[This is a guest blog by Max Gladstone: a writer and recovering expatriate, he lives in Cambridge, MA, USA. Find short fiction and nonfictional ramblings at http://www.maxgladstone.com, or follow him on Twitter (and Echo Bazaar) @maxgladstone.]

Mysteries are hard-coded into the human mind. Withhold a crucial bit of information, and we salivate, or starve.

This is strange, considering how many mysteries we ignore every day. The modern world, like Fallen London, is a web of interconnected systems the rules of which we know in only the most vague approximation. We do not understand the cities we inhabit, or the machines we use, half so well as a farmer of the seventeenth century understood his land and his tools. As a defense mechanism we have become experts at bottling up curiosity in our daily lives. Douglas Adams satirized this habit when he postulated the existence of a Somebody Else's Problem Field: we turn away from questions, because there are too many of them.

That very repression is why many of us are so fascinated with mysteries held up and spot-lit in stories, films, and games: our curiosity is under pressure like champagne in a bottle, and a mystery properly presented gives us tacit permission to remove the cork.

It was no accident, I think, that modern genre fiction—detective stories, science fiction, fantasy, and horror—and its obsession with the mysterious, the unknown and the strange, arose in the West during the Victorian era from which Fallen London takes its inspiration. These tales gained power as the world grew more complicated than human beings could comprehend.

The heroes and heroines of such stories live in confrontation with a giant and confusing universe: Phillip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Captain Kirk and Abraham Van Helsing take on identity through the ways they deal with the unknown. We discover these characters through the mysteries they confront, and the manners in which they confront them. Characters like Holmes and Watson provide a model for living in a world of unknowns by engaging with it, rather than cowering from it.

The genius of Echo Bazaar, to my mind, lies in its use of the tools of interactive fiction to make the player create a character who _belongs_ in a mysterious world and complex world that neither player nor character understands. A beginning Echo Bazaar character is literally a silhouette, without identity or history. Escaping from New Newgate, the player confronts a series of choices, and in making those choices she discovers her character in collaboration with the setting. An Echo Bazaar character has identity because of how she exists in Fallen London; the entire storyline about Recalling (and ultimately Forgetting) Surface Ties is a testament to this fact.

These choices, in reaction to mystery and in pursuit of truth, define a character's arc through the game. How will our heroine enact the Lover's revenge, or will she do so at all? She finds an arcane and undecipherable script in tombs untouched for several thousand years; how will she investigate it, and with whom will she share her discovery? She may, at some point, find herself face to face with a creature born from an entomologist's nightmare, and be willing to risk death at its fangs to learn the answer to a vexing riddle. These choices build a character, in the same way that millions of microscopic skeletons, over hundreds of thousands of years, build a coral reef.

Wonderfully, Echo Bazaar seldom casts choices as right or wrong, good or evil—rather, every choice offers another path of approaching the mystery of the setting. The lothario's devotion to sex and seduction peels away the social curtains of Fallen London, as the footpad's immersion in to the world of crime reveals the whispers of cats and the hidden paths of the Flit. Mystery draws the player into making choices, and when the truth is revealed, it presents itself as a new layer of the unknown.

What is Mister Eaten's name? Who are the Masters of the Bazaar? What is the Correspondence, and who writes it? Why is the Duchess infatuated with cats? Some day, we will probably learn the answers to those questions. By then, however, that reef of character will be built, and the characters of Fallen London will survive beyond the mysteries they were so eager to solve. After the Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes labors on.