What's on your bookshelf?: Leverage Head of IP and former Deck 13 narrative director Christian Fonnesbech

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I once read in a book that you shouldn't really believe anything you read in a book until you've checked at least two other books. Unfortunately, those two books both said the same thing, meaning I had to check four more. If anyone knows what every book ever written says on the subject, do let me know. I'm trapped now.

This week, it's head of IP development at Leverage, former Deck 13 narrative director, and former head of artistic research at Norway's Centre for Interactive Media Arts, Christian Fonnesbech! Cheers Christian! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

Books and games were my first loves – then came the movies (and pen & paper role playing). I sometimes think my entire career is about recreating those emotional journeys with friends. I usually read several books at the same time, I have a “to be read” pile in my bookshelf, and there’s usually more books incoming in the mail.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

I ripped through this funny, surprising, moving novel in a couple of days - finishing it now. I don’t use the word “astounding” much, but Wow! This is so smart and wholly originial (how often can you say that?). It’s about a neurodivergent single mother raising a genius child on a diet of 8+ languages, mathematics, and the movie The Seven Samurai. It made me think about storyworlds and what they do to us and to the characters in them in completely new ways. Read it – you won’t regret it.

The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read it cover to cover. The shame is real, because I work in Tolkien’s house every day; he pretty much invented the whole idea of an alternate fantasy world – and I’m involved in developing three of those right now. Robert E. Howard may have lit the fuse first with Conan – but Tolkien took the idea of an alternative world to the moon. Will I finish LOTR this time? Honestly, I’m not sure. While I admire his brilliance and monumental orginality in his time, the whole “following ancestral heroes of destiny” thing has dated badly. Also, Peter Jackson’s movies are note-perfect, and it’s a very, very long road trip when you already know the story. Finally, well… I always preferred Dune.

Play Nice by Jason Schreier

Blizzard Entertainment is one of the few studios who have consistently built lasting IP- universes. Reading it made me realise why so many other game studios and publishers always wait too long to develop an IP vision for their games. In the old days, gameplay was enough, it sold itself; this has meant that the process of building emotion I sonly rarely part of the culture of games companies. I speak from experience when I say that very, very few studios bake emotions into their development process from the start. Back in the day, this didn’t matter: back then, the competition was about gameplay and tech. But today? Emotion is critical, and Blizzard was part of making that happen. Great book.

What did you last read?

MCU: The Reign Of Marvel Studios– by Robinson, Gonzales and Edwards

If you’re interested in building IP-universes, there’s really no escaping the MCU. I read this on and off while revisiting some of the Marvel movies in phase 1-3. Even though they built the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the backs of 1000s of existing comic books, it is still an incredible feat of content engineering. I doubt we’ll see its like again in our lifetime. Imagine, from Iron Man in 2008 to End Game in 2019, there’s 23 movies! Each one a massive complex of interconnected writing, casting, contract negotiations, visual design, effects, shooting, marketing, and so on.

Reading the book and watching the movies again made me realise that the biggest shift was to flip these superheroes from niche comics to mainstream movies. Each superhero went from being a bunch of features (Shoots webs! Flies! Has adamantite claws!) and attitudes (Angry! Tells jokes!) to being directly relatable to a broad audience. Suddenly, Iron Man’s daddy issues were front and center over 22 movies. Thor and Loki became all about brotherly rivalry, and don’t get me started on The Guardians of the Galaxy (the best Marvel movie ever?). This is very similar to the challenge most game characters have today: they’re mainly a bunch of cool features, and that isn’t going to be enough.

What are you eyeing up next?

Outcast – graphic novel by Kirkman and Azaceta

I’m going to reread this as inspiration for a project about supernatural possession. Kirkman was the writer behind the original Walking Dead graphic novels. I’m fascinated by how he and GRR Martin brought “shocking main character death” into the mainstream. Before Walking Dead and Game Of Thrones, the heroes in mainstream stories always made it out alive. But, suddenly, all bets were off – these days, nobody is safe. Outcast doesn’t disappoint. It’s about a man stalked by possessions that target those he loves. It’s possession as trauma – and a great example of how mainstream genre stories can also be deeply personal and original. This is an important balance to aim for, if you want a big audience: the story in your game needs to respect the expectations for a genre story (Exorcisms! Disturbing body contortions!), but it also needs to bring enough emotional connection and originality to connect and stand out (in this case generational pain, psychological scars, and more).

What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?

I collect quotes, so here’s a couple…

"As long as you get the emotion right, you can throw in all the other stuff." - Edward P. Jones

Jones said this in an interview about his Pullitzer-prize winning novel, The Known World. The book is about a Black slave owner, and Jones was asked about how extensive his research had been. His answer was that he hadn’t done any – he focused on the emotion and let the rest bloom from that. This is a huge part of the work I do with games companies: from an artistic point of view, as well as for positioning the game in the market – we need to get the emotion right.

"I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own." - David Diop, At Night All Blood Is Black

This is a good one, but tough to live and work by. Game universes often work within existing genres, attempting to repurpose existing ideas for a proven audience into something that is fresh but still familiar. The trick is to understand what has gone before, without letting your project be overtaken by it. If you don’t free yourself, you’ll create something generic and forgettable. On the other hand, if you free yourself too completely, the audience will think you’re weird (this might mean it is art, which is wonderful, but also very difficult to sell).

"I can’t go on. I’ll go on" - Samuel Beckett

Devoting yourself to creating anything new, in a nutshell.

What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?

The Wager by David Grann

I was at Gamescom with 8+ meetings a day for a week, and whenever I had minute to myself I just had to read what happened next. It is an absolute horror of a tragedy, that just keeps going deeper and deeper. A big part of what makes it work is the feeling of authenticity. This is something I try to bring to all my work: gameworlds are by nature almost completely artificial. If we want people to get emotionally involved in them, we need to find an authentic foundation for what is happening in the game. That doesn’t mean it has to be true, but it has to be rooted in something that is true.

The Masks Of Nyarlathotep by Larry DiTillio & Lynn Willis

Chaosium’s magnum opus, and perhaps the crowning achievement of pen & paper rpg scenarios. I don’t have time to play pen and paper anymore, but read RPG scenarios for their world-building. This monumental Call of Cthulhu campaign is a global adventure spanning decades, with everything you could want from an existential horror world – cults, conspiracies, ancient secrets, cosmic forces. It is an enormous campaign, but also super detailed. It is full of epic spectacles and unique characters, and of course the constant threat of insanity. I could forget that I’ve read it, just to experience it as a player, but the thought of running it is just too overwhelming. I think I keep pushing it on people so I can live it through them. A true RPG legend.

What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?

The Player Of Games by Iain M. Banks

This is the only one that springs to mind. Banks wrote a whole series of novels set in the “Culture” universe, but this is the only one of them I really like. The others are too loose and slapdash for me, but this one is tight as a drum, brilliantly structured - and for a gamer it is endlessly engaging (perhaps because it builds an entire civilization around being skilled at games?). In the book, a renowned game player is bored, until he is introduced to a new game, Azad, in a far off civilization. In Azad, every move on the board mirrors the social and political dynamics of the alien empire, which is steeped in oppression, and the stakes turn out to be… high. This is a novel that really understands games. There’s endless potential for an interactive adaptation, although the challenge of designing a working version of Azad is pretty daunting. I’ve read it more times than Dune - and that’s saying something.

New year, new slate, so do let me know which guests you'd like to see in upcoming entries. Not that Spector fella, though. He's had enough. Book for now!