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Games And Books Getting Along
The Guardian and Wired are taking a look at the connections between books and games this week. The Guardian's Games Blog has a look at games in literature. Wired, on the other side of the coin, has a look at books written in gaming worlds. From the Wired article: "Sam Fisher is, of course, the hero of the Splinter Cell video game. I've spent countless hours using my Xbox controller to sneak him past armed guards, scale walls and club enemies unconscious. But I didn't know much about his personal life until I wandered into an airport bookstore recently and encountered Splinter Cell -- the novel. That's right: the novel. In the last few years, publishers have taken a cue from the booming world of fan fiction and have begun commissioning novels based on famous games. It's now such a successful cottage industry that when you wander into any Barnes & Noble, there are shelves groaning under the weight of books written from Resident Evil, Halo, Tomb Raider and MechWarrior."
Sorry, but actually, the "MechWarrior" books were out before the game... although it was under the Battletech umbrella.
Sorry, just had to.
--- no sig to see here... move along.
My instincts tell me that game-based books will eventually go the way of the Magic: The Gathering books - they'll find their target audience in only the most hardcore of hardcore fans. (Of course, that might not be a bad thing.)
Lets not forget the classics like the Doom books. I just picked up a copy of the first one last weekend after losing my original. Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky, and Endgame
Wouldn't you rather just read an actual Tom Clancy novel?
English is easier said than done.
Books written in game settings? Ok, not exactly video games, but Infocom had novels set in Planetfall/Stationfall, Wishbringer/Enchanter, and Zork between 1988 and 1991. Adding graphics (though, perhaps still not exactly a video game, to purists), I've always heard a lot of good things about the Myst novels (1995-1997).
This sig intentionally left justified.
More interesting by far than this old marketing ploy of taking a popular brand from one saleable medium (games) and transplanting it into another market (books), is the phenomenon which is occuring within gaming itself with regard to story-telling. The most interesting convergence of recent years between literary story-telling and gameworld story-telling occurred not in literature but in games themselves. I consider one fascinating example of that to be the creation of the Planescape: Torment Novelisation.
Not a book written based on the gameworld. Not a book written in imitation of the game's story. There was a Torment novel. It was absolutely atrocious. What's more interesting is the novelisation of the game's text. What's more interesting is the quality of writing that comes through even when the medium changes. What's more interesting is that the game's text doesn't need to be rewritten to be considered a cohesive piece of storytelling.
Game writing has come of age over the last decade (although some would argue we're merely rediscovering what text adventures had already managed to create in the '70s and '80s). What's significant is the transplantation of narratives which stand on their own as cohesive storylines with coherent character development into gameworlds where gameplay itself does not by nature necessitate high quality narrative story-telling.
The reinterpretation of game stories into novels is, by comparison, trivial as a marketing phenomenon. It's not, in Planescape's case, the fact that the game narrative was transplanted into a horrifically bad knockoff novel that is interesting. That kind of merchandising bridging the gap between various media formats is nothing new. What's remarkable is that the horrifically bad knockoff novel can be held up against the quality of the in-game narrative in the present and the latter, the game narrative, as it was written and novelised stands up and has always has stood up as the far superior narrative of the two.
I read Doom. The first two books. Where I learned that the Mormon church has a secret army of tanks underneath the Temple to defend themselves against the combined armies of Hell and the IRS.
After getting that far, "groaning" is certainly the right word I'd used to describe it.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The Imperial Library has everything you want and then some.
Transcriptions of all of Morrowind's (and all Elder Scrolls games) books, interviews and commentary from the creators and fans, timelines, glossaries, you name it.
Enjoy.