Welcome to the first Round Table of 2009. We had a great year last year and I look forward to another 12 months of insightful and fun posts. We’re going to start out the year on a bit of a light-hearted note and see where it takes us.
January ’09
Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.Feel free to ignore the technical constraints of the era in which the book was written. In fact, feel free to ignore the technical constraints (within reason) of today and push the envelop a bit. Also notice that I didn’t specify video game. Feel free to imagine a board game, card game, RPG, or sport, that could have been created during the same time period as the book in question. Be as vague, or as detailed, about the design particulars as you like. Work together with another blogger, or work alone.
I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
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Jan. 6 – A newcomer to the Round Table, Lola of Game + Life|Balance sets the bar for this month’s topic as she discusses Toni Morrison’s Beloved in Can Slavery Be a Game?
Jan. 6 – Travis of The Autumnal City turns his eminently capable and well-qualified eye towards a sci-fi classic in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren as a game.
Jan. 7 – Shamus of Twenty Sided takes a decidedly pessimistic view, albeit with his characteristically unique slant, as he offers us a Review: Snow Crash
Jan. 8 – Joe of Cult of the Turtle injects some levity into the topic with a chat transcript inspired by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for the Spawn.
Jan. 8 – Steve of Band Sold Separately pulled his Wodehouse card game off the top shelf of the closet and dusted it off, just so he could take A Seat At The Big People’s (Round) Table.
Jan. 9 – Roger of Living Epic brings us a compelling pre-imagining of a Greek classic with Oedipus the RPG
Jan. 10 – Michael of Discount Thoughts joins us with a poetic premise in Downward Spiral.
Jan. 10 – Scorpia offers us a tongue-in-cheek entry on a bit of classic Lewis Carroll in Snark Hunt!
Jan. 10 – Steve of Nerdquest joins us to take a look at a young dungeon master named Frank Herbert in The Saga of Dune: Take 2. With Role-Playing.
Jan. 11 – Krystian of Game Design Scrapbook takes on the challenging task of pre-imagining the work of a master in Solaris: The Impossible Game
Jan. 11 – Kylie of Post-Emo-Existentiell Gaming describes a compelling new form of spiritual adventure game in Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov?
Jan. 12 – Corvus of Man Bytes Blog turned his eye towards unlimited expandability in an effort to pre-imagine Thomas Pynchon’s work in The CCG of Lot 49.
Jan. 13 – Thomas of Mile Zero takes on China Mieville’s Iron Council as a board game in The Perpetual Train.
Jan. 13 – Josh of Mind’s Eye take a shotgun to the topic and hits several books in a single post in Get out of my book and into my game.
Jan. 14 – Michel from Big Apple, 3 AM joins the Round Table with a look at House of Leaves, the text adventure
Jan. 6(really?) – Adam from And thus Spoke Pi returns in full on rambling glory to take a few runs at 1984 in his attempt at Putting the Game Before the Book.
Jan. 16 – Denis of Vorpal Bunny Ranch leads us down a path of low morals as he pre-imagines The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Jan. 16 – David of Tracking the Nordic Ninja takes a very welcome inclusive approach to word literature in Uzumaki the Board Game
Jan. 19 – Jason of Aim for the Head tries his hand at a seemingly impossible task as he takes on Illusions the Game
Jan. 20 – Max of Worldmaker takes a pre-visionist look at the disruptive machinations of a classic video game designer in A Brief History of Games Journalism
Jan. 21 – Chris Bateman, who now game blogs at ihobo, has some Adventures Among Polite Society in the Village of Longbourn and explores Victorian social norms with Jane Austen’s Wii and Wonderment.
Jan. 23 – Scott of Experience Points takes a look at Cormac McCarthy and the nature of violence in Killing Morality: Playing Blood Meridian.
Jan. 24 – Josh of Mind’s Eye comes back to us with another approach to Frankenstein in Looking for a +3 brain and a +2 heart.
Jan. 24 – Diego of Indigo Static shares another approach to an Orwellian classic in 1984: the arcade sandbox game
Jan. 24 – Mitch of Ludic Thoughts joins us with the first non-fiction pre-imaginging with Super God Delusion 64 – A Game Concept.
Jan. 26 – The eponymous Deirdra joins us with a game I’d really like to see her create in Ghost World: An Imaginary Adventure Game.
Jan. 26 – Adam of And thus Spoke Pi joins us again, this time turning his particular brand of focus on a comic series that’s already seen a game translation that he appears to have found a bit lacking in Revenge of Bone.
Jan. 26 – Jorge of Experience Points joins us with a complex design interpretation in Embedded Games: Cloud Atlas
Jan 27 – Julie of The Interactive Quill brings us “a crime you can carry in your pocket and share with your friends” in The Portable Crime.
Jan. 27 – Alex of Show & Tell visit’s Le Guin’s cautionary tale in Omelas, a game.
Jan. 27 – Travis of The Autumnal City joins us again to go where only Keanu has gone before in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.
Jan. 27 – Rob of Ordinary Swords explores the spirit of Orson Scott Card as he attempts take a poke at Putting the Game Before the Book.
Jan. 27 – Michael of Discount Thoughts rejoins wearing Isaac Asimov’s shoes in Dark Age.
Jan. 30 – Ben of SLRC (Super Legacy Reading Club) set his phaser to epic as he pre-imagines The New Testament for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. What, Ben? No OS/2 Warp!
Jan. 30 – Joe of Cult of the Turtle rejoins us with a look at guilt and unreliable narrators in The Tell-Tale Videogame.
Jan. 30 – Chico of nongames.com joins us with a warm up post (he’s got another on the way) that shares some thoughts from an academic paper he wrote in Learning from the digital Library of Babel.
Jan. 30 – True to his word, Chico returns with a look at a “road-trip MMOG with a philosophical twist” in The World of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Jan. 31 – Alex of Exegesis has launched his blog with a look at a real world attempt to convert Shakespeare’s Richard II in Being Nothing
Jan. 31 – Kylie of Post-Emo-Existentiell Gaming rejoins us with a novel that has spawned a fair share of movies, and coins the term Ludonarrative Holism, in Poseidon Adventure – The Game
UPDATE
Jan. 31st – Eric of the Game Critique joins us with a multi-character adventure set in an open world in Sister Carrie.
Jan. 31st – Jonathan of Peanut Butter and Bacon joins us with a game that put us in the shoes of an autistic protagonist in The Curious Incident… for Wii.
Jan. 27th – I somehow missed David of Nordic Ninja’s second entry, where he takes on Poe in The Black Cat.
Feb. 1 – Sneaking in at the last minute, Erik of Elements of Meaning brings us several brief ideas from a range of literature in Books as Games: Omnibus Post.
…and that brings us to the end of an incredible month of Round Table entries. Many thanks to everyone who participated, either by writing an entry, commenting, or reading. I look forward to February’s topic!
January 5, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Would you be terribly crushed if I chose a movie instead? I’ve got something on the brain right now that I’ve been preparing to right that would almost be perfect, but it’s about a movie.
On the other hand I could just save that anyway for a future round table (assuming a series) or a separate non-round table post.
January 6, 2009 at 5:59 am
Sorry, Max. I’m pretty adamant that this involve literature. I figure the industry already makes a lot of movie/game comparisons and I want to see if we can dig deeper into our storytelling heritage.
January 6, 2009 at 8:52 am
Ouch, hard. Hmm…
I keep meaning to contribute (my last one was ages ago) but they’ve been topics I’ve had few thoughts on or just not for me. This one is intriguing though.
The main problem of course being, they are entirely separate experiences. You’d be only ever similar in getting the appreciation of it – for instance, The Last Express would translate to an okay book, but it really fits into the game mould in presentation. You couldn’t really put forward the desperate portrayal of Frodo in LotR as a game originally either, I think – most of the games, in fact, focus on the other more-fighty side people.
The book would have to be one which features a definitely protagonist-focused narrative. A group adventure (even LotR style) where the game might well need cutscenes or multiple characters to play as (while not a bad thing, just…not always a good thing) would be hard. There are books with a large amount of characters which would still work though, if the theme is merely evoking the same style (IE: the book version is simply one interpretation – some games have had this treatment, which is kinda where this leads to).
I’ll have to think if I can do a good one where the game doesn’t have a narrator, static cutscenes full of story, and some actual choice which still portrays a meaningful portrayal of a books themes and content (one way, possibly, is to be a mere sideline watcher to a story…rarely used in games, sometimes used in film, often used in books of course, where the protagonist is possibly not the main focus of the book). I probably don’t have enough books under my belt to qualify any of the stuff I’ve read for treatment though, I’m honestly terrible at reading enough books (I simply play to many videogames).
I also would love a specific Round Table twitter/RSS, but a full Twitter would go against my “I don’t really know the person so this feels a tad wrong”. Except for Sockington and an Game AI News one, I don’t have any twitter feeds
I’ll be interested in reading this months entries.
January 6, 2009 at 9:04 am
I think it’s important to realize that I’m not suggesting you figure out how to translate the plot of a book into a game, but how to design a game that explores the same themes and/or sets the same tone as a piece of literature. It need not use the same characters, the same locations, or even have a plot.
If I understand you correctly, you’re wanting a Twitter feed that alerts you to new Round Table entries without having to endure my endless babble about man bras? I may put that to a vote and see how much interest there is!
January 6, 2009 at 9:11 am
On twitter: Yes, just…I have checked, but I don’t really know you at all and sometimes twitter is a strange place, one I think I’ll stay out of just for now
As for the book things – sure, themes, but a theme from a book has to take place in something more specific then a theme, else Max could do his film tie in just by finding a book with the same theme and replacing all the instances of the film with that book
Going slightly more specific, I did take your meaning to be more along the lines of “The book would have come from the original game, as that authors interpretation/explanation/rendition of it or a book from the same world or same theme”. So it might be you do a LotR game based off a time actually not present in the books – the original rings, the whole big evil coming from ultimate power, the fates of races (bigoted, racist and otherwise), war and delicate peace, and so forth (I do realise this is covered in Tolkiens many history book things. He loved that). So, the same setting and themes, but no similar characters or plot, yes?
Damn, can I just copy that into a post now? hehe…well, no, I did intend something entirely different. Damn tangents! I hope I have the right (or at least one facet) of the idea for this round table.
January 6, 2009 at 9:13 am
I think you’re on an appropriate track there, Andrew!
January 6, 2009 at 10:12 am
Ha, this is a nice one. I can’t do my normal favourite novel because no-one has ever heard of it, but I think I have an angle… The tough choice is whether to run this on ihobo or Only a Game.
Hmmm… I have time to ponder…
January 6, 2009 at 10:20 am
Don’t let source-obscurity slow you down, Chris. If nothing else, it’ll give us something new to add to our reading lists.
January 6, 2009 at 10:33 am
Andrew: I’m considering books in similar thematic areas, but the movie specifically begs post on why the particular movie is indeed a great movie but would have made an outstanding/astonishing video game if done right because the vocabulary of gaming as a medium is in fact richer than the relatively small vocabulary that movies use.
I’ll find a book or three to stab with, it just might take a few days.
Corvus: On the topic of Round Table feeds: I’ve debated setting up Feedjack on one of my servers and (co-)running a Round Table “Planet” site that aggregates all Round Table contributor blogs into a giant (remixable) feed/display site, but I’ve worried about the hit my servers might take if I run such a beast (particularly with some of the awesome Kotaku traffic and whatnot the round table sees). Would you be interested in administering such a site (mostly just adding feeds as people join the round table) if I did set it up, though?
January 6, 2009 at 10:42 am
I’m not sure how I feel about that, Max. I rather like the decentralized nature of the Round Table and feel having an aggregation site defeats the purpose.
Let me think about it a bit and then I’ll open it up to the other participants to see how they feel about it.
January 6, 2009 at 10:56 am
Are graphic novels okay, Corvus? As Scott McCloud and others would argue, the sequential art format is even older than literature.
January 6, 2009 at 11:01 am
Deirdra, I’ll repeat what I said to someone on Twitter: I refuse to clarify any further than “literature.” So… whatever that means to you will do just fine!
January 6, 2009 at 12:28 pm
A separate RSS feed would save me from keeping this post in my RSS feed marked as “Unread” so I can read the updates to it
Or maybe just do a quick post on the previous month at the end of it, so I can read through them all then (so now I might be reading Decembers). You could just backlink to the previous one in the newer one even I guess.
January 6, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Corvus: I think an aggregation site can enhance the decentralized nature of the thing. I was suggesting aggregating the entire feeds of every blog (that is, all of Man Bytes Blog, not just round table posts) that has ever contributed to the Round Table, thus making it something like a “Round Table Extended Family Site”. You could even throw in other feeds that you read that don’t participate to try to shape some sort of larger community feel. You might even allow for open suggestions from anyone visiting the site to include their feeds in the aggregation.
Of course, Round Table posts themselves should start to trickle into the tag clouds and people could filter directly for those if they so choose, and get something of a real time view of round table discussions. This would particularly help with decentralization, I think, in terms of the fact that individual blogs can self-label/tag posts that they think are round table worthy and will be visible to everyone that follows the aggregator before/without your explicit “official stamp”. Updates can be quicker than the time it takes for you to verify the post, then update twitter, GReader and MBB.
In that case you might even focus on just doing a monthly wrap-up post about all of the round table posts that you read, rather than having to do sometimes daily updates to a “status of this month’s round table” post. People could follow the real-time, self-organized discussion on the aggregator or expect a bulky Cliff Notes and follow up at the end of the month from you…
It keeps fairly decentralized in that Feedjack provides OPML back out so all of those feeds become directly subscribe-able as a batch into most feed readers and other aggregators. Someone could easily mirror the “officially blessed” aggregator if they had reason/need…
My original idea was just to scrape the MBB round table posts for all their links then follow them and try to discover all of the RSS feeds that I can and just build it automatically from that, but I realized that I wasn’t interested in writing such an ugly scraper tool and didn’t see any existing useful tools to do that. It would probably be easier just to have someone feed in the RSS feeds by hand and manually vet/verify them and if we were to do that the person that should be in charge of it should obviously be you, Corvus.
It’s still mostly your round table, so it is entirely up to you to pursue. I’d certainly be willing to help you figure out if its the right approach and maybe help you set it up and get it running.
January 6, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Wow, that above post came out much larger than I meant for it to be. Sorry.
January 6, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Quite all right. I’m tossing the idea in the hopper and seeing what comes out. I’ve got some thoughts, but let’s table this line of conversation for now and we’ll find a better venue for the discussion (like a post dedicated to it, for example).
January 7, 2009 at 12:52 am
It’s not quite that simple… not only would my normal choice be too obscure, but attempting to put it into game form would mean nothing to most readers because of the disconnect. Not to mention that I have absolutely no idea how to take a non-linear character-driven narrative and convert it into a game I might respect! If I try and solve *that* problem, I might not have a post within a month!
But I’ll take this into consideration while I ponder this…
January 7, 2009 at 5:11 am
@Chris: Go for it, man! You’re making me feel bad for picking a relatively obscure, non-linear character-driven narrative. =)
January 8, 2009 at 5:18 am
Note about tracking entires: I’m going to start tagging Round Table posts on Del.icio.us. The tag page is here: http://delicious.com/CorvusE/round-table
The RSS feed for the tag is here: http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/CorvusE/round-table?count=15
You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for a Twitter search for the hashtag #bort, with which I’ll be tagging all of my Twitter RT entries. This will not be only entries, but other Round Table related twitterings as well: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23bort
January 12, 2009 at 8:02 am
This month’s Round Table is giving me fits… but in a good way. I have my piece of literature, and that is set in stone because it is by far my favorite piece of literature (I mean, when you’ve read a single book more than forty time and still love it, it has to be at the top of the list), but imagining the story and message of that book told as a game is either extremely simple or terribly complex. The complex part is deciding which medium to portray it in… a card game? a board game? an MMO? a schoolyard game? I can’t decide!
January 12, 2009 at 8:14 am
@jason Try breaking down the book into its smallest components and identify what, precisely, about it appeals to you so much. Is it the imagery, the character interactions, the social themes, the use of language, etc?
Then try and interpret each of those things into a game mechanic. Don’t worry too much about the overall medium of the game itself, just imagine various approaches to expressing those small components as mechanics.
And then, hopefully, the game will come to you!
January 12, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Heh… I’ve done that. I have it in its smallest component, what appeals most to me, and it is part of the reason that settling on a medium is such a difficulty, because by the nature of the theme the medium doesn’t matter as the game should transcend the medium.
January 12, 2009 at 1:29 pm
*eltrohc* So it’s not a matter of finding a medium, but narrowing it down to one. That’s a fun problem to have!
January 13, 2009 at 8:34 am
This is such a great topic. I love the way that it’s almost a new framework for rhetorical analysis: by trying to translate the essence of a work into a set of rules and interactions, the designer has to both identify what the work’s persuasive element is, and create an interpretation that’s not inadvertently inconsistent. Plus, it can expose flaws or ambiguities in the original artifact. Very cool. More like this, please.
January 13, 2009 at 8:47 am
Thomas, I’m glad you’re enjoying and pleased that you joined in!
I hope to continue exploring this idea for the next several months. I don’t have the topics locked down, but I’ve got more than enough inspiration just from the posts submitted thus far.
January 13, 2009 at 8:57 am
Excellent, I look forward to it. The past few topics about family were not something I was entirely comfortable discussing, but this is more up my alley. And the other entries have been really imaginative and fun to read. Clearly a lot of inspiration going around.
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January 21, 2009 at 3:48 pm
I think a book with a theme like “Alas, Babylon” would present some interesting choices as a first person player. The theme would center around “difficult” choices for yourself and others in your “community”. For those not familiar with it, the book starts out with a bang (nuclear war between USA and Soviets in late 1950′s) and then follows the protagonist and a small group of others as they try to carve out/survive (in a part of the USA that was not directly affected by the nukes/fallout) with what the war has left them. I could see it as the player starts out with a fixed number of “survival” points, which would have to be spent with the ultimate purpose of achieving a certain end goal(s) before the player exhausts their points. These could be things like making the town self-sufficient, or keeping fellow townspeople alive (which were all true to the story)and these points are only going to diminish as the player makes “difficult” choices (again, true to the book). I suggest the dimishing point idea because as each day in the book passed, there was a cumulative sense of uncertainty about how the main characters would continue under the current circumstances.
Choices would be how to resolve daily survival issues such as food/water, utilities, commerce, and mental health (one would assume that full scale nuclear war would have a certain amount of psychological effect on the survivors). If the choices could be randomized, but stay consistent to the book would be interesting and allow for variety. I could see some choices allowing the reclamation of some survival points as well. In the end, the US military is able to reach out to the survivors and tell them the war was over and the US had won, so “potentially getting” to this point would need to be an included aspect of the story. Potentially because the characters in the book had no idea if they would meet friend, foe or nobody in the end, and that would make for a very interesting option of an ending. If when you started the game, you didn’t know who would be their in the end to observe all that you may or may not have accomplished, I’d be intrigued. This is a start!
January 27, 2009 at 8:16 am
Great topic! what’s the deadline?
January 27, 2009 at 8:29 am
Heyo Chico! Glad you like it.
The deadline is 11:59 pm, Saturday the 31st of January.
January 31, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Corvus, this topic was a great one, and I’m glad to finally be a contributing part of the BoRT! Now to go through and read everyone elses
February 3, 2009 at 10:40 am
Whoops, late to the party. This is what I get for taking some time away from the Round Table, not that I have a venue from which to post.
I just want to point out that there are already board games based on literature, and that many games elect to recreate the ambience and activity patterns of a book’s setting rather than mirror the book’s exact narrative.