Interview of Julian Egelstaff (cont')

JE:I think the main way the fans have affected me is simply by there being so many of them and me hearing from so many myself. When I started the Monastery, I was just like every other fan who's ever stumbled across it while poking around on some search engine and suddenly turned up Lone Wolf hits. I really had no idea if I was the only one or not. That's a common comment I get from people: "I had no idea there were so many other fans." So hearing from everyone and seeing the community grow has been a real eye opener for me and it's really brought home the fact that Lone Wolf is an important thing for many folks out there, not just myself. Several years ago, many years ago, I could not have done any of this, no way, no how, because back then, when I was really in the thick of it, when I had book one completely memorized and knew all the possible paths through it and where they intersected, I was not prepared to even acknowledge that there might be a community of other fans out there. It would have burst my bubble, and I liked my bubble the way it was. I didn't join the Lone Wolf club for that very reason and I put off reading the Legends books for that reason too, because I didn't want to interfere with my own personal experience of the game books.

Now though seeing the fans everywhere, all over the world, and hearing their own experiences, which are in many ways very similar to my own, it's changed what Lone Wolf is for me. Time and age had done that already, but being in contact with all these people has had an effect too. Now, Lone Wolf isn't quite the adventure it used to be, it hadn't been that for a while actually, but whereas it had just been a receding influence in my life, now it's very important again, just as important as before really. It's just not so personal a thing, it's more like a fun club, or a perpetual reunion of sorts. And it's the existence of the fans and their feedback and dialog that has made it that for me.

RG: You mentioned that you didn't want your "bubble" burst so to speak because you liked it the way it was. Is this due to the individualistic nature of the books? Do you think that if you played a multitude of characters throughout would it be as popular?

JE: Well, it's definitely partly due to the fact you're playing one character all the time. But I think the most important factor was that you were only ever playing the game with yourself and the book. There were no other people involved in your imaginings of Magnamund, or the characters. It was all done by you, the reader, so that made it a powerful experience. A table top role-playing game is a collaborative experience, but the individual nature of the gamebooks is what makes it different--not so much the single character, I don't think.

I don't think in all my years of reading gamebooks, I ever came across one where the reader took on the role of multiple characters. I suppose Fighting Fantasy number four, Starship Traveller, is kind of like that, since you roll up stats for your whole officer corps, but you only ever played the book from the Captain's perspective. I think it would be a really interesting experiment in interactive fiction to do a gamebook with more than one fully developed role that the reader took on, that would be really neat. It might require a more adult, literary air to be truly successful (and there'd be no market for it anyway, oh well). What might take off as an alternate idea along the same lines might be a computer game, first person adventure style, like Thief, where you played more than one character. Heck, plain old Thief but multiplayer would be really awesome, but I'm getting off topic.

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