I tried to keep in mind while writing it to NOT give players a moment that defines what it all meant to you.

Joe: There’s this natural forward progression as well. Given the general movement towards the East, we do have the potential to have all the locations in Europe to be more introductory content, while locations in the Americas are more advanced.

Jon: One of the interesting things about this tech is that although we built the story in kind of a cavalier fashion, technology allows us to remember everything a player does ever. It’s very much like a jigsaw that the player builds bit by bit, and then we can assemble them in new ways. We can just call up the six or seven prior points at which they could have made a decision that could influence this one. Quite a lot of it is written on the fly.

It doesn’t actually matter whether there are sections of the text that are impossible to see, there are so many connections that we’re making all the time. Of course, the player reading the game has one single linear experience. Give up on the idea of telling one story. Once you give up on that, you can start telling stories that aren’t entirely pre-authored.

It’s not entirely emergent narrative as Ken Levine would tell it, but it’s close. It makes it very rewarding.

When we first built it, we didn’t realize how powerful it was. 80 Days is completely mental from a planning point of view. We could attempt to make a graph of the choices, but it would have 10,000 branches. Every location has its own web. From a programming point of view, it’s much more like an AI.

Meg: It’s an incredibly rich world that kind of exists and turns. That was really important to us, that this is 1872 in this kind of alternative history, that the world exists and there are characters living their own lives, there’s all this richness happening. You just thread your part through.

Appszoom: Meg, in your post on Victorian Futurism, I read: “the stories usually told in the margins spill over into the text, and half of them belong to unexceptional women.” AWESOME. Know anything else out there like that? Why is this so important to the world of gaming?

Meg: There’s a lot of exciting new narratives emerging from unexpected places, especially in interactive fiction and the indie scene, but the breadth and diversity of 80 Days is still not the norm. It was interesting to go back to a period piece. Since we’re approaching it in a steampunk kind of way, we’re decolonizing the text. If we’re going to recreate history, why not make more women making gadgets? Why not make this richer?

On one hand, you want to say how exciting this is about our game, but then, this is kind of how games should be.

Jon: We’re working with this book publisher, and he’s reading through the game text. When he finds a female character, a lesbian character, a gay couple, our proofreader doesn’t bat an eye, because it is NORMAL for texts to have non-heteronormative relationships. It’s somehow an amazing thing for a game to be about, but its NORMAL for a human being to write about.

This app isn’t about a monoculture. Neither is it diversity for the sake of diversity. It’s about the entire world: if it weren’t diverse, it would be REALLY boring.

Meg: You’re the first person to talk about this with us. I don’t know if this is because it’s super normal for the rest of the testers, that people are just used to this in steampunk fiction, or if they’ve somehow managed a really straight play through.

Joe: In Sorcery!, we used to have only male avatars, but we got complaints, and in the second build we finally got a female avatar. Jules Verne’s 80 Days is about two white dudes going through the world, so I don’t suppose we’ll get the same complaint for this one since we’ve got pre-defined characters.

Meg: We thought about this a lot.