Converting a traditional book to IF

I’m considering converting a spy novel I wrote to IF using Inform7. I began this journey just playing around with inform7 to create the “world” of my books… and ended up generating a tongue-in-cheek Zork-like adventuring IF game. (Quotient, the Game)… Now I’m considering converting my entire first novel.

My question is, does this even make sense to do? 75,000 words makes for a lot of IF text, and a traditional novel is not generally “free roaming”… I guess I’d make each chapter a scene, and allow you to advance through different chapters in new ways… ordered based on however you explored the world, completing key tasks (puzzles) along the way. Since different chapters are at times written from different characters perspectives, some may just be “cut scenes” provided at the end of a scene to give you insight as to what the villains are doing and get you back to where you were in your adventure through the book. Thoughts on doing this?

Should I just do a completely different premise? The book is The Quantum Contingent.

Thanks in advance for your commentary/thoughts,

Greg

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Adapting a static text does tend to be tricky to pull off in a compelling way; it probably depends on why you’re doing it. So you’d want to consider things like: what would you hope to gain by adding interactivity? What would the reader/player get out of it?

There is more to interactivity than just branching. As you say, experiencing the elements of the story in a different order can sometimes work, but yeah, you probably need some kind of goal for adapting a novel.

You might look at pieces like:

  • The Thirty Nine Steps, Graham Walmsley’s adaptation of the John Buchan novel. Uses the interactivity for pacing and tension (which I thought worked well for a thriller), letting you take different routes and always letting you feel like you’re on the edge of getting caught but in reality you have to work at it pretty hard to actually lose IIRC.
  • Tabitha O’Connell’s Structural Integrity is an adaptation of a novella by the same name - I believe this was a lot of additional work - adding branching and thinking of different ways the story could go. They probably wrote a postmortem on here but I’m too lazy to search for it.
  • Turandot is an adaptation of the opera, using the conceit of a literal inescapable gauntlet to make the game completely linear while allowing the player some freedom to role-play how you might approach each obstacle.
  • The Lady Thalia series are more work, and not adaptations of static stories, but fun approaches to doing heist stories in IF.
  • Oh, hmm, also litruoke’s January which has a literal calendar and leans hard into letting the player choose an order to experience the pieces. But while I put some effort into reading parts “out of order,” my impression from reviews is that most people just went through linearly. Still, it can work. It also imposed some limitations on the orders that you could choose, gradually unlocking calendar dates in a somewhat unpredictable order (IIRC?) and that probably felt interesting regardless of whether a player took advantage of it. And again, I assume this was designed as an interactive story first and not an adaptation of a short story or novel.
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Very helpful. Thanks. These are some great things to explore… and yes, figuring out the “why” is an excellent point. In the book, the protagonists need to successfully shutdown some “stations”, so I think each of those will make for good puzzle locations… In addition, there are some action sequences with the bad guys where you’ll need to successfully escape to continue the game, so I think I have the makings of something where interactivity could add an element of fun…
However, since it’s an entire novel, I willl probably have scenes where the player is not present… so I’m thinking those will be “cut-scenes” where it’s just text… and I may need to cut down on the text to not bore the IF player who is there for interactivity, not for lots of long form reading.

A lot to think through, and your references give me lots of great food for thought.

Thanks again!
Greg

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Not really addressing your choice of Inform 7 here; these are just some general points.

You already have a chunk of story, and I understand why that’s a tempting starting point for your next project. However, you will likely need to re-edit your novel for the screen.

A page of printed text has maybe 200 to 300 words. You will need to think how to chop that up into passages, so that on each transition it takes only a second or two for the user to take on the updated content.

But fundamentally there’s the question of agency. An interactive novel is not a game. That’s not to say a novel is inferior to a game. Only that a novel presented as a game does not fulfill the expectations of a player who expects a game.

Really it’s your story world which will be the basis of your game. You will need to create alternative endings, so there’s more writing to do there.

Your game will need a mechanic. To satisfy a player of your game, you’ll have to engage them in the process somehow. So maybe in order to progress to the next chapter, the player has to collect materials to forge a passport so your spy can travel to the story location.

I’ve been in a similar situation recently. I wrote a short story called ‘Bláthnaid’ a while back. I hoped I could use it as a stepping stone for a more ambitious project. What’s actually happened in my case is that whilst it served to preserve the momentum of my writing, in actual fact very little of the text has carried over, since my ‘game of the novel’ has turned into a different thing entirely.

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Thanks for your insights… All great points, I can now see how this will require a transformation of the book.

Greg

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I will also throw in - for prose-heavy Choice of Games titles which have generally at least a novella-length amount of material for the player to read, there is often at least double or triple the amount of prose the author must account for that the player might never see. If the player never has a choice to not see content, then agency can prove rather limited.

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Another data point: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an adaptation of the novel co-written by the original author, Douglas Adams. But they note in the blurb:

A special note for people who have read the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Although the opening of the game is fairly similar to the book, the story quickly diverges, with lots of new material and different twists. Although familiarity with the story may make a few of the early puzzles easier, if you rely too heavily on this previous knowledge you will certainly end up getting misled.

I don’t know if this is because of the difficulty of adapting a novel or just because why not, but it is an example of a novel becoming a parser game, which is what you’re doing.

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I did indeed write a postmortem, which you can read here!

And another example of traditional fiction adapted to IF is Photograph: A Portrait of Reflection by Steve Evans. He mentions the adaptation in the game’s “about” text:

Despite having been a huge fan of the early Infocom puzzle-fests, when I eventually decided to make my own game I thought I might attempt something more story- than puzzle-based. Being short on ideas, I looked to some of the short fiction I’d written, to see if there was something that might be fun to translate into IF. For reasons I still don’t understand, I ended up choosing a short story that had some peculiar problems when it came to doing an IF conversion.

There’s also an adaptation tag on IFDB.

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Great point. Agency is key. My hope is that some content that the user needs to see will be provided as a “cut-scene”… by that I mean a non-interactive sequence that will trigger at the end of an interactive scene. (using inform7 scene control)… The interactive scenes will have puzzle elements that will need to be collected or solved in order to advance to the end game, so the player won’t be able to “solve” or “finish” the book without participating in the core interactive scenes, and as they complete the core interactive scenes, they will be fed some “cut-scene material” before proceeding to another scene… At least that’s what I’m thinking… Thanks again for the input. It is very helpful as I figure out how to tackle this.

Oh, and I love The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! (and I still have my original infocom package from that game). I think I will definitely need a disclaimer, as I’m quickly realizing this will be very different from the full novel! Thanks!

Thanks! I’ll check out your game and postmortem! Also helpful to know about the adaptation tag!

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FWIW, here’s a bit on my experience of converting my short story “Photograph” to full-parser interactive fiction in I6 over 20 years ago.

“Photograph”, the short story, was a reflective and introspective piece of writing centred on the life and thoughts of a middle-aged loner. An early decision I made for the conversion (and not a great one) was that I’d try to keep the original narrative structure intact and, as much as possible, retain the original text. To mix it up a bit I built in some of the exposition via interactive flashbacks that could be entered in any order and multiple times, and which allowed for some (reversible) deviations in the backstory. But for all that, it remained largely faithful to the original story and quite linear.

Even though it was linear and based closely on something I’d already written, I found I could only use my original text as the “bones” of the new work and spent most of my time on the conversion “fleshing” it out to provide for the required level of player interaction and immersion. In this bulking-up process I tried to somehow maintain the narrative flow, with the reader/player covering everything they needed to see in an appropriate order for the story to work; without getting stuck, feeling the thing was on rails, being subjected to text dumps, or losing agency.

In addition to the “fleshing” out of the story, I made use of the usual “gated”-section IF approach to the narrative and relied heavily on prompts (some subtle(ish), some not-so-much) to keep things moving from one section to the next. And, for anachronistic reasons, I included exactly one traditional puzzle. I thought at that time (2002) that any IF “game” should have puzzle elements. Sam Kabo Ashwell gave this decision (the puzzle involved a tree) more credit than it was due in his generous review of my game several years ago: ANCIENT MYSTERIES OF IF COMP: Photograph | These Heterogenous Tasks

Was the IF conversion process easy? No. Did it work? Only partially. Would I do it this way again? No.

If I was converting a work of traditional fiction to IF now with the benefit of more than 20 years of hindsight, I’d be picking something that lent itself more to an interactive medium in the first place. I’d be viewing the conversion as a new work, drawing on the original, but for its own ends. I’d be deciding what from the original I was prepared to give up, and what I was not. I’d envisage how to draw the most out of the story and its world from the introduction of interactive elements, and how to use those elements to keep the reader/player engaged and manage the pacing (whether it be via use of puzzles or other methods). I’d also be looking at the style of interaction that I wanted (puzzle-based, puzzle-lite narrative-based, puzzleless, or whatever), the tone of the narration to best serve the objectives of the story as IF, and the potential to play to some of IF’s strengths, such as use of multiple POVs, paths and/or endings.

Lastly, in my case I’d be giving some thought to whether what I wanted to achieve would be best served by a full-parser system, or going with a limited-parser, or some of the many sophisticated choice-based systems available these days.

Steve

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Shameless plug for my own adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (I reused the milieu but structured it as a sequel).

Currently working on an adaptation of Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau. I struggled with the narrative until I took inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which also inspired the movie Apocalypse Now).

In Conrad’s novella, Marlow travels upriver to deal with Kurtz, an ivory trader who has “gone native.” Decided I could transpose that journey motif onto the game player’s journey upriver, with them encountering different types of Moreau’s creations as they “puzzle” their way towards the final confrontation.

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Very helpful insights! I appreciate you sharing. Greg

Thanks Bill. I’ve played your adaptation of the Time Machine. Nice work! Greg