{"id":2260,"date":"2010-03-05T13:02:45","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T18:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2260"},"modified":"2010-03-05T13:02:45","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T18:02:45","slug":"more-thoughts-on-that-literature-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2010\/03\/05\/more-thoughts-on-that-literature-article\/","title":{"rendered":"More Thoughts on that Literature Article"},"content":{"rendered":"

Other People’s Stories<\/a> was one of the easiest articles I’ve ever written. As EA’s Jonathan Knight says of Dante’s Inferno<\/em>, the ideas are so big. It’s impossible not to find an angle or know what questions to ask. Not everyone I asked for input replied to my queries, and that ended up being OK since I have enough material for another 2500 words – easily.<\/p>\n

I chose to focus on relatively recent games, though there were lots of other possibilities. The Tolkien games and how they have changed with the fortunes of that literary franchise, a teeth-clenchingly difficult adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle<\/em>, how Romance of the Three Kingdoms<\/em> has retained its strong historical and literary roots on platforms that are generally resistant to that sort of thing, American McGee’s attempts to turn not just Alice<\/em> but also Grimm fairy tales into horror games and what this says about his sense of authorship…the possibilities were really endless. I wrote the first thousand words in a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

As I note in my conclusion, one of the problems with adaptations is the constraint of genre conventions. AAA games seem to be reducing their genre breadth, making it very difficult to imagine adaptations in new forms. Most of us are not designers and see the media we know through the lenses we have in front of us. So, I see The Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> as a Kingmaker\/Crusader Kings type game, not a Heavy Rain<\/em> style exploration of character and meaning.<\/p>\n

Ironically, games are getting better at telling original stories even as they still struggle with adapting other people’s work. This should not be a sign that adaptations are a bad thing or that they can’t be done, only that I think that game developers should take some ownership of the stories they are adapting and consider what makes those stories so powerful. Yes, Dragonlance<\/em> will always be an RPG; Beowulf<\/em> could be almost anything.<\/p>\n

To Knight’s credit, he has seriously thought about Dante and the game. When I asked him why EA’s Limbo was nothing like that in the poem, he explained that the player had just fought his way into hell; giving him\/her a rolling meadow with a castle and lounging historical celebrities would break the pacing. I am sympathetic to the idea that there was no need to have Dante’s named attached at all – they could appropriate his hell and imagery and not bring up the poet at all. But, like it or not, the Western Canon is still a powerful brand and that name itself is probably responsible for a lot of the coverage for what is, at its core, a God of War<\/em>-type action game. Knight and his team knew exactly what they were doing, and he knows this poem inside and out. Yes, the setting was the big draw but they didn’t stop there.<\/p>\n

One side note: If these are the sorts of feature stories that you want to see, instead of simply long think-pieces (op-eds stretched over 1000 words), you need to support them by referring your friends to them or commenting there on Gamespy instead of here – even though you know I love and cherish all of your opinions. Ryan Scott has made it sort of a mission to acquire good writing for this sort of thing (including my friends Julian Murdoch<\/a> and Lara Crigger<\/a>) and it can only really be supported if he has the page views to justify the cost. In an eye-ball driven business like contemporary games journalism, I think we get what we deserve – support this stuff instead of Top 10 Lists. <\/p>\n

Unless I have written that Top 10 List, because daddy has to eat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Other People’s Stories was one of the easiest articles I’ve ever written. As EA’s Jonathan Knight says of Dante’s Inferno, the ideas are so big. It’s impossible not to find an angle or know what questions to ask. Not everyone I asked for input replied to my queries, and that ended up being OK since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[134,21,11],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-As","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2260"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2261,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2260\/revisions\/2261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}