Chapter 10 Style, Consistency and Plausibility in the Fable Gameworld David Surman Introduction I n 2004 British videogame developer Lionhead Studios, in association with its subsidiary company Big Blue Box, released Fable on Microsoft’s XBOX console, a role-playing videogame in which you play an orphaned boy who matures into a hero and whose moral alignment relates to how you play the game. While the videogame enjoyed substantial commercial success in the UK and North America and was appraised in acclaimed videogame magazines such as EDGE, it was not so warmly welcomed by hardcore role-play gamers and fans of Peter Molyneux’s prior achieve- ments. Their tastes had been sharpened by the trail of ‘teasers’ released by the developers, 1 as well as Lionhead Director and lead designer Molyneux’s frequent mention of the revolution in gameworld design that Fable would offer. Extraordinarily, these frustrations motivated Molyneux to confront his audience in the gaming press, in an online documentary, and on his own Lionhead online forum. In answer to the frustrations of his gaming public, Molyneux writes: There is something I have to say. And I have to say it because I love making games. When a game is in development, myself and the development teams I work with constantly encourage each other to think of the best features and the most ground-breaking design possible. Abstract: Gameworlds are the expression of a complex cultural and textual interaction, in which the foundational structures of the videogame solicit investment and belief from the player. Style arbitrates this solicitation, causing all aspects of the gameworld to conform to a common aesthetic line. This process is rarely so efficient however, and contemporary videogames such as Fable demonstrate the messiness of this ideological contract between the ambiguous roles of producers and consumers of videogames. 153