Narrative and the Old Republic

Trevor Elkington's assertion in “Too Many Cooks: Media Convergence and Self-Defeating Adaptations” that there has been a long history of critical and commercial failure in the production of movie-based games should ring particularly true with children of the 80s, who witnessed some of the most horrendous movie-to-game adaptations in the history of digitized gaming (Elkington 214). While the most often-cited example of the substandard adaptation is Atari's “E.T.” (“coming soon to a landfill near you”), anyone who played games in the early console days can rattle off a laundry list of abominations that sought to cash in on the popularity of a given film. A quick jaunt through Cracked.com's list of the 20 Worst Nintendo Games of All-Time reveals that several movie-based titles made the cut, including such classics as Hudson Hawk (“the little Bruce Willis looked like a mixture of Joe Camel and a circus midget”), Total Recall (“a masterfully ruined idea for a video game from the king of unplayable movie games, Acclaim”), though apparently the reviewers didn't have access to Predator, Jaws, or Friday the 13^th – all horrendous in their own right, and worthy of equivalent doses of derision.

Much of Elkington's essay focuses upon the impact of the conventions of the film industry upon these games (wherein script re-writes render entire portions of games meaningless, forcing developers to re-code them while compressing timelines and compromising quality), in addition to incompatibilities between the production cycles of the two mediums (games generally take two years to develop, while films only take 18 months – leaving game producers to either rush to market or risk missing out on the buzz generated by the film's opening), and the simple fact that players are often more critical of games that closely follow the conventions of their favourite movies as they fail to offer any new experiences to players.

However, some of the more interesting things Elkington has to say about movie adaptations revolves around narrative – specifically how the most popular movie-based games succeed in developing their own storylines outside of the narrative of a given film in order to capture the attention of players. Elkington's points become particularly intriguing as the gaming world awaits the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) – a MMORPG based upon the Star Wars franchise being developed by Bioware and Electronic Arts. Billed as a “story-driven, massively multiplayer online game”, narrative resides at the heart of SWTOR, with players prompted to “define your own personal story and determine your path down the light or dark side of the Force”.

Set 3000 years before the rise of Darth Vader (and as such 3000 years removed from the context of the original Star Wars films), SWTOR offers players the opportunity to explore a large fictional world wherein the events of the films have not yet occurred (similar to the game Elkington references in his essay, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay), effectively affording players within the game the agency to feel as though they truly are shaping the galaxy with their actions. As Elkington notes, this ability to pursue “a separate narrative not directly reliant upon film events” generally proves conducive to an engaging gaming experience, avoiding the pitfalls of simply rehashing the events of the original film and “trading in on an oversimplified appeal to interactivity in the place of novelty” (Elkington 222).

Where SWTOR deviates from Elkington's formula for a successful game somewhat lies in its dependence upon cut scenes and cinematic sequences to develop the individual storylines of each of the game's characters. As Ray Muzyka (one of the game's developers) notes, “we want people to feel like they're playing their own personal non-linear fiction”, and this heavy reliance upon cinematic elements is readily visible in the content posted in the Media Gallery on the SWTOR website. It will be interesting to see whether this emphasis on narrative ultimately enhances or detracts from game play, despite an obvious dependence upon what Elkington lists as “perhaps the most common complaint about film-to-game adaptations: an over-reliance on cut scenes” (Elkington 219). With promises of multiple cut scenes and cinematic sequences to tell the story of each character's adventures across the galaxy, it will be interesting to see whether these elements are greeted with excitement by players (as they are visually impressive and depict the world of Star Wars in new ways), or if this abundance of cut scenes ultimately ruptures “the flow of interactive space” (Elkington 219) in a manner similar to the conventional video game adaptation.

Sources

Trevor Elkington, “Too Many Cooks: Media Convergence and Self-Defeating Adaptations,” in The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (New York, Routledge 2009), 213-235.

Agency Begets Parody

Like many children of the 80s, my first exposure to the world of role-playing games was “The Legend of Zelda".  Differentiated from other games by virtue of its shiny gold cartridge, Zelda (as most people called it) was the "must-have" item with my friends for Christmas 1988 - primarily because the nature of the game essentially necessitated you having your own cartridge to play yourself, as it was torture trying to convince your friend to let you play with his character and potentially sabotage his quest.  

Though more of an action-adventure game with RPG elements than a true RPG, Zelda closely followed the typical hero quest formula: namely a hero sets out to accomplish a goal while forces work to help or hinder this individual (in this case an elf named Link) in the achievement of said goal (Krzywinska 386).  A common theme within such games involves the need to rescue a princess from the clutches of an evil tyrant, with the tyrant and his minions posing a series of challenges on route to the realization of the hero's ultimate goal.  Zelda was no different in this regard, as Link was required to travel across the land of Hyrule in order to save Princess Zelda from the evil Ganon – pretty basic stuff, but thoroughly captivating to my eight-year-old self.  

While thematically not all that different from something like Super Mario Brothers (wherein Mario needs to save Princess Toadstool from Bowser), The Legend of Zelda offered players a different form of player agency at the time - primarily the ability to collect and use inventory items to solve puzzles and complete levels, as opposed to the fundamentally linear gameplay experience titles such as Super Mario Brothers offered.  This offered players a greater degree of freedom within gameplay, as inventory items could be used in any number of ways, rightly or wrongly, within the confines of the game itself, and players were free to explore the game world as they saw fit (meaning there was no set order that the game world needed to be experienced in).  

This increased agency would ultimately give rise to the notion of open world games such as Grand Theft Auto, as designers constructed worlds in which players were freed of any sort of constraints upon gameplay as they interacted with the game world largely as they would the material world.  An interesting phenomenon that emerged from the development of these open world games was a corresponding rise in the number of video parodies it generated – primarily created by video game fans who sought to explore how life in the material world would be different if governed by the rules of their favourite video game.

"The Legend of Neil" represents one such parody, though it subverts the notion of "life as a video game" slightly to become "life in a video game" (as Neil is actually transported into the game itself and forced to abide by its rules as opposed to having the physical world bend to the rules of a video game).  Using "The Legend of Zelda" as it's thematic basis, "The Legend of Neil" combines a faithful rendition of Zelda's gameplay (throwing boomerangs, placing bombs, shoving rocks to reveal caves) with issues lifted from contemporary society (race/gender relations, relationship issues, office hierarchies) to create something which is at once fantastical and grounded in reality.  Despite the fact that Neil (playing as Link) is forced to abide by the rules of gameplay and complete quests to rescue Princess Zelda as though he were an agent controlled by another player, the human element he brings to the gameplay (lamenting how heavy his inventory items are to carry, greeting each new challenge with alternating doses of apprehension and sarcasm) provokes the viewer to re-examine the original game in different light.

Interestingly though, in exclusively adopting Neil's point of view "The Legend of Neil" effectively stays true to the nature of "The Legend of Zelda", wherein game play is centered around one individual's experience of Hyrule, interacting with a fairly two-dimensional supporting cast who aid Neil in moving through gameplay (most being caricatures representative of assorted stereotypes: The Fairy is like a clingy ex-girlfriend, while Ganon resembles the incompetent office manager).  While the other characters within the parody interact with Neil as he moves through the game world, his perspective remains uniquely three-dimensional, as each time he strays from the standard dialogue/rules of the game he is greeted with confusion on behalf of the other characters.  Just as a player may shout at an on-screen character when they don't know what activity to undertake next, so too do Neil's outbursts and utterances serve a similarly futile purpose – the game neither acknowledges nor understands him, and continues to behave in accordance with its governing rules.  By "living inside a video game", Neil is thus constrained by the communicative and interactive structures the game affords - and it's within his responses to these constraints that much of the comedy within the show itself is generated.  Dealing with the nuances of the video game world in a manner that is by turns ironic and self-referential, “The Legend of Neil” challenges the remaining linearity within Zelda’s gameplay, while at the same time drawing attention to particular events within the gameplay to highlight the arbitrary nature of the game’s governing set of rules.

Once a Thief, Always a Thief

Within “Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests and Backstories”, Tanya Kryzwinska outlines the function of traditional myth in immersing players in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft.  “The primary and highly recognizable mythic pattern that informs and structures” WoW, according to Kryzwinska, is the “epic hero quest format, wherein various forces work to help and hinder the hero-player on route to achieving particular goals” (Kryzwinska 386).  Citing the work of Joseph Campbell, Kryzwinska goes on to note that the hero quest is something “that figures strongly in the collective consciousness,” providing a “shorthand way of setting expectations and a proven mode for encouraging identification” (Kryzwinska 386).  By undertaking quests a player is imbibed with a sense that he or she is playing a role in the story of the game world, thus further promoting identification with the virtual representation of their character.

Growing up playing video games I always more readily identified with characters on the darker side of the hero quest continuum.  For example, the first time I picked up Final Fantasy for the NES I played exclusively as a band of four thieves, later realizing that within the structure of the game this made it incredibly hard to be successful.  Given that thieves lacked any single ability that came in handy (save for being very adept at running away from conflict), I quickly found that while my party was good for getting around within the game world, they weren’t necessarily as useful when fighting dragons and the like – which was unfortunate, as the completion of these quests was the fundamental goal of the game. 

As a result I often found myself working against the rules of the game in an attempt to find loopholes to advance my party, as the conventional approach (level up, buy the right weapons, take on quests directly) didn’t work given the limitations of my characters.  Ultimately I grew irritated with the entire endeavour (as the limited number of outcomes the 8-bit game world afforded essentially made it impossible to subvert the system), and was forced to abandon my futile pursuit of glory and restart the game with a cast of characters who more directly adhered to the conventional tenets of heroism.

When creating my World of Warcraft character nearly twenty years later I once again found myself gravitating towards a character on the shadier side of adventuring.  Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Swindlor the Cowardly was transplanted into Drak’thul and immediately set to work weaselling about with great aplomb.  What I quickly noticed was that WoW’s gameplay and the realm of Drak’thul were far more conducive to a nomadic, disreputable existence than some of the titles I had played growing up – which at first was something I embraced wholeheartedly.  Battles were fled from, other players’ winnings were stolen, and more than a few arrogant words were dispensed over a fleeing shoulder.  This increased freedom came with a price however, as with countless other players freed of the constraints of “heroic” behaviour I quickly became a target.  Countless times over the first few days of playing WoW I was challenged to ill-advised duels and chased across the land – sometimes for violating the norms of gameplay, but more often just because my character was relatively weak and thus easy pickings for other morally-compromised characters.

At this point I once again found myself wondering if I might not have a more enjoyable experience if I did choose to tap into a more traditional mythic structure and play the game as a hero.  By choosing to play as a villain, I was immediately forced to step into an antagonistic relationship with a multitude of players who had a great deal more experience (and thus power) than I did, and my ability to effectively learn the rules of the game was stunted.  Ultimately this approach resulted in my experiencing a very limited view of the mythological structure of the game, primarily because the myth of Swindlor the Cowardly was one of cowardice and victimhood.   While providing an interesting study in digital first impressions and the manner in which norms are enforced in a MMORPG, my initial experience with WoW was hardly the sort of immersive one that a player could expect from a more traditional interaction with the rules of the game – primarily because I spent more time in the graveyard racking up my resurrection tab than accomplishing anything of note within the game world.