Traffic Was a Bitch

Just some of the digi painting I’ve been doing lately:

To mark the end of using this blog for Uni, I’ve given it a make over. Whee! Next up is to start uploading some of my writing -  yes, (duh duh duh) including poetry. You’ve been warned…

2. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

“A Wizard of Earthsea” is the first volume in the classic fantasy series about the Earthsea world. It follows the adventures of Sparrowhawk/Ged as he learns to become a wizard. Much like Icarus, his arrogance and pride leads him to unleash a terrible shadow on the world. The story is mixture of “the quest” (ie LOTR) and “becoming a man” (ie Prydain Chronicles). It’s also influenced by the Aleut people and their mythology – the world itself is also a large archipelagos, mimicking the Aleutian islands. LeGuin has also drawn heavily from the Jungian theory of the shadow.

It has also been adapted twice into movies; one was an animation and the other a live-action feature. Each may have been somewhat successful as a stand-alone, but both were also abysmal failures as adaptations. They drew criticism and ire from audiences and the author alike, for only marginally resembling the books. About the only things either used were the character’s names – and they were mispronounced. The slow, mature and complex plots/themes are traded for fantasy-action tripe. LeGuin herself sets out the problems with them here and here.

And here we come to the answer to why it has not been adapted into a game – LeGuin had only just recently capitulated to having her work adapted – and has not been pleased with the results. She apparently has been approached over the years about making a game out of her works, but has always refused. Given that copyright of her work passes onto her children, it is unlikely that permission will be granted after her death either.

There are some other problems with adapting the story; it focuses mainly on the maturing of Ged. How can this be represented in a game, without making a player’s experience passive? A movie or a book allows us to sit on a character’s shoulder and see them mature in a truncated amount of time. This isn’t really possible in a game, as it would void player choice and control.

However, the stories of Earthsea contains rich material for the building of a world. Perhaps the best approach would be to create a MMORPG set in Earthsea and allow players to create their own characters and form their own story arcs by exploring and interacting with the world. There is a gap in the timeline of the series between the first and second book – it would be the perfect time to set the game to allow the player to interact with familiar characters and places, without disturbing the story’s continuity.

Thus – somewhat ironically – the way to be truest to the story, is to throw it completely out the window…

Ok, we have been given the task to find an existing work that hasn’t been adapted  into a game and consider two things:

1. Why hasn’t it been adapted?

2. How would I go about turning the work into a game?

So, here’s a culled list of some of the possible works I am considering:

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell

Oh, the possibilities. Animal Farm (originally subtitled as a ’Fairy Story’ ) is a dark satire about revolutions and utopias. Even though it is widely held to be specifically about the rise of communism in Russia, it eerily echoes the events of almost every revolution, past and future (also seems to match the patterns of cults/religious institutions). It delves into the darker side of human nature, by anthropomorphising a group of oppressed animals on a farm. They revolt against their human farmer and take over the running of the farm themselves. They paint a set of ‘commandments’ onto the side of the barn, including “All animals are equal”. Soon the pigs rise up to form a  higher sub-class over the other animals and alter the commandments – including the infamous “All animals are equal – but some are more equal than others”. The animals’ utopia had turned into a hell and they were no better off (perhaps even worse) then before their revolution.

It might be a salient point to remember a revolution is 360 degrees - ie you end up where you started…

There have been a couple of movie adaptations of Animal Farm – neither of which could resist  the impulse to tack on a ridiculous happy ending. Both also skewed the story towards children, which is a little problematic, given that the historical and political events surrounding the story are unknown to the average child.

I can’t find any games that have adapted Animal Farm. In some ways, that’s not a surprise – anyone who looked at adapting it would have the same problems the movies did: primarily, that complex, intellectual material comes bow-rapped in a seemingly childish allegory about animals. That would seemingly diminish an audience for the work – if it wasn’t for the fact of the books enduring popularity over 60+ years. I also think there may be a generational issue here – younger generations are more used to animations, games, etc. dealing with ‘serious’ subjects then older generations.

As to how turn it into a game…..hmmmm…. well, the first thing that comes to mind is a perversion of a strategic resource management game. Perhaps you play as the farmer and your units (the animals) over time will stop listening to you and start sabotaging the farm, rioting, etc. Or maybe you could play as Napoleon or Snowball and make choices that would inevitably lead to you becoming either an ineffective leader with all the animals perishing/the farm being re-taken by the humans or perhaps you become a bloodthirsty despot…. of course, the temptation would be to simply to release a virus targeting Farmville and its users and alter the game in a such way as to make sure they’ll never touch another social networking game again… Mwahahahahah….

Anyways, this is taking far longer than I thought, so I’m going to split each possibility into a separate post, so at least I have something to show… hopefully the others will not be long forthcoming…

Been dragging my heels on posting again – due to wanting to avoid this unpleasantness:

Last thursday we discussed how simple game mechanics can become compelling narratives, simply by ‘skinning’ the game. Unfortunately, I found one the examples extremely tasteless and damn offensive. It tainted everything else I did that day. I’m not going to name it- suffice to say it re-skinned tetris to be set in a concentration camp, where you are manipulating Jews instead of blocks. The cartoonish graphics and sounds are (for me) a poor attempt at making it humorous. Had I come across it in another context, I would have shrugged it off as typical anti-semitic propaganda, but it sickens me that it was being held up as an example of exemplary narrative formation.

Excuse me? Baking powder? What exactly was the narrative? Always look on the bright side of the holocaust? I am NOT against games pushing artistic and political limits – “Train” is a beautiful example of merging gameplay elements with the holocaust. While the former game will do nothing but reinforce your prejudices (or aversions), Train actually guides the players through an emotional and thoughtful journey.  More importantly, it never trivializes or mocks the suffering that people went through.

And you know what really pisses me off? I’m sure that most people would write this off as oversensitivity on my part, because my father is Jewish – well, fuck you. I’m a human being and I’m oversensitive to evil and poor attempts to be ‘avant-garde’.

We then participated in a narrative exercise  – wrote down characters, locations, plots etc. on separate post-it notes and mixed-and-matched them with eachother and then had to come up with a story to match our post-its. I got Red Riding Hood, who was homophobic, had an imaginary friend, survives an attack by raptors, with the theme of the story being about healing burn victims. And the kicker? It had to be set in Nazi Germany.

Yeah, I wasn’t amused. I did the task, even though it made me feel  physically sick. We’re supposed to post our stories, but that ain’t going to happen - for reasons that should be clear.

And now that I’ve gotten that out the way, hopefully we can get back to FUN stuff in my next post.

Well, I’ve been putting off this blog entry; as I don’t really have strong feelings on any of the theories – they are equally valid (or invalid). To me, theories are not an end unto themselves, but merely tools to help you understand. A series of lenses, that help us to see things in a different way.

I was going to be a smartass and find a game that incorporates every single theory, but then I remembered a puzzle in the game “Pandora’s Box”.

“Pandora’s Box” is a series of different puzzles designed by _ , the same man who designed Tetris. One of the puzzles involves trying to fit together torn scraps of parchment, by dragging them under a series of lenses – all of which distort, magnify and rotate the pieces slightly differently. However, one (or in the harder puzzles, using a combination of lenses) will actually make the scrap clearer and you will know how to join it up to the rest of the documents…

…and that’s what theories are to me. It depends on what you wish to achieve and what you are trying to analyze, as to whether a particular theory has merit or not.

Oh, and before I forget, we went through several ideas for Wizard of Oz, first using Darwin’s evolutionary imperative, but ended up with an idea that was more aligned with the educational lens. Drawing inspiration from the original movie and the sequel “Return to Oz”, we have the character of Dorothy segue from reality into memories of Oz, in which she has to solve puzzles/complete arcade sequences which will ‘unlock’ that memory. The player has to figure out which memory needs to be applied to her real world problems – ie it’s all a metaphor for growing up.

Well, I was all set up to look at LOOM , but then realised it was released in1990. Whoops. So instead, I will be going back a few years to another Lucasarts game: Maniac Mansion. Maniac Mansion revolutionised the adventure game genre, by being the first to drop the text parser ui in favour of the mouse. Though it did not yet feature Lucasarts “can’t die, can’t get stuck” philosphy of later games, it was notably more forgiving then other contemporary adventures (kings quest, space quest, etc.). It was also wackier. It features an extremely unlikely bunch of characters: Nerds, Surfers, Crazy Doctors, Tentacles and one very memorable Hamster, among others. The environment and narrative is a kooky mix of B-grade horror, Sci-fi and Comedy. The ‘world’ was confined to the mansion and its grounds – impressively large in its day, but tiny by today’s adventure game standards.

Maniac Mansion was mainly derived from previous Sierra adventure games, which in turn were derived from text adventures. From Mystery House onwards, graphics were added and the worlds shrunk (as text is only limited by the designer’s imagination) and then began to steadily expand as the graphic technology evolved.

Recent adventure games (such as Telltale’s series) have not changed much since Maniac Mansion: the biggest change has been the ui becoming more graphic and less intrusive, also allowing the ‘worlds’ to occupy more of the screen. Otherwise, we still have the same wacky combining of objects to overcome puzzles, smart-alec characters, silly narratives and kooky environments.

Starting with Maniac Mansion, Lucasarts managed to capture lightning in a bottle with its early adventure games and many have tried to re-capture and refine the formula since – but while I have played many excellent adventure games, few have been the sheer joy to play and re-play as Maniac Mansion has.

This will have to be a combined  post for this week and last, as it took me that long to set up this blog.

Last week, we re-framed the classic game of Snakes and Ladders as an action movie, but kept the same mechanics. It was probably mores fun making up the game’s theme then actually playing the game, as in the end, it was still snake and ladders – which is a fairly boring game, as it relies completely on chance.

Ahh..Crystal Castles… this game ate up a lot of my spare time as a child and (with a lot of help from my Dad) eventually finished it. Its core mechanics include maneuvering Bentley around an isometric level, trying to collect all the gems and avoiding various enemies with different behaviours.  I would definitely classify it as an Arcade game. Arcade games place emphasis on a player’s reflexes, trial and error tatics and delayed rewards. Arcade games, of course, find their roots in the classic cabinet games and in trying to suck as much loose change from the player as possible. Not suspringly, Crystal Castles started its life as an arcade cabinet.

Would it matter it if Bentley wasn’t a bear? It’s pretty tempting to say no. The gameplay would be the same and there’s nothing about a bear collecting gems, etc that makes any kind of narrative sense. But, it’s part of a what makes the game memorable.

“Remember Crystal Castles?” I asked my Dad.

He scrunches up his face. “Is that the one with the bear?” I rest my case.

For the Legend of Zelda, there is no question -  while replacing Link, again would  not change the core mechanics of the games, but would alter the narrative drastically. I think it would also alter the player reception of the game mechanics, as well as their emotional connection to the narrative.

This week we used D&D as inspiration to mix-up our game space. Our game revolved around a DM setting players tasks that they had to complete in a round-trip race and battling other players to derail them from their tasks. We set our game at Uni, comprimising of different rooms and the pub, from which players started and returned.  I’ve had to steal images of it from Yena, as my photos din’t come out very clearly. The game relied heavily on the DM and dice rolls for movement. We certainly had a lot of fun using our imagination to come up attacks and responding to the DM’s challenges, but I’m not sure how it would ‘ve played over a more sustained amount of time.

And now I have to:

Geez, you don’t ask for much, do you, Truna? I think this might have to be saved for a post later this week. In the meantime, I’ve just changed my essay topic at the last minute, from Hacker Ethics to Roberta Williams. Let the arm flapping, screaming and general panicking commence…

Yay, finally done! Welcome to Traffic Was a Bitch, please leave your frontal brain lobes in the bins provided.