As I said when I started this blog, I am interested in exploring what features games offer as a medium; how can games create an experience that is different from, but every bit as satisfying as, novels or films? Comparing these mediums becomes easiest when you examine adaptations that cross over into different mediums and genres. Doing so provides a “constant” of sorts. While it is not an entire bust to compare the differences between movies and live theater by using The Matrix and Les Miserables as an example (use of sets, how drama is built, and characterization are all aspects that possibly can be explored using these examples), to really see where the strengths and weaknesses of each lay it is best to use a work that is common between both mediums, be it Sweeney Todd, Les Miserables (which manages to bridge novels, plays, and now films together), or Henry V.
Additionally, adaptations keep stories alive, allowing variations to subvert our expectations, putting familiar characters through new ordeals, or modernizing a dated but poignant story to better apply to a new audience. Shakespeare’s plays are often being adapted to the screen, sometimes as a faithful period piece and other times as a visionary work. I have seen Macbeth walk a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Richard III sport a uniform clearly designed to invoke the Third Reich.
I plan to have this entry be one of my longest yet, and to truly dig into some analysis, which has been sorely lacking in a past few posts of mine. As usual, spoilers will follow. Let’s jump in.
Spec Ops: The Line
I had never played this game, but recently watched the entire story mode in a “cut-scene movie” after I heard great things about it. This is a game I am now regretting having missed. Just as Francis Ford Coppola adapted the core elements of Heart of Darkness to create Apocalypse Now, the team behind Spec Ops: The Line drew inspiration from both of these classics to create a milestone of their own. There are plenty of allusions to each throughout the game, including naming the lost colonel Konrad, titling one of the segments “Heart of Darkness,” and having an intense classical score playing while a helicopter rains destruction down (though not “Ride of the Valkyries”).
Make no mistake though, Spec Ops tells its own compelling story that leaves exactly the impact intended on the audience whether you have read Conrad or watched Coppola’s film. Rather than set in the Congo or Vietnam, Spec Ops is set in Dubai. The player controls Captain Walker as he leads two other soldiers in search of finding and rescuing a unit, the Damned 33, after a tremendous sandstorm ravaged the city. Almost every player, unless they played after hearing reviews from others, went in expecting another straight-forward shooter that glorified combat and war. What they got instead was an uncomfortably grotesque crawl through a city that could stand in as Dante’s Hell. The environments are unsettling and creepy, but not nearly as much as the aftermaths of tortures that litter the way forward. As the player passes the worst that humans are capable of committing on one another, so too are they forced into moments where they must make disturbing choices themselves. Two of the most poignant moments are the firing of White Phosphorous on a large enemy encampment (only to soon learn of the refugees there as well) and being told, while surrounded by snipers, to choose between killing the man that stole water (being told it is a capitol offense, especially given how scarce it is in the city now) or the man that retaliated by murdering the other man’s family. Each of these moments are controlled by the player (although the White Phosphorous part does not give you an option to avoid it), giving additional weight to the player. If in the second moment, choosing which criminal must die, the player can even choose to instead shoot at the snipers, in hopes of saving both men. The dynamic nature of playing AS Walker, rather than simply watching him commit these acts is extremely powerful.
The game sets out to critique not only the horrors of war, but also the state of war games. Games like Call of Duty and Battlefield raised the standards for gameplay in first-person shooter games, and provide a multiplayer that is considerably more cherished than the story campaign. Spec Ops subverts the expectations of trying to be another war clone in various ways. Firstly, the mechanics of the game are almost universally considered to be sub-par, especially given that the game was marketed to a similar extent to other popular shooter games. Secondly, the multiplayer mode, partly because of the relatively poor mechanics, is much less memorable than the story told in the campaign. Given the budget and marketing of the game, many analyses claim that the poor mechanics are a way to unsettle players from the beginning and prepare them for the subversion that continues to take place.
I have always loved moments where the audience is addressed, such as Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Spec Ops has a similar moment when Colonel Konrad is found, but is discovered to have been dead since before Walker was even in Dubai. A hallucination of Konrad appears next to his corpse, chastising Walker for the meaningless slaughter he committed on his way to this dead end. And yet, every word of that speech can be applied to the player as well. You are the one that walked the character to the mortar, you, pulled the trigger, you forced your men further into Hell on a doomed mission.
I could go on even longer about this game, but further analysis will detract from this week’s topic. The developers of Spec Ops utilized the interactivity and player involvement in games to expand on the story of corruption from Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now.
The Wolf Among Us
The Wolf Among Us is a game by Tell Tale Games that is based on the Vertigo Comics series Fables, which in itself is an adaptation of various fairy tales. The world is filled with characters from fairy tales such as Belle, Beast, the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, and Blue Beard. All of these characters were forced to flee their homeland and settle in a slum in New York City. Centuries have passed since the stories occurred and now the Big Bad Wolf, now called Bigby Wolf, is the sheriff of Fabletown. Residents here are slow to forget the horrible deeds Bigby committed in their homeland though.
Fables sets out to return these fairy tales back to the dirtier origins, making fans of the Disney adaptations certainly uncomfortable. Though instead of the violence that was so common in the fairy tales, other vices and problems grip the characters. Belle and Beast are strapped financially now and their marriage is shaky at best. Prince Charming is a womanizer using his charm to seduce and use women, Fable or Human. Grendel, the Huntsman and some of the other more physical Fables (though in the guise of humans via Glamour) drown their memories at the bar.
The Wolf Among Us manages to recreate the feel of the source material while engaging the audience in a more emotional level.
The Witcher
The Witcher series is best known as a 3 game series, but the games are based on a pre-existing polish book series. The books, several of which are translated into English, follow a witcher named Geralt of Rivia, just like in the game series. Admittedly, I have not read the translated book so I cannot speak to the contents of the book(s), nor can I speak to the games besides the most recent, Wild Hunt. Instead, I can speak to how the game adapts a book story and character cast in a more general sense. Further, I have only played the most recent game, Wild Hunt, and cannot speak to the first 2 games.
In the series, witchers are monster hunters that under go a ritual early in life to enhance their physical properties and gain minor magic. The ritual has a great stigma in the eyes of the general population though, leading to many people referring to witchers as freaks and unnatural. In the games, you can take on contracts to hunt down particularly dangerous monsters that are harming townspeople, in addition to following courtly intrigue and personal investigations. These monsters and legends are largely based on the more traditional and monstrous depictions. Godlings, sirens, basilisks, and cockatrices all make appearances in varying degrees.
As the story continues, even the smallest side quest is given the personality and life as a main story quest. Characters that are met in the main story remain in the world and offer new quests that they require help in, now that they have helped you in one way or another. This makes the world that is built seem more organic than most games, where a character seems to disappear once their part of the main story is completed. A common way books create a world that feels alive is through the third person omniscient narrator that is able to provide information on multiple characters in various locations.
(couldn’t find the shorter recap videos online)
Speaking of narrators, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a frame story, being told by Dandelion, a bard and a friend of Geralt. As the player launches the game, Dandelion provides him or her with a synopsis of what is currently happening in the main story line. This almost parallels a reader’s ability to read a page or two prior to where the book mark is if it has been some time since the book was picked up. The choice of narrator, especially once you meet Dandelion, also brings in the concept of an unreliable narrator. Dandelion is prone to exaggeration and self importance, and so the player should be thinking, as with a book with an unreliable narrator, whether what is being told is what actually occurred.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
More than any other entry on this list, The Hitchhiker’s Guide has been adapted the most, and nearly every time with Adams’ vision leading the adaptation. The Guide began as a radio play before being immortalized book trilogy, then being adapted for a short-lived television show, being turned into a maddeningly difficult (but expectedly strange) text-based adventure game, having two more books added to the trilogy, and lastly being adapted to a feature film based on a partly completed script following Adams’ untimely death.There has been a few comic books based on the novels and most recently a sixth book based on notes found written by Adams has been written by Eoin Colfer. Few other narratives can claim to have the adaptation history as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has.
Adams knew that an adaptation that was the same as the original incarnation is at best lazy, and at worst an insult to the fan base. Every single adaptation started from the same central moment of Arthur Dent escaping Earth just before it explodes, but they diverge wildly at times. This managed to keep the series surprisingly fresh, despite how often it was adapted in a relatively short amount of time.
Throughout the series, Adams proved his love of science and technology, eventually putting his money where his mouth was, so to speak, and helped to create a text-based adventure game (playable for free here) in the vein of Zork. Anyone who has played the game can attest to how difficult the game is–but not in the same way we view difficult modern games. The difficulty comes instead in being able to think in abstract ways to further the narrative. When told that “it is pitch black,” the player cannot discount the simple action of turning on a light. The process to acquire a babel fish is comparatively insane, requiring the player to take the junk mail from home before leaving the planet. Of course, once a particular puzzle is solved, the solution seems perfectly in keeping with the tone of the series.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide is loaded with satire, attacking bureaucracy, politics, religion, technology, and the science fiction genre. Each adaptation adds new satire, attacking different ideas and tropes. The game satirizes the text-based game genre at almost every turn by making many puzzle answers near impossibly strange.
To complete the game, you don’t so much as put yourself in the shoes of Dent, but rather in the shoes of Adams. It is a surreal experience that puts you in a mindspace unique to the series. In other entries in the series the audience is a passive observer, but with the text game, you serve almost as a creator or story teller.
Alan Wake
As people that read the first post on here may remember, I am not good at horror games. I am notoriously anxious when playing them. Luckily, Alan Wake is less horror than thriller because I loved playing it. The game plays almost exactly like a Stephen King novel, or rather it reads as if King were the main character of one of his own stories. Alan Wake, the titular hero, is an author of thrillers and goes on a retreat with his wife to a cottage in the Pacific northwest. Once there, Alan blacks out after some strange events, only to wake up and discover that his cottage was ransacked, his wife is missing, and he has a new manuscript written by him that he has no recollection of writing.
As the game unfolds in episodes, complete with “previously on” catch-ups, Wake finds manuscript pages that detail events that soon occur. These events include conversations with characters he is about to meet as well as fighting mysterious, shadow-possessed people. The manuscript pages can actually be read as well (though the entire book is not available, only select excerpts). As each episode is completed, the story continues in a more traditional narrative arc than most games.
It is also revealed that Wake used to be a writer for a television show within the world called Night Springs, a show that can be watched at certain points that has obvious inspiration from The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks. The concept of an author becoming trapped in his own work would be right down Twilight Zone‘s alley (assuming that concept hasn’t already been explored in the show).
The game feels like an organic work from King or Twilight Zone that is now controlled by the player. The horror/sci-fi thriller tone perfectly fits the influences that, while the game isn’t exactly an adaptation, feels as if it could be an adaptation of a missing episode/book.
Never Alone
I have been waiting to talk about this game for a long time. It is a wonderful cultural work that celebrates the culture of the Iñupiat, a Native American people in Alaska. Members of the Iñupiat community worked side by side with the developers of Never Alone to create a game that tells the story of one of their traditional folk stories. As with many native peoples, the Iñupiat passed their stories on largely by oral story telling.
The game is narrated entrirely in Iñupiaq with the translation subtitled along the bottom. It follows the story of a young girl meeting a fox spirit that helps the girl navigate various dangers of the wild Alaskan landscape and return home. A few culture heroes are briefly met and many spirits, both benevolent and malevolent, are encountered along the way. Additionally, throughout the game the player collects various “cultural insights,” which act like mini documentaries of the Iñupiaq people explaining how life is like in Alaska, and how life was in earlier years.They explain the relation of spirits with people as well as how people survive snow storms and the beauty of the aurora borealis.
The game play is a traditional platformer that should be relatively familiar to anyone that has played Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong Country. This means that it has a low bar of entry compared to some other entries in the blog. It also has a linear story, meaning that one player’s experience is largely the same as another’s. It should be noted, though, that while the concept of the game is phenomenal, the gameplay mechanics leave plenty to be desired.
Now is the Time for Games 