Adaptation: From Non-Interactive to Interactive Part 1

Adaptation to video games from other mediums has always been an... interesting venture.  I really do think, as I said in a previous article, that a lot of the failure of game-to-film adaptations comes from a lack of artistic respect for the source material, but I'm not sure the same can be said of the adaptation from a non-interactive medium to video games.  Let's see if we can figure out what makes this so difficult.

Firstly, let's get this out of the way; yes, most games based on movies are shameless cash grabs.  I'm not sure the same can be said of other source mediums (mainly because video games based on books or stageplays are rare, to say the least), but film certainly tends to get the most adaptations and the vast majority of these are simply a hope to cash in more on the film's license.  A rare few of these have been lucky enough to be handed to good directors (such as Michel Ancel's King Kong), or sometimes simply succeeding based on unoriginal but solid construction (such as the Lord of the Rings movie tie-in games), but usually they are uninspired and poorly-made simply because the developer is not trying to adapt, but simply to cash in.

However, that's not something to get caught up on.  There are genuine difficulties and problems when it comes to adapting a work into interactive media, and they are important to understand and solve.

Really, this mostly comes down to a single, large issue that envelops almost all the problems with interactive adaptation; developers, if you're making a game based on another story, tell the freaking story.  Far too many game adaptations take the easy road by bridging awkwardly-shoehorned-in action sequences with a couple lines of dialogue, then moving to the next, and that simply doesn't cut it.

Pictured: the worst offender I've ever seen.  Even more annoying
considering the source material is famous for its long monologues.

Developers, it's obvious from the fact that you had to add action scenes that you're familiar with games' more constant need for interactivity.  Which means you should also be familiar with the fact that not every scene in a movie is an action scene.  Which also means you should be able to figure out that those scenes with all the talking in the movies are kind of important to the story.  Cut them out, and you have nothing more than a string of loosely-connected action scenes.

Otherwise known as a Michael Bay film.

As I noted from my experience with inFamous, it is a lot more difficult to do character development in a video game than it is to do plot development.  Especially over this last generation of games, we've had Cortana explaining the plot to us as we play, audio diaries describing the ruin of Rapture, and Captain Price yelling at us on the radio about where to go next.  And though some of a character's personality can be communicated through this method, a story suffers from having no time fully dedicated to character development.  But in an action-oriented video game, that's not very easy.

The most obvious solution is to just make cutscenes.  And that's fine; not exactly progressive, but I think I've made it clear that there's nothing wrong with telling your story through cutscenes, especially since that would really be the easiest way to tell a story that wasn't interactive in the first place.

Besides, Hideo Kojima does that more than you ever could,
and his games are revered.

Outside of that though, there really is room for creativity.  Remember when I talked about major and minor narrative interaction?  Minor interaction is effective and relatively easy to insert in a linear story since emotional impact is heightened without changing the events of the source material.  For instance, simply taking that supporting character's death in the third act and making it happen while the player was under a time limit to reach him/her would intensely magnify the sense of responsibility, guilt, and sadness an invested player feels.

Specifically back to the question of character development and non-action scenes, however, we run into the most difficult problem to overcome; player choice.  Perhaps, one might think, dialogue systems like that of Mass Effect could give the player a way to interact with dialogue-heavy scenes and even help give the player a say in the story's events, but dialogue systems like that are boring and pointless if the player doesn't have some amount of control over the events of the story.

Minor changes are no big deal, but the ability to decide the character's morality, or the ability to make story-changing decisions like in Mass Effect, simply could not coexist with a story that is preset on a certain path.

But this does not mean all player interaction with the events of the story is impossible.  However, the best way to learn is through example, and this article is already pretty long, so next week there will be a discussion about working around this issue using the example of Shakespeare's Henry V.  Yeah, I'm going there.  Come back next week to see how it turns out, and in the meantime make sure to like Binary Narrative on Facebook!