[Syfy President Dave Howe told Gamasutra that he wants to expand his channel's best shows into the gaming medium. But can so-called 'platform agnostic IPs' ever produce faithful, creatively satisfying results and what are the challenges facing them?]
In a recent Gamasutra interview with Syfy President Dave Howe,
he states his intention to expand the most popular shows on his channel
into various other media ('Platform-Agnostic IPs' as he calls them -
see, I didn't just make it up for the post title), with games being the
frontrunner. The nature of adapting a story or a world from one medium
to another has been the subject of much critical discussion, to the
extent that an entire module on my degree was dedicated to the many
ways books get translated to film.
Although the act of taking a film
property and making a game out of it is done at least as often as
literary adaptations, there never seems to have been much discussion
about the unique challenges that are inherent to taking a world defined
in a linear format and recreating it in an interactive medium.
I've
read endless numbers of articles focusing on how bad many film-to-game
adaptations are, but precious few (if any) examining why they didn't
work and whether it had anything to do with an IP's potential
difficulty in moving to such a radically different format while staying
true to what fans liked about it in the first place. Speaking purely on
a creative level, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that
companies are looking at ways to move their IPs into different media,
but a lot more thought needs to go into carefully selecting which
properties are suitable to be moved, as well as how it should be done.
One of the most frequently adapted properties is the character of
James Bond, who started out as the protagonist of thirteen literary
thrillers by Ian Fleming (which if you haven't already read, you
definitely should as soon as possible) before becoming one of the most
famous characters in cinema history in twenty-two (or twenty-four,
depending on whether you count the two rather dismal non-EON produced
efforts) film outings.
While the character's career in books and film
can be considered successes (yes, even taking Die Another Day
into account), he's had considerably greater difficulty in achieving
similar success in the gaming medium. Bond has been around in gaming
form since 1983, appearing in everything from side-scrollers to text
adventures and RPGs, most of which have long since been forgotten (James Bond: The Duel, anyone? No?) by all but the most arcane corners of fandom.
After the high point of GoldenEye 007, EA got hold of the licence and struggled to achieve anywhere near comparable critical or sales success (although The World Is Not Enough was given reservedly positive notices and with the help of a huge development and advertising budget, Everything Or Nothing sold in respectable numbers).
But capturing the essence of who Bond is and creating the same
sense of excitement in videogame form that fans have for the character
and his world in the books and films has always posed a problem for
developers. As an avid Bond fan, the only game I've ever felt has born
even the slightest flavour of the character was GoldenEye 007.
EA paid for the films' stars to provide their faces, brought in famous
musicians to provide theme tunes, integrated a system of '007 moments'
in later games where the player is rewarded for devising outlandish
solutions for dispatching enemies or overcoming obstacles, yet their
games perpetually felt like reskins of any other anodyne action game.
GoldenEye 007
didn't feel especially Bondian by any stretch, but its stealth system
helped it to feel like a proper espionage game, while getting the
decorative details spot on (the tone of the mission briefings read
authentically: 'Grabbed by the Spetnaz' might be one of Moneypenny's
funniest lines) gave it just enough spark to recall my fondness for the
characters. The care with which the film's locations were recreated and
adapted to suit the needs of a good videogame structure made the right
balance between fidelity to the source material and meeting the needs
of a new medium.
But the biggest problem with Bond is that the character many of us
fans fell in love with, as written by Fleming or played by Sean
Connery, simply doesn't suit needs of the gaming format. GoldenEye 007 got the details right to help you
feel part of a world Bond might be in somewhere, but you never played
in the way Bond would act. Bond, while latterly an action movie star,
does not run around gunning people down left, right and centre.
In the
books, he's ruthless but methodical and occasionally even a little
pensive (see the wonderful opening lines of Goldfinger when
Bond ponders life and death while sitting in an airport terminal). Even
in the films, it's broadly true that the heavier the action, the less
Bondian it feels. The recent adaptation of Casino Royale was
lauded because it slowed down the film series' ever accelerating pace
and brought back some of the tension and cold sophistication of the
earlier classics.
Consequently, fans began worrying about Quantum of Solace
from the moment producer Michael G. Wilson said it contained three
times as much action as its predecessor, showing his failure to grasp
what had made that film appealing to fans. On a similar note, when EA
tried to adapt From Russia, With Love as a videogame, having
Sean Connery's Bond running around shooting everything exposed how
anachronistic the character is in a gaming world. The extensive changes
to the story proved how futile and ill-thought out the whole exercise
was, as the drama in the literary and film versions of the story are
delivered in ways which have proven impossible to replicate in the
gaming medium.
Videogames require there be some sort of action happening at all
times to be interesting. This doesn't mean guns need to be firing, but
the player needs to feel as though they are constantly interacting with
the world. Sipping martinis or being engaged in lengthy conversations
(even if you have a Mass Effect-esque menu system) in a game
doesn't work because the player is forced to give up a certain degree
of control.
Not a lot happens in Shadow Of The Colossus
outside the boss battles, but players are still engaged in riding a
horse across a landscape and are in full control of that interaction.
If you take control away from a player for too long, there's no point
in having made a videogame in the first place. Books and film can allow
characters to take a break from the action because the reader or
viewer's engagement with those characters is on a passive level: they
are being engaged as distinct individuals, rather than avatars.
Players engage with game protagonists through the actions they allow us
to perform, providing a conduit for us into the gaming world. If a
protagonist is given 'personality', it rarely goes much deeper than to
set a tone for the game world: Nathan Drake acts like Indiana Jones in
the Uncharted games because Naughty Dog want us to experience their world in the same humourous vein as Indy's. Yet if as much of Uncharted 2's playtime was dedicated to dialogue scenes as Raiders of the Lost Ark,
players would quickly get bored because they are not able to be in
control of those conversations in the same way our every move is
important during 'action' moments.
I'm near the end of writing my second novel and as both a game and
film geek, I've been giving a lot of thought into how my character
could be translated into those media. While there's plenty of action in
both of my books, much of their personality comes through means that
only the literary medium can offer: a character's thoughts, themes
relating to literature and how they're conveyed through the way I
structure my prose and storytelling, for instance.
Because my character
undergoes a broad evolution as the series progresses, I think he could
be faithfully placed into different media at certain point in his
timeline. Yet for a character like Bond, whose personality is more
concretely defined, moving him into the interactive sphere force you to
abandon some of what make him unique and admirable in order to make an
interesting gaming experience.
My planned series of novels would be
impossible to faithfully translate into videogames, as would many
others for the same reason: the chasm between what makes a good book
and what makes a good game is simply too wide and the requirements too
different. Having constant action, even if it were in another form than
guns blazing, would defeat everything that my work is about.
I don't think all adaptations are destined to creative failure, but
when dealing with adaptations to the very unique medium of videogames,
more care needs to be taken when selecting which properties can make
the jump and how they will do so. Whatever the merits of EA's recent God Of War clone, throwing in the odd quote and using the same names did not make their game Dante's Inferno by any stretch of the imagination.
The constantly rumoured Battlestar Galactica
videogame, for example, would seem a particularly risky proposition
because so much of the drama and flavour of that series comes not
through the action, but the relationships between each character and
their personal issues. Maybe a videogame can work in Galactica's world, in the same way that GoldenEye 007
worked in a simulation of Bond's world, but the developers would have
to accept adopting a very different tone and dramatic style to that
fans enjoyed on television.
The Sopranos: Road To Respect
game shows how horribly wrong a gaming adaptation of a television
series can go when it fails to take these differences into account and
doesn't give due consideration to whether it will still be the same
property once the transition has been completed. Still, at least
no-one's trying to digitize Mad Men. Yet.
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