We chat with the author behind the indie FPS mash-up

19 October 2015 | By Nick Horth

Although the core tenet of shooting people in the face and torso has remained the same, the FPS genre has changed markedly in its relatively short lifespan. We’ve gone from the gleeful carnage of Doom to the rocket-powered acrobatics of Quake, all the way through to the modern obsession with po-faced military blockbusters. Author Christopher Brookmyre’s new game Bedlam, set in the same universe as his well-received novel, is a nostalgic, self-reflexive trip through the founding years of the genre, which both subverts and celebrates its familiar tropes and conventions. We grabbed a chat with the man himself.

GameWatcher: What was the journey from the novel to the game? Did you seek out developers to work with?

Christopher Brookmyre: The impetus came from their end. A guy called Nick Witcher at Red Bedlam had read my novels Pandaemonium and A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away, and both of those are packed with gaming references. So he got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in working with them to develop a new FPS. So it wasn’t something I ever thought I’d be involved in, but at the time, fortuitously, I was kind of at the end of writing a novel, and had a bit of a gap in my schedule. We met up and discussed things, although really we just met to get a sense of where the other was coming from. We each had a similar experience of growing up with games going back to the 80s, and we’d seen them evolve and society’s relationship with them evolve.

I left the meeting thinking that I wanted to come up with a concept that encapsulated that, rather than a generic shooter story. So I went off and came up with the basic idea for Bedlam, and while I was doing that I realised I was outlining a novel as well, so I though I would write that as well to kind of flesh out the world and the characters. That turned out to be quite a serendipitous strategy, because when the novel was published it made it a lot easier for the developers to get investment in the game.

GameWatcher: The blend of literature and gaming still feels a bit odd, simply because outside of tie-in fiction nobody is really writing about games. There are very few authors who would deign to discuss the level design in Quake 2, for example. Do you think that will change over the next few years?

Christopher Brookmyre: I think writers can be really, really snobbish about what they’re prepared to admit is influential. There are certain writers that claim they’re not influenced by cinema, for example, when it’s been the most pervasive and influential art form of the last hundred years. I think writers are going to be even more sniffy about video games, but I think the influence of games is becoming more and more clear in novels and other art forms. In terms of movies, for example, you’ve got Edge of Tomorrow, which is a clear video game structure – someone dying repeatedly and getting better. Same with Source Code. Actually the S.J Watson novel, Before I Go to Sleep, that’s got a similar thing, because it’s about someone whose memory is wiped every night and she has to sort of find a way to save her progress.

So I think it will be something that subtly influences authors without them really knowing where it comes from, rather than them putting their hand up to it. I’m something of a rarity in that I’ll stick my hand up and say that I’ve been playing games all my life and been hugely inspired by them. That’s had its culmination in Bedlam, which is kind of my love letter to the FPS genre and games as a whole down the years.

GameWatcher: Have you kept up with the FPS genre in recent years? Do you still play these kind of games?

Christopher Brookmyre: No, in recent years I’ve just been too busy to find the time, but my son is an avid gamer. I keep up to date in as much as I’m vicariously keeping up through him, because his PC is in the same room as mine and I’m looking over his shoulder. What’s fascinating to me is that he plays all the latest things, but once he gets bored of them he’s straight back to Team Fortress 2. He’s on a big, big TF2 kick at the moment, him and his friends. Whoever thought there would be a hat-based economy?

GameWatcher: How do you approach the balancing of storytelling with FPS mechanics? Because that’s a problem the genre has always had.

Christopher Brookmyre: Actually I think it’s surprising that the FPS has struggled with narrative, because it’s the form that lends itself best to a linear narrative that you would see in a novel. Because you can, far more than in other genres, map out the player’s experience. You can guide them along a certain path, and writing a novel is kind of like an FPS experience itself as you’re looking at things through the perspective of a single character. At one point quite early on we were playing with the fact you have a fixed perspective, and maybe we could change who you were without you realising it, because in the book there’s a character who’s going around helping the Integrity pick off the Resistance.

I though initially it would be interesting if you suddenly realised you had changed character, because you’re used to always playing the same character. I was looking at ways to do that, maybe subtly changing the HUD or something. In the end that was something that we had to drop in order to streamline the concept, but it’s something I suppose we could look at for a sequel.

GameWatcher: Is that something you’re hoping to do? Create more games and books set in this universe?

Christopher Brookmyre: More so for the game than the books, because I’ve got a lot of things that I’m already committed to in terms of writing, but the concept of the game lends itself to boundless possibilities in terms of where you could go with it. You’ve got not only the potential to mash-up certain genres, but also because the Integrity have the ability to take over the game-world and co-opt the NPCs, suddenly any game has the potential to be some kind of combat challenge for the player. The devs, particularly, like the idea of taking FIFA or some other football game, my son was suggesting Guitar Hero, so suddenly the crowd… are like zombie drones or something, you’ve got to use the neck of the guitar as a way to shoot back at them. There’s lots of potential in the overarching concept of Bedlam that a sequel would let you really go to town on it.

GameWatcher: There are a few games that are just starting to take a more metatexual look at the form of certain game genres. I don’t know if you’ve played The Stanley Parable, for example. Your game is another rare, contemporary example of that, but as games grow as an art form I imagine that’s something we’ll start to see more of.

Christopher Brookmyre: It did kind of surprise me when I outlined the concept to Red Bedlam, and we were wracking our brains in an attempt to think of other games that had done something like this, that had beaten us to it. We kind of couldn’t believe no one had beaten us to it. I think it’s because games as an industry and an art form are still quite young. So although there’s always going to be metatextual deconstructions of any form, people are always trying to move forward rather than look back. Especially as the technology keeps evolving. In that sense I think we were fortunate that we could make something that looked back over a period of thirty years and see what had changed, rather than looking to the future. Obviously there’s a lot of retro stuff out there, that has a deliberate aesthetic for its own sake – things like Hotline Miami and Broforce – whereas we wanted to have that retro, nostalgic feel not for its own sake, but because there’s a story explanation for it.

GameWatcher: Bedlam’s full of jokes and the lead character has a very sardonic, satirical viewpoint. Do you think it’s important to have a touch of humour in a genre which often takes itself very seriously?

Christopher Brookmyre: When I first really got into PC games there was always humour in them. I think back to the ZX Spectrum and things like Manic Miner, which was basically a glimpse into the mind of a madman. There was always an anarchic humour in games, they never took themselves too seriously. When I first started playing PC shooters it was things like Duke Nukem even Quake 2 there was a distinct humour in realising that the Stroggs were turning marines into food. The games had an awareness of their own absurdity, and that they were an entertainment. I think that’s been lost a bit. The FPS genre in particular has become incredibly po-faced. It’s always trying to be serious and gritty, and obviously there can be a place for that, but I feel like it could do with remembering that sense of humour. That’s why when I discussed this with the developers, from the off we were determined to make it fun, make it satirical, and really play with the tropes and conventions.

Many thanks to Christopher for talking to me. Bedlam is out now on PC and consoles.