be nothing more than a simple fur-trader.  Sergeant Pugnas Flint couldn’t hold back a grin as his men boarded the ship to apprehend the infamous Skycaptain.

When it transpired that the seized ship was in fact nothing more than a simple fur-trader, Sergeant Pugnas Flint stopped grinning.

Below the docks, in the not-so-reputable borough of Hagger’s Stone, the door to the bar Wayward Maiden opened and a tall man entered, wearing a long red coat and a wide-brimmed hat.  The bar’s patron, a one-eyed man known as Ebert Eagle-Eye, looked up as the newcomer entered, gave a slow smile, and returned to polishing a glass.

The newcomer walked over to a table where four men were engaged in a game of Shank-me-Neighbour.  He sat down, emptied a small purse of coins onto the table, and was wordlessly dealt a hand.  Of the four, only the man known as Able Sidney recognised the newcomer, and Sidney quickly took his winnings and left with mumbled apologies, because the man who had just joined the game was Skycaptain Edward Valens, the Nobleman Pirate, Scourge of Civilised Skies, the most wanted man in all of London.

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I hope that goes some way to whetting the appetite for some sky pirate-based fiction.  It’s worth noting that all those words up there may well have changed by the time I deem this novel ‘finished’, so…enjoy them while they last, I guess!

For me, there’s a special feeling to the first few hours of a new JRPG. It’s a comfortable feeling, like sinking slowly into a hot bath, or curling up under a blanket in front a well-loved film. It’s anticipation of many adventures to come, and acclimatisation to a world you know you’re going to be spending many hours in.

These games always take me back to my childhood, recalling adolescent years spent with games like Final Fantasy VII and Skies of Arcadia. I guess a part of me pines for a time when I could spend entire days absorbed in a massive RPG, a part of me that’s strong enough that if I’m given half a chance, I’ll still spend entire days sitting in front a massive RPG.

It’s a mixture of familiarity and uncertainty. In a sense, you know exactly what you’re getting; monsters will be defeated, levels will be upped, bosses will transform into bigger bosses and Some Bad Guy will threaten to Destroy The World. There will be a desert level. There will be at least one magic sword. The world, ultimately, will be saved, but only after a three-part final boss fight set to a thunderous orchestral score.

But as much as all of these games are the same, each one is also unique. You never know who you’re going to meet before you start; you don’t even know who you’re going to to be. You don’t know who the villain is yet, you don’t know how they’re planning to Destroy The World, or why. You don’t know which bosses are going to be the toughest, what the strongest weapons are, which abilities can be exploited or where the best location for levelling up is. You don’t know how long you’ll have to play for before you reach the desert level.

A new JRPG is both comforting in its familiarity and exciting in its sense of possibility.

It helps when a game is as easy to like as Level 5’s Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. The touch of the animation masters at Studio Ghibli is obvious in the visuals, which pop vibrantly off the screen and lend an undeniable charm to the game’s every character and location. Both the english script and the voice acting are superlative. The score by Joe Hisaishi, performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, is soaring and triumphant. The tiniest details, down to the most obscure corners of the game’s menu, have been polished to a glittering shine.

There hasn’t been a JRPG with such a complete and confident production in, well, probably ever. It’s a really easy world to want to spend time in.

Some critics have complained at the game’s somewhat glacial pace, but I’m actually enjoying the laboriously measured way the game leads you in. Most modern games will hurriedly toss you through a tutorial level or two before handing you complete control and hurling you straight in at the ‘exciting’ end for fear of letting you stand still long enough to get bored. It’s more immediate, sure, but there’s something to be said for introducing a game’s elements one at time, letting a player experience and experiment with each one, before introducing the next. The slow build-up makes the eventual payoff feel more meaningful.

It’s that childhood thing again. The game’s babying me, and I’m happy to let it. It’s like a videogame comfort blanket. I know there’s going to be plenty of time for sidequests and equipment hoarding and obsessing over stat points later on, but right now I’m happy to be led slowly by the hand, being gently shown which bits of the game are just how I knew they would be and which bits are exciting and unexpected.

The Japanese RPG gets a lot of bad press for being a genre that’s stuck in its ways, stuck in the past, and the developers of these games are often criticised for an unwillingness to innovate. Ni No Kuni isn’t breaking any new ground, and some people might frown at it for that.

But here’s a thought: maybe we don’t have to innovate all of the time. There are plenty of games out there that are pushing the envelope, changing the very concept of what a game is. Industry stalwarts are falling over themselves to say that games need to ‘grow up’, ‘mature,’ open themselves up to new audiences. And that’s a great thing.

But in the same way that not every movie release is an avant-garde re-imagining of cinema, not every game needs to be sitting right on the bleeding edge of progress. Not every game has to take my breath away. Once in a while, I don’t actually want my breath taken away. Sometimes I like to keep my breath, in fact.

We absolutely should innovate within games. We should make games that are new and different and exciting. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also make games that are just like games we played when we were twelve, only new. Because if we can’t sometimes play games to indulge our inner child, then that’s not much fun, is it, really?

Modern videogames seem to be at a loss with how to handle death. Player death used to make sense in the days of the arcade, when a dwindling stock of lives meant a dwindling pile of quarters in a gamer’s pocket. Death used to be the game designers’ main revenue stream, and in a pay-per-play world it made sense to challenge a player with fiendish difficulty, to always keep the next checkpoint tantalisingly out of reach.

In the age of the cinematic AAA blockbuster, this model doesn’t work so well. Increasingly, designers build their games as glamorous content tours, devices to show off explosive visuals and movie-aping storylines, delivered to a mass market with a lower threshold for punishment than the arcade gamer of old. So games get easier. Checkpoints more generous. The challenge of staying alive is rarely allowed to get in the way of accessibility.

But we still have to die.

I’ve been playing Far Cry 3 recently. It’s pretty great. It does so many things so well. But one thing it does terribly is player death. When you die – and you will, as FC3 certainly deserves this year’s award for hungriest videogame tigers – you get booted back to the last checkpoint, and all your progress since that checkpoint vanishes like it never happened.

Tracked down some sweet loot in a hidden cave? Too bad, it’s gone now, and good luck finding that cave again (if you can actually be bother trying a second time.) Stocked up on those rare leopard skins you’ve been hunting for ages? Tough luck, son, those are gone, and there’s no guarantee those animals will turn up in the same place again, either.

The frustration is compounded by the game’s super-lazy checkpoint system. It will checkpoint after what it considers major events – so any sort of mission, basically – and it practically babies you through story missions, checkpointing after every minor shootout, but if you choose to kick back and wander the island, your save won’t bother keeping track of what you’re doing. So you can explore valleys and caverns, go hunting for game or for treasure, but take a tumble down a cliff-face, and you’ll find all that progress lost.

It’s just not any fun. Most of the scenarios in Far Cry 3, whether they’re ‘official’ missions or just the result of larking about on the island, are fun to do exactly once. Once you’ve explored a cave and liberated it of treasure, are you really going to go and do it again just because upon stepping into the open you were mauled to death by a pack of giant turkeys? Exploring is fun to do one time. The second time, it doesn’t count as exploring any more.

The same applies to the game’s stealth sections. The first time I go to raid an outpost, there’s a tangible thrill of anticipation; I sit on a far-off hill, scouting enemy locations, spotting the alarms, planning the best route of entry. Then I move in slowly, hanging back behind every wall, breath held while I wait for each guard to turn his back, to silently slice his throat and drag him into the undergrowth. I feel like a master assassin, right up until the last guy spots me after an errant misstep and blows my face off with a shotgun.

Now I’m back up on that far-off hill again, only this time there’s no thrill, no sense of anticipation. I know where the bloody guards are now, only the game hasn’t bothered remembering that I know, so I have to scan the damn camp again anyway. Then I trudge through my pre-established route with gritted teeth, only I probably don’t, because I’m annoyed, so I just shoot all the blokes and settle for the crapper EXP reward. Because I’m not having fun any more, and I just want this bit over with.

After all this, I find myself wondering what the point is. What’s the point of death in Far Cry 3? What benefit is there to making me replay a section again because I screwed up first time round? Who benefits? I don’t; it’s not like I’m learning any crucial new game skills as a result of my mistakes, because I learned ‘not getting shot’ right at beginning. The game is so open to random elements that there’s no way to ‘master’ any given situation, no real learnable method to the repetition. And the game’s designers aren’t getting paid whenever I have to redo a checkpoint, not these days. So what’s the point?

The point is challenge, of course. One of the myriad purposes of games is to pose a challenge, and threatening the life of the player is the no.1 go-to default setting for making a videogame challenging.

Games that aren’t challenging are dull. No one likes a dull game. What many big studios these days don’t seem to grasp is that there are lots of ways to make games challenging. Having the player die and restart over and over is not the be-all and end-all of challenging design that so many seem to think it is.

It’s something I’ve run into in lots of big games over the last few years. Thinking about this as I frowned at another of Far Cry 3′s improbable automated gun stores,* I wondered at what point the whole die-and-redo thing became stale. This has been the bread-and-butter of games for years, of course, and I used to have no problem replaying often massive sections of older games. Have I just become old? Have videogames finally eroded my attention span to the point where I can’t bear to play if I’m not winning? Or does something in modern design actually render the life/death loop somewhat useless?

The conclusion that I came to is that your modern AAA blockbuster gives no reason for a player to value their life (their life in the videogame, of course; these games aren’t that depressing). There’s just no peril to death any more. Back in the olde worlde arcade, your game-life had real-life monetary value. If you died, you had to pay up to continue. There was actual, real-world cost to death, therefore an actual tension to playing, so the emotional reward for victory was much greater. And we’d put up with dying, because we knew how great it would feel the one time we didn’t die.

This carried over to the first console and PC games. Most games gave you a stock of lives, and if you ran out, you had to start the entire game again. The prospect of defeat was crushing, but damn, didn’t you value those few lives a whole lot more for it?

As games got bigger, more expensive, and crucially, longer, their design by necessity became more forgiving. It’s fine to ask a player to replay an entire game from the start if the game is only an hour long. Less fine if the game is ten hours long. As technology allowed us to save and resume our games, thus enabling longer games, the penalty for death became less severe.

Soon losing all your lives only meant reseting to the start of the world. Then it only reset you to the start of the level. Then we did away with lives entirely (and really, thank the stars for that; finite lives have no place in a game where they are not directly related to the coins in your back pocket), and you only have to restart from the last checkpoint. And the checkpoints are only two minutes apart now.

You’d think that only having to replay two minutes of a game would be less frustrating than having to replay a whole hour of it, but the way games are designed these days, this isn’t always the case. Your death is now so inconsequential that all value of life is lost.

It used to be the case that reaching the next part of the game was a major achievement, because there were real odds to overcome. Now it feels like reaching the next part of the game is the default state, with your death just being an annoyance that’s preventing the game from showing you the next sweet set-piece; something best glossed-over and treated like it never happened.

When all that happens when you die is that you have to replay the last minute of the game, you start to wonder why it’s even possible to die at all. If the designer is so desperate for everyone to see the next part of the game, wouldn’t it be better for them to just not have you die at all?

There’s no point in death in a Call of Duty game, for example. You don’t want to die, because then you have to annoyingly replay the checkpoint. The developers don’t want you to die, because they want you to see the next cool sparkly thing they’ve spent millions of dollars on. But if you can’t die, where’s the challenge going to come from?

If I could enforce one rule for all game designers from this point forward it would be this: either make player death meaningful, or find a way to challenge the player without having them die.

There are games these days that do a great job of making player death meaningful, and I think AAA designers could learn a lot from these games. Chief amongst them is Dark Souls, the modern master of challenging design. Death is fundamental to Dark Souls (and its predecessor, Demon’s Souls); it’s woven into every element of the design, from the story to the setting to the core game loops. It’s a punishing game. You will die. Probably a lot. But each death is given real impact, real consequence, and each life feels so important that you carry on, even when the game’s beating you into the ground again and again.

A lot of this has to do with the soul currency that underpins the entire game. The souls you collect from defeated enemies are used for everything in the game, from levelling your character to upgrading your equipment to purchasing new items. In Dark Souls, souls are everything.

And when you die, you lose all the souls you are carrying. You do, however, have a single chance to reclaim them, by making it back to the place where you died without being killed again. Do so, and you get to continue with all your souls. Die, and those souls are gone for good.

On paper it sounds like a recipe for frustration, but in reality it gives the player an agency over their character’s life-cycle that few other games achieve. Your entire style of play changes depending on how many souls you are carrying, because the value of your life is tied directly to your soul count.

How you approach a possible boss door, for example, varies greatly depending on how many souls you’re holding. If you’ve just spent your full stock on upgrades, you’re free to proceed with little caution. If you die, you’ve little to lose. But if you’re approaching that silver mist with a few thousand souls, you have to weigh your options; do you proceed and risk losing all those souls forever (as if you are killed by a boss, you’re never going to be able to keep those souls until you defeat it) or do you backtrack to the last bonfire, forcing yourself to battle back to the boss door all over again?

The constant risk of permanent loss makes death seem like a much greater risk. It can be hugely frustrating to lose a stock of hard-won souls for good, but at least the tension enforced by that possibility means that a re-tread of a checkpoint is almost never boring. It’s this permanence that lends death such weight.

Another great touch is that while the souls you are carrying are lost upon death, the items you pick up on the way are not. This adds another layer of strategy to each life-cycle. If you have a low soul count, it makes more sense to explore unknown areas to search for items. But if you amass a stack of souls on the way, you’re suddenly left in an unfamiliar area (that perhaps you don’t know how to get back to should you die) and find yourself desperate to retrace your steps until you at least see something familiar, so those souls are retainable should you die.

These mechanics open up a huge number of options for every life-cycle. Suicide runs into lethal areas to try and grab rare items become a legitimate option. Sometimes the prospect of killing a powerful opponent to open a shortcut overpowers the risk of death; other times you have no choice but to turn and run to preserve your life. By making life and death into meaningful game mechanics, Dark Souls gives players greater agency over how they approach the game’s multitude of scenarios.

I’m not suggesting that every game needs to internalise the very concept of death to the extent that Dark Souls does, although I’d certainly encourage designers to try. I think the key thing, the key difference between a challenging system and a boring one, is that element of permanence.

What annoys me most about dying in Far Cry 3 is that it renders everything I achieved since the last checkpoint completely meaningless. It’s effectively erasing that chunk of time entirely and demanding I do it again. It’s wasting my time, and I hate having my time wasted.

If all that changed was that it let me keep the items I’d picked up before death, death would suddenly be less frustrating. Sure, I’d still have to replay the last gunfight, but if I could keep the tiger-skin or relic I’d pillaged beforehand, it would mean that the last 5 minutes of game weren’t completely pointless, and I’d be more inclined to keep playing.

It’s a technique used by recent roguelikes such as Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac and FTL. All of these games are deliberately difficult, seemingly delighting in killing you again and again, and all of them demand that you play the entire game again every time you die.

But these games also give you objectives outside of the standard life-death loop. In Spelunky you unlock shortcuts, in Isaac you unlock new characters, and in FTL you unlock new ships. All these optional objectives alter the way you play the game, and give you different ways to approach each life-cycle.

The long-term objective remains ‘finish the entire game in one go without dying’, but you can also choose to shoot for short-term objectives, such as opening the next checkpoint or unlocking a specific new ship. Much like in Dark Souls, these options let the player choose how to approach each and every life-cycle, let them set their own goals, and coupled with randomisation elements that ensure you’re never playing the same thing twice, mean that while death occurs frequently, and can still be frustrating, it’s never boring.

Being boring is about the worst thing a game can be. There’s a lot of debate about what games can or ‘should’ be at the moment, but whether as a piece of entertainment or an artform, the one thing games should never be is boring. Yet still we’re being pushed through life-death cycles of tedious repetition, with design that refuses to acknowledge states other than ‘alive’ or ‘dead’, and the resulting game systems are at best boring, and at worst a complete waste of a player’s time.

Knowing how (and how much) to challenge players is one of the toughest tasks in game design. That doesn’t mean you can just ignore it entirely, and hope that a lowest-common-denominator difficulty curve will stop too many people getting bored of your game. If games are to move forward, designers should take a long hard look at the nature of the games they are designing.

Does your game actually need to feature player death? And if it does, how can you make it so that player death is meaningful, and player life valuable? Tough questions, yes, but the games we see when they are answered are unquestionably more engaging, more interactive, and crucially, more entertaining.

*(A note on Far Cry 3‘s automated gun stores. These stores are a hilarious concept. They’re like armoured vending machines, where you presumably put coins in and guns come out. Seems cool, but massively open to exploitation. Here’s what I’d do:

First, I’d purchase a single grenade. I’d pop the pin, stick it back in the slot, and make a quick exit. One the dust had settled from the resulting explosion, I’d nip back over the remains of the vending machine and pick up all the free guns that have fallen out. I’d grab the coin I’d spent while I was there. Unlimited profit. Sadly, FC3 doesn’t have a QTE for doing this, but I’d suggest that Ubisoft include one in the next update.

I also don’t buy that 3 whole separate rocket launchers would fit in a box the same size as a Coke machine. How would you even get one out of the slot?)

The last week of writing was actually pretty relaxed. I wrote a big pile of text early in the week, so I only needed to write a few hundred words each night as the month came to a close. I have noticed over the course of the process that I’ve actually started writing a lot faster as well, which is a bonus, and half the point of undertaking the experiment in the first place. I’m fairly sure I can bust out a thousand words faster now than I could at the start of the month. The actual quality of those words is, at the moment, an unknown entity.

One thing’s for certain; I find it difficult to stick to any sort of schedule. I’m not sure how many weeks it’s actually been since I started writing this, but it feels more like 3 than 2.

The NaNoWriMo people break the challenge down into a totally-manageable-sounding 1,667 words per day, I target I have so far completely failed to stick to. Instead, I seem to write in bursts;  today, according to their stats, I’ve written 4,994 words.  Over the weekend, I managed to write no words at all.

So this isn’t exactly running like clockwork, but it is definitely going somewhere.

I am once more ahead of the average schedule, but only because I know I’m likely to write exactly nothing at the weekend again. Even with weekend lapses, though, I’m looking on schedule to finish on time.

I’ve also got a definite direction I’m taking the story in now – I know how most of the main storylines are going to go, and how the novel as a whole is going to end. I have completely written one character’s story arc now, and am reasonably happy with how the whole thing is looking.

The objective now is to finish off all the major story lines and then see where the novel is at as a whole. If I’m still a few thousand words out, I have some other material I can work in that will gel the whole thing together a bit more.

So on the whole, it’s a positive middle-ish of the month. There are only 10 days left now, which still doesn’t seem like enough, but with my current progress, I’m pretty sure I can get this done. Whether the result is actually worth reading, of course, is another matter entirely, and something I’ll only be able to tell much further down the line.

Well, I’m more than a week in now, and surprisingly, I’m actually ahead of schedule.  Perhaps more surprisingly, not everything I’ve written so far is complete rubbish.

That’s not to say a lot of it isn’t.  The first day of writing coincided with me coming down with a cold, so the first few thousand words were written in the grip of fever.  Fever-writing is weird; the sickness seems to sap all creative power, and makes even putting words down seem horribly difficult and time consuming.  Also, I’ve very little real recollection of what I actually wrote in those first couple of days, beyond a vague thrust of overarching story. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn out to be pretty awful.

Still, considering I started with no real plan in mind and wrote the first few sections feeling like I was simultaneously drunk and hungover, I am now starting to put out work that I think is quite good.  Characters are emerging, and forming actual story threads, which gives me a bit more direction going into the second week of writing.

The first few days were definitely the hardest, as I was trying to create something from almost nothing.  Now that’s over, though, I feel I’ve got enough to work with now to keep me going at a good rate into the next week, and hopefully I’ll end up with enough material to fill a novel.

There’s still a good chance I’ll play out these story threads and still be nowhere near done, at which point it’s back to scraping about in the back of my head for ideas, but right now, I’m feeling pretty good about the process, and reasonably confident I’ve got what I need to finish on time.  Now, onwards, to writing even more fiction!

I do not have an issue with the F2P model in general, although admittedly I’ve had little exposure to it on account of not owning any sort of ‘smart’ device. I think if used correctly it’s a perfectly valid business model that clearly benefits certain types of games.

What Ubisoft is proposing, however, isn’t free-to-play at all, it’s expensive-to-play; now-with-added-expense. ACIII is a full price, £40/$60 game, not an accessible MMO or pick-up-and-play iOS game. If the budget of ACIII is really too big to be covered by the usual £40 price tag then Ubisoft, really, you shouldn’t have made a game that’s that expensive. Seriously.

Now it’s worth dialling back the rant a bit to consider that we don’t know what these nebulous ‘Eriduto Packs’ are actually going to be used to purchase. When discussing the F2P model in general, people live in fear of ‘pay to win’ items, where players willing to spend real cash have access to better, higher-level equipment and such. Quite why this would matter in a primarily single player game I don’t actually know, but it’s more than likely that the ACIII will packs offer little more than the chance to pay for some cosmetic additions for the multiplayer mode.

But if this is the case, it still doesn’t make it fine. I thought we were long past the point where paying real money for cosmetic enhancements in a full-price game was considered fine. But Ubisoft, desperate to shoe-horn F2P elements into AAA development so they can take more of people’s money, are quite possibly going to try and repackage Horse Armour as a hip new business practice for the next console generation.

Still, much as I may loath Ubisoft’s business practices, I’m still going to be playing Assassin’s Creed III over the coming months (I will not, however, be purchasing any Eriduto Packs, just in case the above paragraphs have not made that clear.) All this pondering on the topic of F2P brought me to consider way the business model could realistically be applied to the AAA scene, which brought me to consider a game I likely won’t be playing in the next few months.

Specifically, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.

Now, I usually do like the Call of Duty games, with one major caveat; I only ever play the campaign mode. The campaign mode is fun, providing you stick firmly to the designated rails – a roller-coaster ride of ridiculously bombastic set pieces and satisfying shootouts. But I won’t touch the competitive multiplayer – unarguably the real meat of the CoD package – nor am I likely to partake in the co-op missions.

This leaves me with the rather unappealing option of shelling out £40 (okay, more like £45; I never said Ubisoft were alone in over-valuing their own product) for a 6-hour-if-you’re-lucky campaign which is fun exactly one time through. Which basically means I’ll be playing the game next year when I can borrow a friend’s copy, and Activision won’t be seeing any of my money.

But what if this weren’t the case? What if I didn’t have to buy either the whole game, or none of it? What if Activision sold the campaign as a stand-alone for, say, £15, the multiplayer for £15 and the co-op components for £10? Now I have actual purchasing options, and £15 to blast through a campaign sounds a lot more appealing than £40 for the same. And then Activision would have 15 of my pounds, and it seems that if there’s one thing publishers really enjoy, it’s taking my pounds.

It works the other way around as well; I know lots of people who only play multiplayer, never touching the campaign that they have unnecessarily paid for. So why make them pay for it?

Now obviously publishers want people to purchase the whole package regardless – they make more money this way. So incentivise people to do so. Perhaps make so that if you buy the whole package at once, it only costs £35 instead of £40 (alright, this is Activision we’re talking about, it’d be more like £45 instead of £50, but Activision can do one.) Now those people who were always going to buy the full game are certainly still going to do so, and you’re making extra sales from all those people who only want to play one, or a few, elements of the game.

This business model could apply to every game where single- and multi-player elements are separate components, which these days is almost every AAA title. It means that games like Spec Ops: The Line wouldn’t be weighed down by a multiplayer component that most people won’t play, and can launch at a more competitive price point as a result, but equally, for those that do want to play this content, then it’s available for purchase. Developers are still building the same amount of content, but players have more control over how they access it.

And if the success of the free-to-play model has shown anything, it’s that players like to be given control over how they access content and how much content they access. In a market where the £40 AAA business model is looking increasingly precarious – largely as a result of successful new models like F2P – publishers are scrambling over each other to find way to ride the F2P gravy-train to mega-bucks city.

Bolting micro-transactions onto a game whose price of entry is already difficult to justify is not the way forward. But perhaps giving player the freedom to identify why they play games, and greater control over how they access these games, could be a way forward.

I have a very loose idea of the novel I’m going to write – about the lives of people living inside an infinitely tall tower in some distant future – but I’ve not got much more than that. There’s no overriding plot yet, and it’s possible there won’t be by the end either; this might end up being more of a tumbling together of disparate ideas and story threads than one cohesive plot.

I’m going to approach the whole thing like a free-writing exercise – just sit down with an idea in mind, and write the first thing that comes to mind. And then keep writing until I either hit the word count, reach the end of the month, or my ideas dry up completely.

It’s a new approach to writing for me – I tend to start writing with a definite idea of at least the main characters, and the important plot points mapped out in my head before I even begin typing. I’m going to try and come up with something more organic, more instinctual, driven by the pressures of a very tight writing schedule. We’ll see how that plays out in a month’s time.

I could come out with something great. It could end up being the novel of the century. More likely, perhaps, it will end up being incoherent rubbish. Or I’ll run out of things to write a week in and the whole exercise will be a dismal failure. Still, I like the idea of starting off a month with a stem of an idea, and ending the month with 50,000 words of something. Whether it’s any good or not is almost beside the point.

I’ll endeavour to provide semi-regular progress updates – though I’m bound to not actually do this, as a result of spending all my time writing and forgetting to post anything at all – and eventually the finished article, however successful, will be available here.

See you in December!

Trouble is, all those paths of prose I’ve forged often end up being ungainly, badly worded and full of errors. So editing has to happen. In the case of Answer, lots of it.

I don’t ever again want to give myself such a big editing job as I did on Answer. Now, I edited all through the writing process, often hacking out huge chunks of narrative, as previously discussed. The end result was still a big ungainly manuscript badly in need of a lot of editing.

The big problem I faced, that I had not anticipated, was how much my writing would improve as I worked on the novel. I estimate that writing the first ‘full draft’ of Answer took near enough bang-on two years – one summer, through another, and finished in the next. It turns out that if you’re unpracticed at novel writing, and you start doing it nearly every day for two years, you improve quite a lot.

This meant that the later stages of the novel – written in focused 5-hour days in relative solitude – ended up more accomplished than the early chapters – written in sporadic bursts of chaos by someone with very little idea what they were doing.

A fun side note: reading through a whole novel you have just written, like literally just finished writing, is no fun at all. At this stage you are so entrenched in the world of the story – two years of thinking bout the same themes, places and characters – that it becomes impossible to enjoy or really judge the story at all. You just have to hope it’s as good as you thought it was when you started, back when it was a fresh idea.

All you can do, really, is pick out flaws, errors, and bits that don’t work. It’s easy to do this overmuch, as well, and become stuck in an endless loop of editing. I’m a harsh judge of my own work; I’m never satisfied with it, and were it entirely up to me, I’d never get out of the editing process.

The trick, then, is to identify the bits that really don’t work, and trust or hope that those other bits, those bits that you maybe aren’t happy with but which seem grudgingly, objectively alright, are actually better than your subjective self gives them credit for.

Even taking this into account, Answer needed a lot of work. I had to take the parts that I’d not even looked at for 18 months, and the parts that I’d only written last week, and make them flow together into cohesive whole.

I edited in three ‘passes’ – when it comes to work like this, I have to set rigid milestones or I’ll go insane well before it’s finished. The first pass was most intensive – a straightforward run-through with some major re-writing and re-wording, to make the whole manuscript cohesive. This required a lot of work on the first two-thirds or so, and less towards the end. After this, the thing at least read like it had been written by a single person.

The second pass was the ‘character pass’ – for those that haven’t read it (and why the hell not?) Answer is written from the perspective of several characters, each of whom lends their unique voice to the passages they inhabit. For this pass, I divided the novel up by character view points, so it ended up being lots of little novels, each from the perspective of a different character. I then edited each of these chunks individually.

The purpose of this was mostly to make sure each character’s ‘voice’ was consistent – their mannerisms, choice of words, etc. It also helped me keep track of where each character was, and to make sure no one teleported between locations or times of day – it became surprisingly difficult to keep track of each separate strand of story when everything was a big intertwined whole. The process of separating out the different character’s stories made it much easier to get a handle on.

The third pass was once more straight through the whole thing – I reintegrated each character’s chunk into a whole manuscript and did another run through. This was a much lighter edit, and served mainly to make sure that my separating up the story earlier hadn’t buggered up any of the major plot points or story arcs.

After these three passes – and effectively reading the damn thing through three times – I was thoroughly sick of Answer, but was, on the whole, and again grudgingly, pleased with the manuscript. At this point I enlisted some generous and lovely people to serve as proofreaders, and sent them each a copy of the manuscript.

They immediately spotted a frankly embarrassing number of mistakes and inconsistencies, which I ironed out in a continuous reading/editing process. This was also the first time since submitting those first three chapters (now dramatically different from what ended up in the actual novel) for my MA dissertation that I received feedback on the novel from anyone other than myself and the voices inside my head.

On the whole, people seemed to like it. This made me pleased. I made a few tweaks to scenes, and added a couple more, based on feedback I received from proofreaders, and made one final last-minute panicked restructuring of the opening. To this day I can’t decide if this new beginning is actually an improvement, or just the final throes of my never-happy subjectivity.

Then the novel was done. It was time to appeal to the literary world for publication, a process which requires an entire article to itself.

I re-read Answer recently, in preparation for the Kindle release (and to make a few tiny, final – I promise – edits), a good 5 months divorced from my last working on it, which let me view the thing a bit more objectively, and identify the parts I think work and I part that I don’t.

I like how the pacing turned out. I like the plot twists. The plot in general kicks along at a good pace, with some thudding build up leading into some (hopefully great) little releases and set-pieces. It all gets a bit muddled around the middle, and I will never be satisfied with the conclusion, but on the whole, if there’s one thing I feel I got right, it’s the way my initial idea turned into a compelling plot.

I really like maybe two of my characters. Raif and Donovan. With some of the others, I cant shake the feeling that they serve as ciphers for the story, and don’t really stand up on their own. That’s not an inherently bad thing, but it’s a way off from the character-driven drama that I first imagined.

The thing I feel I really failed to achieve was the setting. In my head, Answer takes place in this complex world of technology, corruption and political double-standard, and while the novel infers this world, it never establishes it fully, never draws the reader in the way I intended it to.

Part of this is due to my lack of planning; I didn’t take time to establish the world, the future-London, and its boundaries before writing. A lot of the ideas, for both places and technologies, came to me in the middle of writing, and the result is a world that I feel happens around the story, rather than containing it.

Another issue was that in paring the manuscript down to a sane word-count, a lot of the world-building exposition was cut. Passages that served to establish the place that story happened in, but did not serve the story directly, were removed, their key descriptions fragmented, simplified, and merged with other, more plot-relevent scenes. It was a necessary process, but leads to the feel of a world which exists to serve the story, without ever feeling like a tangible, possible future.

If asked whether I’m happy with Answer, I suppose I’d say I’ve read worse first novels. I’m so far removed from it as a story now that it’s impossible for me to really judge its merits, only to analyse what I feel works and what doesn’t. I am happy with the feedback I’ve received from it, from both friends and literary agents, which means I must have done something right. Hooray.

As a learning process, writing Answer has been invaluable. The improvement in my writing, both during the process and since, is ridiculous. My output has increased massively as well; there’s no way my next novel will take even half as long to complete. This is helped by the fact that I’m now putting out work that won’t (hopefully) require several entire re-writes to get to an acceptable standard.

So there you go.  How (Not) To Write A Novel, by me, in, as always, too many words. And the best thing about this whole process? The fact that I no longer have to think about Answer for a really long time. Now that’s the true achievement.

Answer is available now in all good bookshops on the Amazon Kindle store.