Meg Jayanth: the 80 Days writer on the interactive power of game-play

'Games are about pulling people into a world, making a space for creativity and building a dialogue'

80 Days, the rip-roaring, award-winning iPhone and PC game in which you assume the role of Passepartout, put-upon butler to the world-travelling 19th-century explorer Phileas Fogg, boasts more than eight times the word count of the novel on which it's based. The journey described in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days is complete in a little over 60,000 words. 80 Days, by contrast, contains more than half a million - although you'll have to play many times before you read them all.

Meg Jayanth, a writer for video games who splits her time between London and her home city, Bangalore, was responsible for much of the sprawling word count. During 80 Days' development, she wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of text, snippets of dialogue and the taut descriptions that fill out the game's landscape as vividly as any 3D artist could.