GAMING: PLAYING WITH LITERATURE – Newspaper

With its vision of towering tripods striding across a desolate landscape, the latest video game developed by Flipswitch Studios, War of the Worlds, is highly anticipated by players. It’s notable, however, that discussion forums have focused more on the similarities to Spielberg’s 2005 film and less on how the game might reflect the source material – HG Wells’ 1898 novel.

Novels have been providing source material for games for years. Here are four examples of games that wear their literary inspirations on their sleeve.

1. The Hobbit (1983)

Peter Jackson’s films may have been praised for imagining the previously unfilmable, but Tolkien also inspired early game developers to push the limits of hardware to create the previously unplayable.

From today’s perspective, The Hobbit looks like a crude text-based adventure, but its methods were far ahead of its time.

Because Tolkien’s story could not be fully converted into 16 kilobytes of memory, developers Veronika Megler and Phil Mitchell had to create a custom game engine before the concept was widely adopted.

Four video game adaptations of classic literary works, from The Hobbit to Hamlet

A game engine provides a framework of basic principles and elements such as: B. Language rules, which can then be changed according to the specific requirements of a game. In this case, non-playable characters roam the world and respond independently to players based on some basic linguistic principles, creating a form of what we would today call “emergent narrative.”

While there have been other Tolkien game adaptations since then, The Hobbit is special because it shows how attempting to model literature can in turn inspire new forms of computer storytelling and programming expression.

2. Bioshock (2007)

Bioshock physically transports players into the world of Rapture – an underwater utopia built by business tycoon Andrew Ryan. Philosophically, however, it takes players into the universe of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), a source of inspiration for many libertarian entrepreneurs.

Although many games invite players to live out their ethical values, Bioshock stands out. Despite being a first-person shooter game, it shows that behind the shooting game façade it is still possible to stimulate critical thinking. Even the most frenzied player can pause when faced with the choice of sacrificing children to obtain the resource ADAM (a form of capital) that makes winning the game easier.

Game designer and blogger Clint Hocking saw this as a “ludonarrative dissonance,” where the message of the story conflicts with the way we must play it to win. But it is also possible to see this as a playful equivalent of literature’s “negative capacity,” the requirement to live uncomfortably with moral and aesthetic conflicts that cannot be easily resolved.

3. Elsinore (2019)

The #GamerGate controversy around 2014 was an online hate campaign that questioned diversity and representation in games. As part of this, Golden Glitch Studios launched a crowdfunding campaign to transform Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the archetype of troubled masculinity, into a new game that depicts the play’s events from a female perspective – that of Ophelia.

Elsinore shows how adaptations can maintain fidelity to a literary ancestor through their mechanisms, as well as through superficial copying of dialogue, characters, or settings.

Although Elsinore uses some of the conventions of the point-and-click adventure game, Ophelia’s actions in particular are very limited. Most of the time, she (or the player) can only talk to people and eavesdrop on other characters’ conversations, representing her marginal status in Shakespeare’s play, where she is spoken about or about her more often than herself.

Although Elsinore succeeds on the level of characterization, it also raises a broader question about the divide between the literary and gaming worlds.

To complete a game (and this one has multiple endings), we as players must succeed. So if the ending condition of a game is that our character commits suicide, even though we are sad about his loss, we can at the same time be happy that we have reached a state of victory. So can a play ever be tragic in the sense of theater?

4. The Witcher 3 (2015)

The Witcher 3 is one of the most acclaimed games of recent years and is based on the fantasy universe of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski.

It succeeds in part because it balances an open world with a narrative structure. In general, the more open a game world is (allowing players to do things in any order), the harder it is to develop a coherent plot and characterization. This reverses the logic of the written novel, which normally offers the reader limited freedom in navigating the text but a maximum sense of coherence.

Developer CD Projekt Red has managed to balance these two elements with miniature side quests that function as standalone stories and build the world and character of protagonist Geralt. But the game still seems to logically move us forward in an overarching narrative no matter how or when we explore it.

This final example illustrates how game scholars can use games based on literary antecedents to theorize some of the building blocks of both media. What gives a narrative its structure? Does fiction produce similar effects regardless of whether we read and play?

By adapting literary works, these games inherit not only stories but also the currency of prestige associated with their canonical ancestors.

The author is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Modern Literature at Durham University in the United Kingdom

Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 13, 2024