Four video game adaptations of classic works of literature, from The Hobbit to Hamlet
With its vision of towering tripods stalking across a blasted landscape, the latest War of the Worlds video game being developed by Flipswitch Studios is hotly anticipated by players. But it’s notable that discussion boards have focused more on the similarities with Spielberg’s 2005 movie and less on how the game might echo the source material – H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel.
Novels have provided source material for games for years. Here are four examples of games that wear their literary inspirations on their sleeves.
1. The Hobbit (1983)
Peter Jackson’s movies may have been praised for imagining the previously unfilmable, but Tolkien also inspired early game developers to push the limits of hardware to create the previously unplayable.
From today’s vantage point, The Hobbit looks like a crude text-based adventure, but its methods were far ahead of its time.
Because Tolkien’s story could not be converted wholesale into 16 kilobytes of memory the developers, Veronika Megler and Phil Mitchell, had to devise a bespoke game engine before the concept was widespread.
A game engine provides a framework of basic principles and elements, such as rules of language, which can then be modified according to the specific needs of a game. In this case, non-playable characters roam the world and respond to players independently based on some core linguistic principles, producing a form of what we’d today call “emergent narrative”.
While there have been other game adaptations of Tolkien since, The Hobbit is special because it suggests how the attempt to model literature can in turn inspire new forms of computer storytelling and programming expression.
2. Bioshock (2007)
Bioshock takes players physically into the world of Rapture – a sub-sea utopia built by the business magnate Andrew Ryan. Philosophically, however, it takes players into the universe of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged (1957), a source of inspiration for many libertarian entrepreneurs.
Although many games invite players to model their ethical values, Bioshock is especially prominent. Despite being a first-person shooter game, it shows that behind the veneer of gun-play it’s still possible to elicit critical reflection. Even the most frenzied player may pause when faced with the choice of sacrificing children in order to receive the resource ADAM (a form of capital) that makes it easier to beat the game.
The game designer and blogger Clint Hocking saw this as giving rise to “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the message of the story is at odds with how we are required to play it in order to win. But it’s also possible to see this as a ludic equivalent to literature’s “negative capability”, the requirement to live uncomfortably with moral and aesthetic conflicts that cannot be simply resolved.
3. Elsinore (2019)
The #GamerGate controversy around 2014 was an online hate campaign contesting diversity and representation in games. In its wake, Golden Glitch Studios set up a crowdfunder to turn that archetype of troubled masculinity, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, into a new game that would present the events of the play from a female perspective – that of Ophelia.
Elsinore shows how adaptations can maintain their fidelity to a literary ancestor through their mechanisms, as much as by superficially copying dialogue, character or locations.
In particular, although Elsinore uses some of the conventions of the point-and-click adventure game, Ophelia’s actions are very limited. For the most part, all she (or the player) can do is talk to people and overhear other characters’ conversations, representing her marginal status in Shakespeare’s play where she is more often spoken about or over than speaking herself.
But while successful at the level of characterisation, Elsinore also raises a more general question about the gap between literary and game worlds. To complete a game (and this one has several endings), we need to be successful as players. So if a game’s end condition is to see our character commit suicide, even though we are sad at their loss we may be simultaneously happy that we’ve achieved a win state. Can a game, therefore, ever be tragic in the manner of theatre?
4. The Witcher 3 (2015)
One of the most acclaimed games of recent years, The Witcher 3 draws on the fantasy universe established by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski.
It is successful in part because it balances an open world with a narrative structure. Generally, the more open a game world is (so that players are free to do things in any sequence), the harder it is to build a cohesive plot and characterisation. This inverts the logic of the written novel, which usually offers a reader limited freedom to navigate the text, but a maximal sense of coherence.
Developer CD Projekt Red managed to square these two elements with miniature side-quests that work as self-contained stories, building out the world and protagonist Geralt’s character. But the game still seems to progress us logically in an overarching narrative no matter how or when we explore it.
This last example reinforces how game scholars can use games based on literary ancestors to theorise some of the building blocks of both media. What gives a narrative its structure? Does fiction produce similar effects whether we read and play? In adapting works of literature, these games not only borrow stories, but the currency of prestige associated with their canonical ancestors.
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Alistair Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.