The Lindenbaum Prize, a competition for short gamebooks, goes into its fourth year. This year’s contest has no less than seventeen entries from a variety of genres, with a wide range of creative approaches. It’s a great opportunity for experiments, and it’s always exciting to see what the authors come up with. If you’re interested in interactive storytelling, you should check it out!

Scopes is the second competition entry I’m covering. For an overview of what I’m especially looking for in gamebooks, please refer to my coverage of the first entry, The House on Happy Hill.

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So… yesterday I praised The House on Happy Hill for its almost flawless execution, but noted that even after several runs, I wasn’t quite sure about the story the book wanted to tell. Scopes has its priorities vice versa: It is highly focused on the story it wants to bring across, but unfortunately riddled with just about every error you could imagine.

The adventure takes its name from the “delicate glass scopes” that form an integral part of every sniper rifle. In the not-too-distant future the book is set in, snipers are a profession vital to the survival of the last few remaining human settlements, and Scopes wastes no time – there is no lengthy rules explanation, two pages of exposition, and then we find ourselves staring through such a scope, focusing, aiming.

What are we aiming at? A robot. Why is it our target? Because robots have been bad and blown up most of humanity.

Honestly, I think the exposition could have stopped after just such a handful of sentences. Establish the protagonist’s role in the scenario, the enemy, and the objective for the first few sections. Don’t try to explain every little detail – drop some hints, make some allusions in the other sections, let the reader’s imagination fill in the blanks. Scopes could afford this because it’s not taking place on an unknown world, we don’t have to be told what magic is and how it works, and so on. Instead, the exposition spends a ton of effort detailing how our present evolved into a man-against-machine situation somewhat akin to the future setting of Terminator. And it inevitably falls prey to the plotline paradoxon: If the reader’s/player’s mind has to fill in the blanks, it automatically tries to find possible explanations it would find plausible. The less blanks there are, i.e. the more details are presented by the author, the more important it is that these details are plausible and coherent, because the reader’s mind will test them.

And oh boy, there’s a lot to test. At least I couldn’t help but question every other sentence. The superpowers didn’t want any more human soldiers to die? Really? And if so, why did they deploy fragile and expensive robots instead of relying on drones like they already do? And if they deploy robots, why have each of them carry a half megaton nuclear bomb inside? What, their nuclear mini-explosions were at first explained as cruise missiles to keep the armageddon bots a secret? Did the future abandon Geiger counters? After a full-scale global nuclear war, wouldn’t fallout and nuclear winter render survival for several years in any non-bunker environment basically impossible? And so on.

Again, a small fraction of that background would have sufficed for the story the book wants to tell. Because once we leave the lengthy introduction and get to the action, the narrative is actually pretty effective. The exploration of the blasted wasteland, the ruins of a former metropolis, the action scenes themselves, all of this worked pretty well for me. (The few passages of human interaction I found somewhat awkward, but then they are really not the focus of the tale.)

In terms of structure, Scopes is pretty linear. Yes, there are some branches, but they do not really offer divergent plotlines; on the other hand, this allows the story to flow at a steady pace and briskly arrive at its (one) conclusion. As said before, the book knows the story it wants to tell.

Sadly, once we look at the execution of the adventure, Scopes falls completely apart. I assume this is the result of a severe lack of time. We have typos all over the place, punctuation sometimes seems to have been the result of a lottery, the GBAT standard “continue” autotext (“, turn to XX”) has not been aligned to fit the remainder of the sentence, and there is at least one (non-terminal) section that shows no option to continue at all. The errors are so overwhelming that they gravely diminished my enjoyment of the book, and while the story works and is written reasonably well, it isn’t so spectacular that it could compensate for them.

This means that overall, I cannot recommend Scopes. However, I would be genuinely interested in what A.E. Johnston could accomplish with enough time and effort to come up with a better setup for the adventure, create a narrative with a bit more branching and especially to polish everything to the level of The House on Happy Hill. Maybe next year?

Conclusion

• Writing: Good, as long as exploration and action are concerned, clearly the author’s strengths.
• Plot: Average. A solid main plotline is marred by an exposition that tries too hard to do too much, and an ending twist that is telegraphed from miles away.
• System: Minimal, but that’s fine: the book really focuses on atmosphere, and any elaborate dice-rolling or table-checking would have distracted from that. There are a few instances, however, in which I would have preferred keywords to clearly track events.
• Structure: The narrative is pretty linear, but that fits the story. No alternative endings, though, and most of your choices only matter for the next one or two sections.
• Execution: Sadly lacking, see above.
• Overall: Won’t make my top 3.