Don Bosco talks about his epic gamebook series Last Kid Running: The Supergame

Hi, and thanks for having me here on your website! In my Last Kid Running gamebook series, you roleplay as Runner X, a contestant on the hottest reality show streaming on the mobile web. The enigmatic Dr Yamato has created an amazing, ambitious running game, filled with futuristic inventions and crazy AR and VR challenges, and you'll need to outrun and outsmart the other contestants to win this competition. The three books are designed like a computer game series, in that each book has five levels that the reader needs to progress through, before getting to the next book. After I became a parent, I really got to appreciate computer games. My two sons love to read, but they don’t enjoy the same kind of stories, so they seldom discuss books. When it comes to games, though, they connect easily. They share strategies, they watch each other play, and where it’s possible they even play together. So some years back I decided to try making gamebooks with them, just to have fun together. We created our first gamebook in Twine, which was called The Secret of the Chatter Blocks, and it’s now a self-published illustrated paperback. This eventually led to us creating the Last Kid Running series for Penguin Random House to publish. The Last Kid Running series brings to life some wacky game ideas that I would really like to share with my kids, and kids everywhere. A point to note, the Last Kid Running gamebooks are written in the style of absurdist science fiction, to entertain young readers who haven't encountered gamebooks, and there are no conventional gamebook mechanics. Your progress comes from exploring the storyworld and picking up on all the plot twists that arise when you interact with the other characters, and this information helps you with your decisions later on.

Asia is made up of many different countries, each with its own rich history, tradition and culture. And so there are so many different approaches to sports. Some countries have a very rich street sport scene, where they might play cricket or soccer in the alleys, and some countries have giant sporting industries, with stadiums and competitive leagues and merchandising. There's really far too many examples for me to summarize here, but some cool Asian sports that you might be interested to look up are sepak takraw, kabaddi and dragonboat racing. For us in Singapore, the local schools promote sports actively as part of the curriculum, and my two sons have been involved in all sorts of sports, from golf to soccer, floorball, handball, basketball, badminton, air pistol shooting, and more. Just earlier this week one son told me he's been playing tchoukball, which I'd never heard of before, I thought he was making it up, but I googled it and it's actually a thing.

The biggest influence would be the X Games Asia extreme sports event that used to be held on the island of Phuket in Thailand around 2000. My wife used to work for the company that organized this, and I attended the finals in 2001. It was a really thrilling experience, next to the beach, with giant ramps for skateboarding, and loud music blasting throughout the day, and a gathering of competitors and skateboarding fans from all over the world. I had never seen anything like this before. In this gamebook series I've tried to recreate my sense of excitement there. I also worked on a documentary about a parkour group from London, we brought them to various famous landmarks around Singapore and filmed them executing daring stunts and running sequences there. Through this I got to learn quite a bit about the parkour culture, its history, and why some enthusiasts believe that it could be the most intelligent urban sport form to have emerged. In my series, this was the inspiration for why Dr Yamato wanted to create the Last Kid Running competition, to get kids excited about running, and possibly running on other planets one day. Some friends of mine also created a VR rollercoaster experience once, which they installed at various shopping malls and tourist spots around Singapore. I brought my two sons to check it out, and it was a really immersive experience. I could feel my body getting fooled by the VR illusions, I really believed that I was moving in that simulated space, and that I was in a rollercoaster car that was racing downhill at an incredible speed. This experience inspired many of the scenes in the series.

It was a really challenging time for all of us, and it was great that we had access to such a lot of music, reading material, games, etc to keep us company. But the most basic "technology" that we need to experience is the human body, using our five senses, and I think we really need to be out in the real world to fully satisfy our biological systems. I'm not sure that the world is in a big hurry to embrace even more online interaction, or even virtual reality technology. It may happen one day, but likely not in a way that we expect. I used to work in technology development many years ago, and I remember around 2003 a friend showed me a project in development, which was basically embedding a full virtual environment in a PDF document, using VRML. That was such a mind blowing experience for me, I was anticipating all kinds of commercial applications for this, but somehow this technology never made it big out in the real world. So it's very hard to say if real life sporting and gaming events will ever be replaced. I sincerely hope to see more creative people everywhere design lots of new and fun activities that we can enjoy in the real world, in nature, with other people, etc. And this may or may not involve some technology aids. This is actually what the inventor Dr Yamato is trying to do in my series, using technology to get kids running together and dreaming of exploring strange new worlds.