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"Literature? In MY video games?" It's more likely than you think. |
We all know that adapting a video game into a movie usually turns out poorly. The leap from video games to books happens for the big blockbuster games sometimes, and usually the resulting literary product is a pretty niche-market kind of thing, meant for existing fans who want fuller immersion in the game's world (can you imagine reading the Halo novels if you didn't own an Xbox? It would be like buying collectible horcrux miniatures without reading Harry Potter. It just wouldn't happen).But adaptation of a movie or a piece of literature into a video game is a different matter. The history of video games is dotted with these strange hybrids, who bear the storytelling genes of film or prose or sometimes even poetry, but have mutated to fit the needs of electronic gaming. These games are sometimes very bad. Occasionally they are good. And there will invariably be more to come.
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Press right trigger to say, "Darling!" |
This article on MSNBC, though it's not exactly news, concerns a developer's attempts to adapt, among other things, Dante's Inferno into a video game. It's an interesting but kind of depressing read -- I haven't played the thing, but it sounds like Inferno becomes essentially just Gears of War in hell with Marcus Fenix in daedric armor.
Usually adaptations are about finding the strengths of a medium and using those strengths to best tell a familiar story in a new way. Film can create a clear, exact, breathtaking visual representation of a story. Books usually excel in offering thorough, deep, cerebral manifestations of the stories they tell. But what are the reasons for a story to be told as a video game? Why, other than for the sweet, sweet money, should we adapt the classics into games at all?
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One of the best things about video games is that you can decide when a story's protagonist is going to be a gigantic dick. |
Well, the incorporation of player choice into a narrative is a major factor in video games. If you want to adapt a well-known story into a video game, you have a few options. You can:
A.) Give the player free reign over the attitudes of characters and the events in the game. This will create a much more interactive experience, and it will accentuate one of the reasons games are played in the first place. The downside to this is that you will invariably create a game which does not necessarily tell the story intended. An open-world Catch-22 game would allow the player to forego Yossarian's horror and confusion at the absurdity of war and instead blithely kill fascists. Die, Nazis! What if they end up going full Fallout-style for the planned video game adaptation of Game of Thrones? The typically honorable Ned Stark could go on a civ-killing rampage in the middle of Winterfell.
Purists would revolt. "How can you call these adaptations," they'll say. "The stories become all warped and lose all meaning!" And they're kind of right. Catch-22 sucks as a jingoistic war story, and Ned Stark is no longer the embodiment of chivalry he must be for the story to make sense if the player makes him chop peasants up with his greatsword.
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If you play as Renegade Ned Stark, the whole thing starts to make a lot less sense. |
B.) Okay, so total freedom's out, then. But the opposite path is only marginally better. We've all played video games that were movies first where the whole thing is action sequence after action sequence, with obligatory cutscenes in the middle to get the plot out of the way. You essentially herd the characters from scene to scene and keep them alive until it's over. Congratulations! You pretty much just watched a movie, except twenty hours longer and less emotionally fulfilling!
C.) Go the Dash Rendar route. Within a familiar universe, create a new, blank slate for the player to control. That way, it doesn't mess up the canon, because the character is whoever the player wants him or her to be. But this isn't so much an adaptation as a new game in an established world. If I make a Great Gatsby game where the PC is a new character named Crash Xanatos who runs around solving mysteries in 1920's NYC but sometimes runs into Gats and the Buchanans, that's not really The Great Gatsby. Though that does actually sound kind of awesome.
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Who spoiled the American Dream for these hoity-toity suckers? Crash Xanatos is on the case! |
Option A would be fascinating to see -- I don't think it's been done before. It would be interesting to twist a story with your own free will, see which choices made it interesting and which choices made the whole thing nonsensical, but as a straight adaptation I don't think it would work. Option B is done all the time in video games, and only rarely do I find this type of game any fun (see the N64's Goldeneye). Option C can be either immensely stupid or really cool, but again, I don't think this is truly adaptation. Is there a way to re-tell a cherished story in video game format without destroying the story's meaning or reducing the video game to a mind-meltingly linear progression through a series of plot points?
This is hard. Why are we trying to make beloved movies and books into video games again? Why do we want to do that?
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Oh, right. |
Right, I forgot. The money. The sweet, sweet money.
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