Home For Players Player Profiles Charlie Stross: Monster Inventor, Hugo Winning Author, and NWN Gamer

Charlie Stross: Monster Inventor, Hugo Winning Author, and NWN Gamer

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

Meet Charlie Stross, the man who invented githyanki and slaadi. Not only is he an award-winning author, he's also an NWN fan. A recent win of the prestigious Hugo for Best Novella for The Concrete Jungle, being guest of honor at Armadillo Con 27 and a panelist at Interaction, and actually finishing a novel this month have kept Mr. Stross very busy. Considered "one of the hottest short-story writers in the field" by Publishers Weekly, he has penned a great deal of science fiction from novels, such as Singularity Sky and The Atrocity Archives, to collections of short stories, such as Toast. In previous incarnations, Mr. Stross was a computer journalist, programmer, tech author, and pharmacist. Somehow, Mr. Stross found time to answer a few questions regarding games, writing, and gadgets:

Would you consider yourself a gamer?

Short answer: I try not to be. :)

Long answer: back when I was in my early to late teens I played D&D -- back in the days when AD&D was just coming online, back in the days of the original system -- fairly compulsively. It took a combination of leaving home for a new town, and a buttload of work at university, to disrupt that pattern. I'm a junkie for the creative process, for world-building, and during my teens RPGs and writing fiction were effectively competing obsessions; by the time I graduated, writing had won. Back in those days, computer games were a lot less compelling than they are today, at least in terms of demanding creative input from the player. I successfully managed to avoid getting sucked in, but I'm quite capable of getting lost in a game for an alarming length of time if I find one that offers some narrative flexibility -- and there are more of them these days than there were back then. I remember, back in 1986 (when the original, very first, text-only MUD was running over JANET, the UK's joint academic network, from a mainframe in, I think, Nottingham), watching the sun rise behind the terminal I was logged in on, and thinking to myself, "hmm, better avoid this," for much the same reason that most folks avoid heroin.

What is your experience with Neverwinter Nights?

I've been playing it on and off for, oh, about six months now. It's a blast from the past for me -- it's been about 20 years since I last had anything to do with D&D -- and some of the rule changes from 2nd edition AD&D days took me by surprise: armor classes that make sense, for example! It's a surreal experience in some ways, too -- getting beaten up by a bunch of Red Slaadi at one point in chapter two of the official campaign. ("Hey, I invented you!")

On the other hand, I've managed to avoid getting sucked in too far by the simple expedients of (1) refusing point-blank to go on-line with other players, and (2) running it on a Mac, which puts 90% of the content-creation kits safely out of reach. This is a good thing, insofar as I work from home as a writer, and if I let go I'd end up blowing through deadlines like... [tasteless metaphor to hurricanes and levees deleted].

What is your opinion of storytelling through the medium of a computer roleplaying game?

That's a huge topic, isn't it?

To start with, of necessity it's got to be a different process from the sort of writing I -- as a novelist -- get up to. Even if the story line is rigid and fixed, it's got to include not only textual matter but graphics, music, voice-over, animation, and all the other paraphernalia of film production: it's a team effort, and the storyline is no more the beginning and end of the experience than the script is in relation to a movie. But then there's another complication: the player is, at a minimum, in the role of an impatient editor, picking and choosing bits of the narrative to flip between; at best, they're a director, creating a new narrative experience of their own.

I think we're still in the infancy of storytelling through this new medium. It took a century or two to get the conventions and structure of novel-writing sorted out, and if you look at the information content of an RPG it is substantially higher. A lot of the gameplay experience needs to be automated in ways that are non-obvious right now if we're to get away from some of the clichéd conventions of the genre. For example, the way most bedrooms look alike in the core NWN campaign. (There's a library of design elements somewhere, rather than an architectural AI that designs rooms on the fly so that no two are quite the same.)

And then there's the collaborative aspect of it. To my mind, the brilliant insight of the MORPG game is that it substitutes human intelligence for not-very-bright game AI: you play with or against real people rather than bots. I'm currently looking into the implications of this closely for my next SF novel, Halting State, which I'm going to be writing next year and which is due out in 2007. And, of course, I get to play WOW for a couple of months as a business expense, but let's not go into that :)

Would you ever consider penning a computer game, such as Orson Scott Card's Advent Rising?

Yes and no.

Back when I was a teen, I was more heavily into dungeon design than into GMing or playing AD&D. (I got as far as having a honking great series of modules on submission with TSR UK -- it was cancelled just at the wrong time, so I drifted off elsewhere.) I think I've got a handle on how much work it would involve -- the answer is clearly "lots!" Which is not to say that I don't think it'd be great fun to do, but it's not a solo job for a writer, it's a job for a development team with the writer working on the storyline, and I suspect it'd take at least as much work as writing a novel.

You mention collecting weird gadgets and orphaned computers on your website. Does this predilection include fascination with shiny new pop culture technology, or are you more a retro man?

I'm trying to thin the herd of computers down -- I need to move somewhere bigger! (I've managed to break myself of the habit of keeping desktop PCs and related paraphernalia by weaning myself onto PDAs instead, and now I'm trying to make sure I never again have three of the same model -- except for cats, which don't count.) Yes, I'm mostly a shiny new pop culture tech guy, but for values of shiny new tech that goes back up to 20 years.

What are you currently working on?

A bunch of stuff. As I think I indicated, I'm currently finishing up a novel called The Jennifer Morgue, which is a sequel to The Atrocity Archives.

I'm also working on a sort-of fantasy series for Tor, and have to write book 4 in the series Real Soon Now. I say sort-of fantasy: it's a very stripped-down look at some of the turf covered by Roger Zelazny in his Amber series, only with less magic and more hardcore economics. (And, I hope, a killer twist in every book.)

Finally, I'm researching a near-future SF thriller titled Halting State, set in the games industry in Scotland around 2012. (With some semi-autobiographical color from my time working for a successful dot com startup in Edinburgh, but that's beside the point.) I've got an edgy feeling that MMORPGs are just the tip of a huge cultural iceberg that's bearing down on western civilization, if you'll permit the mixed metaphor, trying to predict where it's going to be at in 2012 is like predicting the Crazy Frog ringtone fad from Alexander Graham Bell's proposal to use telephones to broadcast live music in the 1880s, but my gut feeling is that MMORPGs, convergent media devices, peer-to-peer networking, and distributed filesystems are going to come together to give us, for the first time, something not unlike William Gibson's cyberspace -- if cyberspace was riddled with LARP games and had succumbed to semiotic diverticulosis. MMORPGs are the first really popular distributed virtual reality systems, and mobile telephones with broadband networking are the first really popular distributed peer-to-peer communication systems, and....

(Stops and holds head in hands for a few minutes.)

What invention needs to hurry up and get invented?

An input device that's as fast as speech and doesn't give you repetitive strain injury. But you knew that :)

(Editor's note: Don't get him started on input devices. :) Read the Aug 27th journal entry for reference.)

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