Tattered Page

I just finished reading the Escapist’s interview with Curt Schilling (thanks for the heads-up, Ryan). If the company and game philosophy plays out as well as he pitches it here, count me as an early fan. Here’s hoping they deliver.

One of the lines there serves as a lead-in to something I’d been mulling over:

The three most branded franchises in the history of the MMOG space were Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and, to me, Blizzard. Lord of the Rings had a century to brand their IP, Star Wars had three decades and Blizzard has had a decade of branding and franchise in the world of Warcraft. And they’ve done it so impeccably well, but at the end of the day, the thing that sticks out amongst those three is Blizzard stayed truer to their visions than anyone else, and fans got what they wanted.

I’m left wondering if maybe WoW had it a bit easier. They not only were the original source of the franchise, but it was built from the start to accommodate gaming.

Blizzard’s Warcraft fiction was created with gameplay in mind. As the fiction grew in richness, it did so for gameplay purposes. When new elements were introduced, they were introduced by the creators, and the careful extension into things like novels did little to change what was predominantly a malleable game-based fiction. The entire content from the start was designed to accommodate a game. Even though it was a Realtime Strategy and not MMO, it shouldn’t be surprising that the developers could remain truer to that vision- it never left the original medium.

Adapting to the Medium

Take any novelization of a movie, or vice versa. Take a comic book turned movie turned game turned into an episodic tv series. Chances are you’ll have to change more than a few details to play to the strengths and weaknesses of your medium. Some re-imagining is needed.

It may be that the original story worked better in a certain voice, or the new one’s strengths lie in presenting action, or dialogue, or a change in primary audience. Heck, etelling the story to a new generation might warrant changing the sex of a key character!

There’s always risk in that re-imagining. Look at any of the last decade’s movie adaptations of comic books. Some managed to balance adaptation with remaining true-to-form, others were box office failures by remaining TOO true to the comic or not true enough.

Games as a New Medium

We’ve had games based on other media for a long time, but in most cases, we haven’t been too critical of the translation. We’ve been perfectly happy to play Marvel vs Capcom without arguing that “Wolverine’s Healing factor isn’t taken into account- his claws never did that attack in the comic!” I never was concerned that the Atari 2600’s “Empire Strikes Back” didn’t accurately portray how to take down an AT-AT.

We didn’t expect much of games back then, and we didn’t take game mechanics to really mean much about the franchise’s universe.

That’s changed, at least for some games. We still don’t expect much from a podracer game beyond a re-skinned track racer, but games with a rich story are seen more and more as windows into the universe. Gameplay elements that don’t ring true to that universe become violations of canon… or a corruption of what we love.

Star Wars

Star Wars games number in the dozens. Some, like the aforementioned Atari game, didn’t do much more than reflect a movie theme as a game. Others, like Rebel Assault, Rogue Squadron, Knights of the Old Republic, Dark Forces, and Galaxies, expanded the universe.

Even with the good storytelling, or perhaps because of it, many of my friends hated Dark Forces. They couldn’t get past the ablative-damage “personal force field” that it brought down on the Star Wars faithful. It wasn’t just that the game felt like a really good re-skin of Doom, but a critical change had been made to their universe- and they couldn’t accept that.  There were no such force fields in the movies- even though the heroes could have really used it. I was more tolerant- I understood the challenge of making an FPS feel like the movie combat… and since my Star Wars universe included the comic books, it was more open to outlandish space opera additions like that.

My turn came with Star Wars Galaxies.

I hated the mechanics for Combat Medic and Doctor not because of the gameplay, but because they had no place in my view of the universe. It seemed more like a Star Wars skin atop a fantasy MMO rather than a game that would let me live in that universe. The midcombat area heals were just a cleric by another name, and the Combat Medic’s area damage over time was a wizard’s fireball.

Heck, even the “cottage industry” feel of SWG’s crafting (which I would have enjoyed in any other setting) seemed out of place in the heavily industrialized “used universe” I’d come to love. That complaint was eventually nullified by the realization that C3PO (despite other nearly-identical models appearing elsewhere) was crafted by a young slave boy in his bedroom on a desert planet. Maybe 3PO was a “kit” model or something…

(sigh)

Still, I could never really shake the feeling that Galaxies felt more like a skinned fantasy MMO than really capturing the Star Wars essence.

Do We Expect Too Much?

Good game mechanics are tough to do- replayable games designed to capture the attention of players for a long time are even tougher. Twisting a working game engine- even a little- to better reflect a franchise’s feel can make a tough task nearly impossible.

I’m not a game designer.

I do make mini-games within our course material, and as time has moved on, we’re producing games that are more central to the delivery of our learning material. I’ve had to alter a game mechanic to keep true to a learning objective. It’s tough to keep the “fun” elements of gameplay in sometimes- or replayability, but remove the learning objectives and you kill the project.

None of these products are a-list (or b, c, or d-list) material. What I have to do with learning objectives is orders of magnitude less difficult than thbringing a franchise to life in a new medium.

It’s easy to say that Galaxies should have sought gameplay more uniquely Star Wars.

It’s a lot tougher to deliver it.

Should We Expect More?

Are we at the stage where we should be expecting more from our game than a “classic” engine skinned for our favorite franchises? I like to think we are, but we’ve all seen those games that are so heavily ‘based on the movie’ to the point that gameplay really suffers.

I’ve been challenged with keeping really simple games fun and true to learning objectives, I can only imagine the challenges facing game developers.

But if we want to realize our ambitions- if we want games to be extensions of that greater universe… we’ve got to meet that challenge.

Fans will also have to accept that, to one degree or another, the story’s may need to adapt to fit the medium.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.