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A LEGO Orange
By Corvus | January 29, 2009
I should make it clear at the outset that A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is most emphatically not one of my favorite pieces of literature. Nor is the film adaptation by Stanley Kubrik one of my favorite pieces of cinema. In fact, both are so unrelentingly violent, in both theme and content, that I tend to regard people who list either the the book or the movie among their favorites with no small measure of reserve.
That being said, if you can stomach the violence, the book and the movie are important cultural indicators and deserve to be read/watched for that reason alone. They are difficult and hard to stomach, but I feel they reflect an ugliness that exists in our culture, both in our tolerance of youth violence and our own violent approaches to dealing with it. And if you’ve only read the deeply flawed twenty chapter version of the book that was originally published in the US, you should read the 21st chapter before moving on to this literary pre-imagining. I’m going to assume some familiarity with the source text, or movie, and skip explaining the hyper-stylized appearance of the gang and the complexities of their patois. In fact, rather than focus on the particulars of scene, event, and location, I’m going to discuss why this dark and terrifying novel would best be served by a LEGO style game. That being said, I do reference some particularly upsetting moments from the book, so if you have difficulty reading such things, please feel free to skip this post. If I didn’t need to get this out of my head, I’d likely just skip it myself.
It probably goes without saying that the soundtrack to this game consists of classical music, predominately featuring works by the protagonist’s beloved “Ludwig van.”
The game would cast the audience in the role of Alex, the cunning leader of the droogs. Georgie, Pete, and Dim would be available as sidekicks, each with a different skill to help deal with environmental challenges. But rather than allowing the player to take control of the droogs, they would always be under AI control. When one of the secondary character skills were needed, the player would strike the droog, spurring them to action.
Unlike you’d expect from a LEGO game, however, the majority of the game features absolutely no building. None at all. It’s all destruction and ultra-violence. The closest thing to a constructive action is in the Milk Bar, where pouring and drinking milk mixers from different taps slightly alters your interactions with the game. One drink slightly speeds up your movement, another makes you a bit stronger, yet another alters the coloration of the lighting in the levels, casting everything in a ghastly purplish hue.
The first third of the game consists of the same gleeful abandon as the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Batman games. You smash up the environment, earning LEGO studs, leap to improbable heights, recklessly drive LEGO cars across garden patches, and maniacally smash apart any minifig that dares to appear on the screen. But therein lies one critical difference–the minifigs in A LEGO Orange don’t attack you. They run. They scream. They cower. These minifigs are women, children, and old men. Defenseless against the onslaught of your fists and cudgels.
There’s also an intentional targeting issue in the game. If a female minifig is in striking range, Alex will turn and hit her instead of your intended target. Always. Women first. The culture described by Burgess is not kind to women. If you’ve only seen the movie version, you’re likely not aware that in the book Alex meets two 10 year old girls in the record store, brings them home, drugs them, and rapes them. The game will not spare you this scene. The violence you visit upon these children will not be sexual in nature, but the unfortunate girls will be a boss level that must be… resolved… before continuing.
This is not intended to be a fun game. It has all the trappings of a LEGO game. It has the forgiving game mechanics. The ease of control. But it uses these elements to create a cognitive dissonance between the ease of the actions and the terrible nature of their real world counterparts.
To help underscore this fact, another major difference between A LEGO Orange and the other games in the franchise is the blood. Like the other games, the targets of your violence still shatter into pieces that scatter into nothingness, but they leave bloodstains. On the environment and on the droogs.
It is clear that while this game’s mechanics reflect the careless disregard for life and property of the protagonists, the visual cues and content are meant to make the player very uncomfortable with their actions.
After the first third of the game, Alex kills an old woman, is betrayed by his droogs, and winds up in prison. The next few levels represent Alex’s feigned interest in religion. The prison chaplain provides him with a Bible that places Alex in a variety of religious scenes where he exhibits the same violent behaviors from the previous portions of the game, culminating in a boss level where the player must successfully, and bloodily, nail Christ to the cross.
All but the final level of the remaining prison levels represent the aversion therapy that Alex was subjected to as a subject of the Ludovico treatment. These scenes feature Alex in a variety of violent situations–war, gang violence, domestic abuse. Unlike the previous levels that featured traditional LEGO sound effects, these levels utilize hyper-realistic audio effects. The visual depiction of the violence is the same, but the soundscape has become extremely visceral. The classical soundtrack is also considerably louder during these levels.
In the last prison level, Alex is pitted in violent conflict against another inmate. The player finds, however, that any attempt to have Alex jump or attack causes him to woozily wobble in place. Even Alex’s speed it reduced. Rather than running, he can only walk. And as he receives his beating, his speed is reduced further, until he can only crawl. The soundscape of hyper-realistic violence remains intact for the remainder of the game.
His ability to wreak violence removed, Alex is turned out to find a new role in society. It is during these levels that Alex can now build things in the environment. In fact, although his movement speed is back to normal, this is all he can do.
And now the dynamic of the game is completely reversed and Alex himself is the boss and the AI controlled minifigs work to defeat him. He can only run, scream, and cower as he has violence visited upon him. Now to escape each level, he must find, build, and navigate an exit, all the while trying to avoid the beatings that stain the landscape with his blood. This culminates in a jump from an attic window–where Alex, and the player, are hoping to end it all.
The penultimate level returns us to the same gameplay of the earliest levels. As the effects of the Ludovico technique have been reversed, we join Alex in his imagination as he plans the violence he can once again visit upon the world.
Only the final level offers us a glimpse of redemption. Alex, freed again, follows a group of younger “droogs” and watches them beat a stranger. The sound, while realistic, is flat. The music is gone. In the final encounter of the game, the final boss level if you will, Alex meets Pete, a reformed member of his gang. Pete works with a female minifig to build a pleasant looking cottage, complete with garden and white picket fence. Alex must help them build their new life together, turning his destructive urge to the purpose of creating raw materials to help them build. The game ends with Alex gazing thoughtfully at an empty lot next to Pete’s newly constructed home.
Tagged:a clockwork orange, Blogs of the Round Table, literary conversions. | 21 Comments »
January 29th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Wow. Just imagining playing this game is making feel ill.
I never did finish the book because of how disturbing the themes and actual events in it were, and I doubt I would finish the game if it was real, but I do understand the importance of something like this being made.
Probably only someone in the indie dev community would have the guts to make something like this right now.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hahaha
That would be a great game indeed. But doubt LEGO would accepts that new franchise.
Also – you think this would be the game the Clockwork Orange book would be based upon? What if you would show blood? I think a smart author would be able to see the horror through the clean brick violence and feel compelled to make a real-world adaptation.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Are you asking why I bother to show the blood, Krystian? I think it’s important to show that the violence has lasting impact. It’s a crucial component of the book, how the violence Alex sows is returned upon him. So the blood in the game is meant, not to reflect reality, as much as it is a metaphoric portrayal of that impact.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Corvus,
Never watched or read the story.
But, I will say this. It would be one of the few Lego games our kids _wouldn’t_ get in their stockings, heh heh.
But you’ve made me think about some other stories.
Have you seen 300? I was pretty sickened by the amount of (yeah comic-ised) violence/blood in that. Is Orange worse than 300?
January 29th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
It’s a very different beast than 300. More psychologically difficult to process. From what little I know of you Stu, I don’t think you’d deal well with the frank portrayal of sexual and physical violence in either the book or the movie.
January 29th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
I love the idea of this. Well to be more accurate, I love the idea of the juxtaposition of A Clockwork Orange with Lego. Though would that only be effective for those who are familiar with both the book or film, as well as the lego games?
I would be very interesting in expanding the metaphors in use too. Perhaps deepening them by a subtle choice of colour change (as you have done with the purple), or perhaps very smart choices in what objects are constructed or destroyed?
January 29th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I think that the game would be able to convey the message, whether the audience had ever played a LEGO game, or read the book/seen them movie. The contrast between the subject matter that the LEGO brand communicates (along with the cheery noises of LEGO bricks clattering together in the early levels), with the stark brutality of the themes would work to provide the discord between the antagonist’s world view and the player’s.
And I absolutely think each level would have to be carefully constructed so as to convey maximum impact. Level design is an enormous part of successfully communicating meaning.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Ha ha. You do know me
It burns! My eyes!
January 29th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Ahhhh. I can now follow this conversation!
Kudos to you Corvus. King above men.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Stu is referring to the new “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” check box on the comment form. You can also subscribe without commenting, if you so desire.
January 29th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Confirmed as alive and working.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
You weren’t going to leave out Singing in the Rain were you?
And I’m still leaving Clockwork Orange in my favorite movie list.
January 30th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
If I remember correctly, the book doesn’t reference that song being sung during the scene, so yes I guess I am going to leave it out.
And of course you can leave the movie on your list of favorites. It doesn’t even mean I wouldn’t share a pint with you at some point. It just means I’ll be doing so with a healthy measure of reserve. *nirg*
February 1st, 2009 at 9:24 pm
I like the LEGO approach, but I think it feels almost too “ironic” or unattached to truly reflect the work. The book and movie work as effectively as they do because they use the language of violence and they take it to points that are extreme and then pound into your face “Are you comfortable with this?” Using LEGOs is almost a cop-out…
I would imagine more of a GTA-style free-for-all, albeit very British and drenched in both style and slang. What I played of GTA4 had those few brief moments where it tried to question the cycle of violence and the culture of violence and I can only imagine what it might be like if such a game took such themes to heart as A Clockwork Orange asks of them. Imagine how much more impactful a change it might be if an engine like GTA and its vast game mechanics that enable and encourage violence suddenly twisted three-fourths of the way through to discourage and disable violence…
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:08 am
I, of course, thought about the GTA model, but I believe that the greater the realism of the storyworld, the easier it is to distance ourselves from the actions we take within it. This is because because of the uncanny valley–our eye & brain are so busy pointing out everything that doesn’t look “real” that we’re not as emotionally engaged.
I also don’t feel that the GTA style of gameplay adequately expresses the ease and childish delight that Alex takes in his actions.
So I intentionally picked a LEGO style game to address those two points.
Coincidently, Brian of the select button seems to have had a similar experience to what I was going for here with Super Columbine RPG, for much the same reasons.
February 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 pm
I enjoyed the idea muchly, but would like to point out that Alex isn’t raping the two girls he ‘picks up’ at the record store. He only takes them home for fun and games. They stand around without screaming; put on clothes, have them removed, and at no time exhibit ANY signs of distress. The theme is the programming of desire, and takes place in the world of ‘teenagers’. It makes sense that he would look upon his own age-set as members of his gang instead of victims (but that’s also arguably because its not nighttime, the hours of his anarchic activities).
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:29 am
“I, of course, thought about the GTA model, but I believe that the greater the realism of the storyworld, the easier it is to distance ourselves from the actions we take within it. This is because because of the uncanny valley–our eye & brain are so busy pointing out everything that doesn’t look “real” that we’re not as emotionally engaged.”
Scott McCloud has something interesting to say about this in his book “Understanding Comics”. He proposes that everyone has a complete and comprehensive understanding of the faces of the people around him, but in regards to his own face, he only has a loose, abstract, proprioceptive conception—”my eyes are here, my nose is there, my mouth is turned upwards” etc. He proposes this as the reason why people love cartoons—because a finely detailed face makes us think of the people around us, but a vague, sketchy face that’s light on details makes us think of our own face.
See the image below:
http://blog.kenperlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/mccloud.jpg
I think the parallels are clear. When we see it in a hyper-real GTA-like format, it’s almost like a security camera video—we see it happening to other people. We see it happening to cartoons, though, and we see it happening to ourself.
February 3rd, 2009 at 4:08 am
@Filekutter Alex is an unreliable narrator. He drugs the girls and when they leave, they threaten to call the police. He may cast it as innocent play, but it’s clear from the text that it is anything but.
And 10 year old girls are not teenagers.
@Malagayne That’s an interesting take on another psychological layer of the uncanny valley. Thanks for sharing it.
February 5th, 2009 at 1:53 am
Malgayne: Scott McCloud has given me a new angle to reflect on the uncanny valley.. thanks for passing the info along!
I am so amazed at how many people here, and on the other blogs reffering back to this story, have not seen the movie nor read the book. (in full disclosure I have only seen the movie – shame on me).
Without any ill will to anyone I have no idea why anyone would feel like commenting on something they have no experience with.. and in one way its good that this violent piece of media has been lost, for I have seen too many people enjoy it with no though of anything other than its surface value.
On the other hand it IS very polarising when it comes to one’s own moral compass. It is easy to float thru life not knowing your opinions on matters until someone like alex shoves the issue under one’s nose.
I feel you are right wanting to use the childish style of lego to maximize the “off”ness of the whole thing. Too realistic and we definately would file it under the same heading as 90% of todays entertainment.
and Super Columbine RPG is amazing.. it has the same effect I was hoping to elicit from an FPS modification. A successful thought experiment would be to leave an fps as impersonal during the levels, so as to promote the wholesale careless slaughter of as many people as possible. Then when the level is done you are forced to look over a slideshow (randomly generated) of the peoples name, age, and the family they left behind.
that fps, a lego orange, and Super Columbine RPG should all be required playing for all adults capible of concious thought.
February 5th, 2009 at 2:03 am
oh and the game called Bully, by the makers of GTA series, does a great job calling the players morals into question and pushing for a sort of moral truth (or at least positive’ness).
The game got worried parents freaking without playing it, where as I would rather the kids play bully, where the mission seems to be beat up the homeless guy, you defend him against your supposed allies and befriend him.
too bad bully does come off alittle too Ayn Rand for my tastes.. most violent heroic western cinema does. bleck.
Maybe a hack of a previous lego game’s engine? Total conversions happen all the time..
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:59 am
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