I totally forgot I wrote a game based on Through the Looking Glass. I actually remember having a nasty flu for two weeks during the crunch and writing a lot of it in a delirious medicated haze that sounds like it should be a good thing, but resulted in a good deal of non-interactive placeholder in the endgame.
The hard part about adapting an existing story is they aren’t built to go what if… like interactive fiction does. Victor Hugo probably had no idea what would have happened if Valjean hadn’t decided to lift the cart off the villager and clue Javert in about his identity. That’s the kind of stuff an author has to think about in interactive adaptation unless they railroad the player into the original plot. Which is no fun.
Stuff that really works is a concept like 80 Days whose picaresque flow lends itself well to an adventure that can veer wildly.
STREETS OF PARIS
You are poor and starving. You have no hope.
>BELT IN CHEST VOICE
The recent game Elsinore does a stellar job of creating a whole extracanonical story framework around the plot of Hamlet. Backstories, side plots, and alternate arcs for all of the characters plus a bunch of new ones. (Othello is bartending out in the city, because why not?)
I don’t think it’s entirely successful as a game structure, but it’s a hell of an attempt. Also demonstrates just how much effort you have to put in to build what feels like an explorable story space around a familiar plot. 80 Days is of course another example of that.
Agreed. Adapting an existing work of fiction to be interactive can be more work than writing the original. Choice of Games stories can have multiples of a standard novel word-count than what the player sees to account for player choice.
A standard length novel is 50k-70k words. Choice of Games stories often go 100k-200k plus. Choice of the Dragon, which might be considered the “demo” story, is 30k.
While this can be mitigated by smart design, it’s a completely different skill than writing linearly.
In the mainframe/early home computer wave, I think these classic veins of material got crowded out by the crowds of game-developing nerds that were enthusiasts of one or both of these genres:
The sword-and-sorcery intersection spearheaded by the likes of Tolkien and TSR
19th century adventure/fantasy, from Alice In Wonderland to Treasure Island.
There’s something else relevant here that no one has mentioned, and I’m only noticing it because I spoke earlier to my father, the (mostly retired) animator, and we happened to touch on the Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit. So I notice that these examples of texts adapted into parser IF are also examples of texts that have been adapted to animated form, with greater or lesser fidelity to the original but often with a lot of popular acclaim.
What all of these texts have in common from an animation-adaptability standpoint is that they leveraged the animation format to hit a sweet spot in terms of production costs and marketability. That is to say, the genre itself was a kind of secret weapon allowing the people creating the adaptation to do things that would have been impossible or much more expensive to do with live action. Doing The Hobbit as a live-action movie in 1977 would have been prohibitively expensive, due to the extensive special effects needed; but a dragon in an animated film need not have the extensive, long-running design and creation that would have been necessary for a mechanically operated prop. An animated dragon is not inherently more expensive to bring into existence than an animated horse or an animated tree. (Conversely, think how much terrible costume and set design there was in 80s fantasy film, and how tacky the obvious failures looked. Or creature design in '80s fantasy, good lord.) The Hobbit was successful in part because it managed to bring a story to which many people already had a strong emotional connection to the screen in a way that worked within expected tropes for the genre it was working in, and it was able to bring that adaptation to life because the genre it was working in helped it to hand-wave many of the “realistic” concerns that would have bogged down a live-action presentation.
The things that make these texts relatively amenable to adapting to animated form also make them relatively amenable to being adapted to parser IF, because the genre conventions help to prop up some of the weak spots in the same way: The player understands why Thorin only responds to a few queries in the Melbourne House Hobbit in the same way that the viewer of the Rankin/Bass adaptation doesn’t expect realistic detail on Smaug’s scales. Similarly, Alice in Wonderland has a beloved standard (Disney) adaptation that may be more recognizable to people than the original novel; part of the reason for this is that animation was a much more plausible way to affordably represent the surrealistic narrative directly on screen than could ever have been done with live action at the time. But parser IF is also adaptable in some of the same plastic ways that animation is: the author can banish various rules, even laws of physics, and invent new ones with the wave of a hand, just as the animator need not be worried about how to go about suspending gravity. In that sense, parser IF provides authorial and production benefits that makes certain things quite adaptable.
The 70s LOTR animations came up in a different context in a Facebook version of this discussion… they obviously loom large over the landscape.
Meanwhile, I have reached a very different conclusion than our essayist. With Scott Adams Literary Adventure Diversion #1 GHOST KING nearing release, I am super-jazzed to start on SALAD #2… adapted from a play whose final bloodbath makes Hamlet look like a mild traffic accident.
(When I think of bloodbaths of the era besides Titus Andronicus, I think of The Duchess of Malfi, but dunno of that has any salad in it… and my salad connection is with Antony and Cleopatra, but that one’s final bloodbath is relatively mild.)
Had to look that up, I’ve never read any Pynchon. No, although the period is right. It’s the bonkers Women Beware Women, which lends itself really well to puzzles and storytelling involving object manipulation, map exploration, and two-word inputs, as it turns out!
As for S.A.L.A.D. (Scott Adams Literary Adventure Diversions), it’s just the branding for this quixotic what-if exercise, derived from S.A.G.A. (Scott Adams Graphic Adventures).
If I did pivot to focus purely on those classic texts which have overt discussions of salad, there’s an even more obvious Shakespeare nod than Cleopatra musing on her “salad days”:
LAFEU
'Twas a good lady, 'twas a good lady: we may pick a
thousand salads ere we light on such another herb. Clown
Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the
salad, or rather, the herb of grace.
It’s a stretch, but I think there’s a case that Helena of All’s Well That Ends Well is the first literary “woman laughing alone with salad” meme.
It turns out posts aren’t visible to non-members, but since it looks like a group I’d love to see posts from, I have hopes that my request to join will be approved and I’ll be able to see the post soon.
