{"id":2063,"date":"2009-01-07T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2063"},"modified":"2009-01-07T11:19:21","modified_gmt":"2009-01-07T16:19:21","slug":"roundtable-books-as-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=2063","title":{"rendered":"Roundtable: Books as Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month at Man Bytes Blog<\/a>, the roundtable discussion<\/a> is:<\/p>\n

Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?<\/div>\n

I don’t participate in the roundtable as often as I would like, but I think I can make up for it with this one. I have the longest and most detailed response in the history of the roundtable. It’s 155 posts long and took a year to produce<\/a>. <\/p>\n

But my first webcomic – while true to the premise offered – is probably a bit too much to qualify as an “entry” in the roundtable. Let me check the bookshelf and see what else might be good: God Game? Er. That would be sort of meta, making a game about a book about a game. I guess you’d just end up with a game within a game. Or just making the game described in the book. Either way, that’s not very interesting. How about Cryptonomicon? Nah. WWII shooters are too passé. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy? Already been done. A Brief History of Time? Er. No. Snow Crash<\/a>? Yeah. That can work. <\/p>\n

I will do better than simply imagine what that book would be like as a game. I will imagine Snow Crash as a game (made with today’s technology and design techniques), and then review it<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Review: Snow Crash<\/div>\n

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. I’m always talking about the need for games with richer stories and more interesting characters, but whenever one comes along I’m never happy with the result. Last year it was the Indigo Prophecy<\/a>, the story-based game that was more story than game, and ultimately failed at both. <\/p>\n

Snow Crash is a crazy, schizophrenic game with a wide variety of gameplay elements, like GTA with strict linearity and less dead hookers.<\/p>\n

You begin the game as some kind of pizza-delivery ninja (I’m not kidding here) delivering pies for (and I’m still not kidding) the Mob, which has re-formed itself into a seemingly reputable business in some freakish near-future world where the United States has shattered into a bunch of tiny little countries. It sounds absurd, but I found the setting oddly compelling and a nice break from Space Marines and Middle-Earth knockoffs. <\/p>\n

The first section of the game is a driving sequence where you have to deliver a pizza before the time runs out, while dodging cars that change speed and lanes more or less at random. There is also a skateboarder named YT darting around in traffic. She’s supposedly fifteen or so, although if they wanted us to think of her as a kid they should have given her more clothes and a much younger voice actress. Not since Rikku has a game been so confused about whether we’re supposed to want to date or adopt a female character.<\/p>\n

You have to keep her from grabbing onto the back of your car, because apparently in the future cars will be so feeble that the weight of a 90 pound girl will cut their speed in half, and thus you will not deliver the pizza on time, which results in a game over.<\/p>\n

As you reach the suburbs, you enter a gauntlet of quicktime events to dodge hazards as you cut through the yards of the various houses. This section enforces my most hated of videogame tropes: Failure is forbidden until it is mandatory<\/strong>. It’s game over and back to start if you run out of time or miss a single quicktime challenge, but once you get to the end there is a cutscene where you crash anyway, your car is ruined, and you must hand both the the pizza and the narrative off to YT, where the game transforms into a sluggish and less-fun version of Tony Hawk Pro Skater.<\/p>\n

The rest of the game is like this, with stiff, unsatisfying challenges blocking our progress to the next collection of overlong cutscenes. The challenges are too rigid and don’t really make you feel like you’re taking part in the gameworld. The cutscenes are gorgeous but drive home the point that you’re just riding along while the game tells you a story. It’s like a jRPG without the RPG part. You jump from one protagonist to the next, from one type of game to the next, and the whole thing feels more like a collection of mini-games than a coherent whole. You drive cars, ride skateboards, have swordfights, some gunfights, some frustrating platforming on a giant floating city, (Did you know that ocean water is instantly fatal? Neither did I.) and even a little bit of adventure-game puzzle solving. And for all the skills you have to learn in order to progress, none of them let you affect the outcome beyond simple pass \/ fail. <\/p>\n

The story itself is odd but interesting, and I was constantly frustrated by the fact that the cutscenes were both too long, while at the same time not showing me enough of the world. It centers around a computer virus that affects humans, infecting people as they inhabit a Matrix-style virtual world. If you look at a “snow crash” (which looks like television snow with flickering pseudo-subliminal symbols in it) then you’re turned into a drooling husk and sent back to the loading screen. And this will happen to you a lot<\/em> if you’re not a master of swordfighting and quicktime-event button mashing. <\/p>\n

The only time where you’re able to drag the story away from rigid linearity is at the very end, when you can choose the good ending or the bad ending. And the bad ending is little more than “the city gets nuked”. That’s not as much of a spoiler as it may seem, since it’s heavily telegraphed from the start. <\/p>\n

I don’t know if a story like this can fit within the context of a game. I realize this sounds odd coming from a “games are art” evangelist like myself, but games can only add<\/em> to the other forms of art, not supplant them. It really seems like the designer had a bigger idea than game budget. Maybe a bigger idea than could be supported by any<\/em> game budget. The game has things to say about politics, technology, the future, government, language, religion, disease, computer viruses, and a dozen other things I could barely keep track of. The highlight of the game for me was a huge dialog tree with The Librarian, a pseudo-AI that lives in a virtual world and can fill in the details of the backstory and setting, as well as filling in some of the denser ideas connected to the main plot. Sadly, you don’t meet him until about halfway through the game and not at the start when he would have been really useful.<\/p>\n

Snow Crash isn’t a great game, but I’d love<\/em> to see what it would have been like as a graphic novel, or a book. Although, I have to admit I can’t picture it as just a book. The look of the Metaverse (Snow Crash’s version of the Matrix) is so distinctive, I can’t imagine how you could manage it with just prose.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously this fiction puts Snow Crash at a disadvantage by having it come out today, instead of seventeen years ago. This makes it a descendant of The Matrix, and not the other way around. In any case, we’d have no idea what we were missing. Videogames are still my favorite form of entertainment, but they are not as universal or as articulate as I’d like them to be. At least, not yet. <\/p>\n

EDIT:<\/strong> To answer the question of what the book look like if it was a game first<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I don’t think the game WOULD get made into a book. Maybe this seems like a cop-out, but it’s where the thought experiment led me. I imagined if Stephenson handed off his plot to a team of reasonably competent (in the technical sense) developers and they did their best to make it into a game. This is very much the approach used by developers making games based on movies, and we all know how those<\/em> usually turn out.<\/p>\n

The result would NOT be something that would make gamers clamor for the book, because so much had been lost in the port from prose to pixels.<\/p>\n