E-books are not the only electronic medium attracting writers. The New York Observer has an article about journalists and novelists migrating to the video game field. Not that authors working in other media is necessarily new; prose writers have dabbled in theatre, movies, and television for as long as those media have been around. But the video game storytelling form brings new sets of challenges to writers—as well as new opportunities for creativity..
In addition to working on a project involving a major movie license, [journalist and fiction writer Tom] Bissell and his partner, Rob Auten—who, as a recent graduate of the Dartmouth English department, found himself writing the cutscenes for the widely praised Far Cry in 2003—have been shopping around a "comedy shooter," complete with mission and design documents, which detail gameplay, and concept art. They’ve been kicking around the idea of asking Junot Diaz to voice the main character, because Mr. Bissell is fond of the nerd-friendly author’s performances at readings.
Marc Laidlaw, novelist and long-time writer at Valve (whose credits include the original Half-Life) feels video games are more like books than movies, “because you immerse yourself in them and they take up a big part of your life for a very long time.”
One e- and p-journal, Electric Literature (which we also mentioned a couple of weeks ago), is even adapting one of its stories into its own video game, though its editor is cagey about the details. He does note that it’s an interactive story and not something that can be “won”.
The article put me in mind of the predictions some have made that as e-readers and tablets gain more capabilities, the lines between books and games may start to blur. I’m not sure that will be completely true—there will always be a place for ordinary prose reading—but certainly games that tell stories well can offer a compelling experience. Indeed, the games where you want to find out “what happens next” can be every bit as compelling timesinks as novels where you want to read “just one more chapter.”
The problem with games as ‘books’ is that there has to be a game in there somewhere. I used to play a lot of games, but now I read because I can enjoy the stories without having to guide the dumb character around, talk to npcs, fight enemies, and all that. Of course, that doesn’t mean games shouldn’t have great stories.
Games have always had a “story” to them, since the days of Space Invaders and Pac Man. But in the last decade or so a *strong* story has become a requirement for any game aspiring to major sales. The turning point appears to be the release of HALO: Combat Evolved which proved that even shooter-games could (and should) be built around an immersive narrative rather than just providing a setting and aiming the plaayer at an endless horde or moving targets of increasing difficulty. In recent times, shooters and action games have brought in elements of progression and character “development” from the realm of Role Playing games.
And this has inspired a newer evolution of the electronic role playing games:
Some of the newer, western, RPGs are built around the concept of the old “choose your own adventure” books rather than the traditional JRPG approach of “revealing” the developer’s hard-wired story.
In these games the player is the *protagonist* rather than an outside observer/puppetmaster and the developer is not so much the author as a facilitator.
The three top game studios in this emerging arena are all following different approaches to this philosophy:
– Bethesda softworks with their Elder Scrolls Series—classic High Fantasy adenture—and Fallout series—black humor-tinged 50’s SciFi movie spoofs—both built around the idea of freeform roaming in an open “sandbox” realm where the player is (mostly)free to interact with the computer-controller characters and carry out missions/quests/assignents as they see fit up to and including declining them.
– BioWare, which has produced a series of standalone games around a more cinematic approach (STAR WARS: Knights of the old Republic, Jade Empire—a kung-fu ghost story!—, Dragon Age—classic Dungeons and Dragons high fantasy) culminating in the Grand Space Opera MASS EFFECT Trilogy (deeply endebted to the Classic Lensmen Saga) and DRAGON AGE 2, where they somewhat constrain the gamer choices to provide a richer, more character-driven story but retaining the idea that the gaming experience is shaped by player attitudes and choice. Less freedom, more character interaction, basically.
– Lionhead Studios, with it’s FABLE series; a more whimsical cycle that controls the basic plot of the narrative but allows more gamer control of the tone of the character interactions, focusing more on emotional investment than in plot control. Plus, a lot of British-style humor for those that can appreciate it. 😉
As the different approaches show, these new age Role-playing games all seek to draw the gamer into their millieus and get them invested in the characters and the narrative, like a good novel; to draw emotional responses and not just impress with plot developments, but they are constrained by the technology available and the development costs, which are approaching Hollywood-blockbuster levels. (These are *not* trivial productions: Mass Effect, for example, provides and tracks several *thousand* branching decision points that contribute to the story and its ending and that information provides starting point data for Mass Effect 2, which in turn, will feed into Mass Effect 3 when it is released.)
With the arrival of the XBOX 360’s KINECT vision-based control system we may see a further step down this road by allowing the gamer to explore these worlds with voice queries, body language, and gestures. It will take at least one new generation of gaming hardware before the three approaches can even begin to be combined but the obvious end-point of this particular game development path is the STAR TREK Holodeck.
With all the talk of ebooks evolving/leading to interactive novels, the fact is interactive novels already exist, they’re just coming out of a different direction: game development studios rather than the traditional publishing houses.
However, immersion aside, these games are *not* novels. In style, tone, and approach, these interactive narratives bear more in common with movies and TV shows (witness the recently-released ALAN WAKE, a Steven King-ish horror game structured as a TV show) than novels simply because of the amount of effort and variety of skills needed to make them happen, so good writers will be in demand in this arena but they will make up a smaller part of the team effort than in other areas. Much as in a big summer blockbuster movie, where the screenplay is important but ultimately it is the producer and the director who truly control the narrative as the post-production technical phase is where the viewer experience is definitely shaped.
Any writer aiming at this new market should understand that just because they can can conceive and map out the story and structure of a game, doesn’t mean the finished product will bear much resemblance to the initial vision. It’s a whole different world structured a lot like hollywood-movie making and there isn’t much room for Independents. Expectations should be tempered.