Gamebook Friday: SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK

Last Saturday, BBC Radio 4 broadcast SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK, a documentary all about the history of interactive fiction. (You can listen to a recording of it here.)

As the title might suggest, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were an important part of the piece, and this in turn lead to me visiting the Radio 4 studios to be interviewed by presenter Naomi Alderman about the books, how I came to write for the series, and even what I'm working on now.

However, this being radio, a half-hour long interview with me was edited down to about two minutes of the actual documentary. But this being a documentary about interactive fiction, producer Alex Mansfield has put together an interactive audio documentary adjunct. There are some rather special treats hidden within it, amongst them an extended extract of my interview.

To listen to it, simply follow this link and then click 'red things', click '1', click 'restricting your options', and then click 'Fighting Fantasy gamebooks'.

Enjoy!

Ian Livingstone and Rebecca Levene on Radio 4

Friday night's Front Row programme was all about the cultural snobbery concerning video games. Novelist and games writer Naomi Alderman interviewed various industry insiders about this issue, first and foremost among them Ian Livingstone (yes, that Ian Livingstone). However, I was thrilled to hear my friend Bex Levene discussing the current state of the games industry during the course of the programme as well.

It was also interesting to hear Rhianna Pratchett talking about how writers are all too often brought in too late in the development of a video game, almost as an afterthought, by which time there's very little the writer can do to save the game if it's already a mess. This is something which Tin Man Games have most certainly got the right way round, hence the recent spate of award nominations for my own Temple of the Spider God.

If you didn't hear the programme when it was broadcast, you can listen to it here and now.