Worlds that are not games yet

The scenario is written, the world is drawn, the people stand in their places, waiting to be called into a game. From Tolstoy's blizzard to Abe's sand pit.

> [!CAUTION] > **Careful: this article is an example of how not to do it.** Pavel read it — and it was this very article that made him realise our scenarios are a disaster. Not "could be better in places", but from the very start: games are not written like this. Everything told proudly below is a detailed illustration of failure. The scenarios are now being redone in a completely different way. How exactly — we'll tell later. This one we leave as it is: let it hang here as a warning.

Before a book becomes a game, it has a middle of the road: the scenario is written, the world is drawn, the people stand in their places — and nothing happens yet. Here are the worlds that are in that middle now. Whether they will become games is not known. But they can be looked at already.

We look for a game where the author himself showed that things could have gone otherwise.

Ibsen, besides his own ending of A Doll's House, wrote a second one for the German stage — in which Nora stays. Dürrenmatt ended Traps twice: in the novella the hero hangs himself, in the radio play he wakes up and drives away. In Turgenev, Asya writes: "if you had said one word to me, I would have stayed" — and nobody said the word. Places like these become choices.

Sometimes the author says outright that there is no choice. Le Guin writes of Omelas: nothing can be done. In the scenario the cellar door has a key, and someone turns it every day. It can also be left unturned.

And sometimes it has to be built from a hint. At the end of Bradbury's The Fog Horn the narrator regrets that he has nothing to say — and the game gained Nora, with a window on the far shore that is now lit, now dark.

Chamber stories came easiest to us: one place, two or three people, a short time, and the choice already in the text itself. Half of them are plays. Harder were the ones where the world has its own laws or there are hardly any people: Solaris and The Little Mermaid never reached this middle.

The scenario is written by an AI, and it is read by AIs too — fresh ones, new each time, [like everything here](/stories/how-it-is-made). One of them looks for smoothness. After edits, characters tend to become equally reasonable and to speak in aphorisms, and he catches it. Because of him, in The Buried Giant the old woman never says her line about the mist that takes everything — she just puts a second empty bowl by the hearth.

Sometimes the readers pull in different directions. One asks for the price of a choice to be seen. The author lets a character say it aloud — and at once another catches that as smoothness. That is how some scenarios go round in circles for a long time.

And sometimes it is simpler. The Fog Horn and The Buried Giant came back the first time with a unanimous "no" from everyone. The reason was a fair one: the file with the scenario was not in its place yet.

When the scenario is ready, the world is drawn — just enough to see what it is like. No mini-games, the camera stands still, the people hardly stir. Only light, place and faces. If the world is not right, changing it now is cheap; later it is costly.

Many worlds have one rule of colour. In Orpheus the only red is Eurydice's ribbon. In Asya, only the geranium. Tolstoy's world has almost nothing warm: the master's fox fur coat, Nikita's sash, the shop window — and snow. And the whole world of Asya is drawn like an artist's sketch: towards the edges the paint fades away, leaving paper and pencil.

Not everything works yet. Torvald went without his black domino: the engine cannot yet hang cloth down a back. There is no rope between two people. Two palms in Klara and the Sun should meet on the glass, and for now they fall short. The steam over the soup tureen in Traps came out as a string of beads — it was taken out. None of this was worked around: such places are written down, to be done properly.

Some worlds from the same round have already become games and are coming soon — together with those begun earlier:

- [Around the World in 80 Days](/games/around-the-world-in-80-days) - [The Lady with the Dog](/games/lady-with-the-dog) - [The Night Before Christmas](/games/the-night-before-christmas) - [The Summer Book](/games/the-summer-book) - [Moominpappa at Sea](/games/moominpappa-at-sea) - [The Fisherman and his Soul](/games/the-fisherman-and-his-soul) - [Small Things Like These](/games/small-things-like-these) - [The Canterville Ghost](/games/the-canterville-ghost) - [Night Flight](/games/night-flight) - [The Man Who Planted Trees](/games/the-man-who-planted-trees) - [The Paper Menagerie](/games/the-paper-menagerie) - [White Nights](/games/white-nights)

And these can be played already:

[Scarlet Sails](/games/scarlet-sails)

[Cinema Paradiso](/games/cinema-paradiso)

[The Elder Son](/games/elder-son)

The rest are waiting for now.