Video Game Adaptation Research Articles

‘This is the fate I choose’: Elsinore and thoughtful choice in Shakespeare games

Abstract Interactivity is one of, if not the most, crucial factor in video game adaptations of literature. The 2019 point-and-click adventure game Elsinore makes the most of its interactivity by building its narrative and gameplay around structural and thematically relevant aspects of the source text, Hamlet. Specifically, the combination of knowledge and motivation, central to the philosophy of prohairesis or thoughtful choice, is also an essential element of a fulfilling game experience. Additionally, it is meaningful that Elsinore leverages its focus on choice to make Ophelia their player-character. In short, this article argues that interactive genres, specifically video games, are a natural fit for the Early Modern fixation on thoughtful choice, especially representations of characters infamous for their lack of choice. Furthermore, these adaptations continue to represent an encouraging future for the commercial success of such works and future scholarship in adaptation theory.

A Narrative Study of Video Game Adaptations of Drama

A Narrative Study of Video Game Adaptations of Drama

Wendigo, vampires and Lovecraft: Intertextual monstrosity and cultural otherness in video games

Civilization has, since its inception, employed mythical or deified entities in place of the unknown. Folklore and mythology are the culmination of such beliefs, providing lessons or logic behind behavioural patterns within the society of the time, with the Epic of Gilgamesh (Anon. c.2100 BC) producing a narrative precedence that ‘[n]ature is the opposing pole of the human’. However, the roles of such tales, and hence their monsters, have adapted as humans came to understand more of the world around them. Tchaprazov suggests that Stoker’s Dracula (Stoker 1897) emphasizes ‘that the Slovaks stand both culturally and geographically opposite to the West’, producing social narratives relating to a cultural ‘Other’. Within this article I explore how monsters, based on regional folklore, within video game adaptations such as The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (CD Projekt Red 2008) and Metro 2033 Redux (4A Games 2014) are depicted as a nature-based ‘other’, especially as opposed to the player-character. Furthermore, I look at the cultural implications of contrasting modern depictions, such as the wendigo within Until Dawn (Supermassive Games 2015) and other transmorphic entities. Finally, I suggest that the intersection of culture and folklore within the ‘brickmaker’s village’ in The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is a hybridized adaptation which simultaneously adapts Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (Lovecraft 1931) and the Slavic folklore of the vodyanoy, whilst also challenging what Švelch calls a ‘conceptualization of monstrosity’.

‘NowyouareRobin Hood: Prince of Thieves™’: Intermedial Medievalism

AbstractThe 1991 Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves console video game constitutes a significantly different vision of the Middle Ages than the blockbuster film upon which it was based. Prince of Thieves is one among a prolific tradition of Robin Hood-themed digital games, which produce anew a legend that has thrived across intermedial networks of representation since the Middle Ages. The game represents a desire to transform popular medievalist narratives into play formats, but also the entwined and invested relationship between Hollywood and the game industry over the last half-century. This article will analyse how three core thematic elements of the game are inherently shifted in the adaptation process: the range of perspectives reduced by a first-person game, the modes of violence, and the role of familial relationships. The game is more than just a remediated version of the same story, as its adaptation process is a result of not only the medievalist tradition of Robin Hood and a connection to this film but also of the history of the action-adventure game genre and movie-adaptation games. This article will argue that the context of video game adaptation and genre conventions shape the way this text operates as a piece of franchise media, and that these constraints or choices in the game’s design in turn shape the production of vastly different historical meanings.

World Literature Representation via Video Games

This article aims to answer the following question: can video games be a dynamic medium for globalizing an adapted work of literature to be later played and received by gamers who might learn and increase their literary and cultural knowledge? World literature scholarship, gamer-response theory, game studies research, and my experience of playing Assassin’s Creed (2007) were used to explore how video games can globalize world literature to increase readership. The video game Assassin’s Creed (2007), adapted from Bartol’s Alamut (1938), was used to both discuss how world literature can be transmitted via video games and demonstrate how video game adaptations can be beneficial for learning and increasing global readership among gamers. The process of globalizing Alamut via Assassin’s Creed is shown by focusing on how the game employs different themes taken from the novel, its narrative, and some actual historical characters and places, such Acre, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Masyaf castle. Using literary novels and adapting them as video games can be adequate for incorporating those novels into world literature because the novel’s narrative is transmitted and exposed to gamers worldwide, thereby facilitating the transmission process of the novel’s content. Thus, it is recommended that the possibility of expanding world literature should be explored via adaptations of novels into video games.

Playing the Classics: Constructing a Digital Game Adaptation Database

Abstract Due in no small part to the proliferation of accessible game design software, digital crowd-funding infrastructure, and academic programs in game studies, the amount of video games based upon works of ‘classic’ literature and drama has grown exponentially in the last few decades. In order to help scholars and educators get a foothold in the world of video game adaptations, the ‘Remixing the Classics’ scholarly network initiated a Video Game Adaptation Database in the summer of 2022. This companion piece to the database will help orient the uninitiated by explaining the project’s origin, methodology, and organisational criteria, as well as provide an introduction to some of the formal, generic, intertextual, and accessibility concerns involved in studying game adaptations. Along the way, it aims to introduce readers to a variety of game adaptations both in and outside of the database, including Walden, a game (USC Game Innovation Lab 2017), Elsinore (Golden Glitch 2019), and Toho’s infamous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1988). VITA: John Sanders is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and the Humanities at Reed College, where he teaches classes on literature, new media, and classical Hollywood genre film. His current research involves theorising an approach to studying digital and analog game adaptations as intertextual systems of experience. His work has appeared in journals such as gamevironments and First-Person Scholar as well as in presentations at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, the Literature/Film Association conference, and PAX East. Outside of academia, John has worked as a curriculum designer, site director, and instructor for local summer enrichment programs. John currently splits his time between Portland and his partner’s home in Denville, New Jersey, which they share with their three dogs: Neo, Henry, and Mr. Darcy.

Global TV Horror

Global TV Horror

Megalodon

Megalodon

The Force Is Strong with This One (but Not That One): What Makes a Successful Star Wars Video Game Adaptation?

The Star Wars films have probably spawned more video game adaptations than any other franchise. From the 1982 release of The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600 to 2019’s Jedi: Fallen Order, around one hundred officially licensed Star Wars games have been published to date. Inevitably, the quality of these adaptations has varied, ranging from timeless classics such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, to such lamentable cash grabs as the Attack of the Clones movie tie-in. But what makes certain ludic adaptations of George Lucas’ space opera more successful than others? To answer this question, the critical response to some of the best-reviewed Star Wars games is analysed here, revealing a number of potential factors to consider, including the audio-visual quality of the games, the attendant story, and aspects of the gameplay. The tension between what constitutes a good game and what makes for a good Star Wars adaptation is also discussed. It is concluded that, while many well-received adaptations share certain characteristics—such as John Williams’ iconic score, a high degree of visual fidelity, and certain mythic story elements—the very best Star Wars games are those which advance the state of the art in video games, while simultaneously evoking something of Lucas’ cinematic saga.

‘The Time Is out of Joint’: Interactivity and Player Agency in Videogame Adaptations of Hamlet

Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the past, these have often been confined to either theatre-making games (which present the staging of Shakespeare plays using the mechanisms of strategy or simulation videogame genres) of education/trivia games that aim to familiarise players with Shakespeare’s texts. While references to Shakespeare abound in videogames, there have been relatively few attempts to directly adapt one of his plays into the form of an interactive videogame narrative, where the player controls one or more of the principal characters and can affect the outcome of the story. This paper will examine four videogame adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose differing approaches to player-agency and interactivity in relation to narrative of the classic play demonstrate the interactive potential of Shakespearean drama. While the player-driven overwriting or rewriting of the classic text may appear irreverent, it is, in each game, dependent on some conception the original play and the past tradition that it represents, which is translated into the contemporary medium of the videogame. This illustrates Jacques Derrida’s contention that the longevity and translatability of Shakespearean texts are due to their ‘spectral’ qualities, in that they allow the past to be re-examined through the lens of the present and vice versa.

Adaptive System for the Generation of Emerging Behaviors in Serious Emerging Games

A video game adaptation system (SAV) for serious emergent games (JSE), allows emergent behaviors in the game, such as the appearance of environments, events, narratives and characters, among others, in order to adapt to the context in the one that is developing. In previous articles the architecture of a JSE engine has been proposed. Furthermore, a first subsystem has been proposed that allows the emergence of a JSE according to the objectives of the environment, based on the ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO). In the present work, the second component of said architecture is specified, the SAV, which allows its dynamic adaptation (during the JSE). The SAV is made up of the sub-layers of strategies, sequences and properties, which manage each of these types of possible emergencies in a JSE, with the intention of dynamically adapting it to the context-domain where the game is being played. Furthermore, in this work the behavior of these sublayers is analyzed in a specific case study, showing very encouraging results of SAV in the educational context of an intelligent classroom (SaCI).

Meeting the Alien Face to Face—in Italy

120 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Premendra Mitra’s Fiction” by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, analyzes the famous 1955 Bandung conference’s rarely documented racism, as examined through the lens of Premendra Mitra’s seemingly prescient work, a short story cycle about Ghana-da, “the irascible Bengali teller of tall tales” (193-95). By using these short stories as a case study, Mukherjee explores the seeming lack of historicization of science, notting Suvin’s neglect of the intersectional and race-based facets of sf that depend on such historicization—partially rectified, as he notes, by the work done by various scholars in SFS (196-97). “The Afterlife of the Post-Apocalypse: Dmitry Glukhovsky in China” by Jinyi Chu discusses the cross-cultural exchange with Glukhovsky. He has become quite well-known in fandom, pop culture, and literary circles in China (216-17). Primarily focusing on historicizing and comparative translations, Chu’s contextualization of the Soviet-Chinese “friendship” is enthralling, offering background to just why Metro 2033, Glukhovsky’s 2005 novel, was not only such a big hit, but also how transformative fandom and archival fandom mixed to create their own interpretations and translations where the official translations lagged behind, or even censored content. This piece was my personal favorite, as I am a fandom studies scholar. Chu describes in a nuanced manner the many translations of Chinese to Russian, Russian to Chinese, English to Chinese, and Chinese to English works. Most intriguing to me was the process of fans attempting to translate Metro 2033 after the video game adaptation’s release, with one netizen (now an official government employee) publishing a translation on a fandom website that became so wellknown that she was tapped to do the official translation of the novel’s sequel, Metro 2034 (2009). She even consulted the gamers to discuss names that were not localized in the original novel or on which she was a bit hesitant (228-29). Combined with Chu’s translation of a fan-made parody of a famous Cold War ballad that had been translated from Russian into Mandarin, this chapter is a fine examination of translations, localization, and fandom discourse and engagement with sf. Each chapter offers a new analysis of global sf. The first section, “An Other Transatlantic,” takes a historical lens to Russian, Mexican, and Cuban sf to contextualize cross-cultural exchange between world cultures and how these literatures were able to work around the constraints of government censorship. The second section applies these ideas to Eastern Europe, especially regarding translation studies. The final section takes readers into Bengali myth and history to examine a subtle undercurrent of racism, and then to early-2000s China, where fandom practices keep Russian literature in translation alive and well online and in gaming. These articles continuously engage with the work of Suvin, Jameson, Žižek, and many other notable scholars, placing each into conversation relevant to contemporary literature. If one has any interest in global sf, Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East is a valuable book.—Katherine Randazzo, University of Iowa Meeting the Alien Face to Face—in Italy. Simone Brioni and Daniele Comberiati. Italian Science Fiction: The Other in Literature and Film. STUDIES 121 BOOKS IN REVIEW IN GLOBAL SCIENCE FICTION. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 289 pp. €62.03 hc; €43.42 ebk. When I co-wrote with Arielle Saiber the introduction to SFS’s special issue on sf in Italy (42.2), we decided to end the text—which complained about the scarce interest in sf in Italian academia, the rarity of studies devoted to Italian sf abroad, and the prejudice against sf in Italian culture in general—by optimistically declaring that the cat was out of the bag. This book by two relatively young Italian scholars based in the US and France (Simone Brioni teaches at Stony Brook University in New York and Daniele Comberiati at the University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 in France) seems to prove that Saiber and I were not over-optimistic. It also confirms that scholarly work on Italian sf seems to be at home only on the border between Italy and the rest of the world. This book is the work of two...

Meeting the Alien Face to Face—in Italy

120 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) Premendra Mitra’s Fiction” by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, analyzes the famous 1955 Bandung conference’s rarely documented racism, as examined through the lens of Premendra Mitra’s seemingly prescient work, a short story cycle about Ghana-da, “the irascible Bengali teller of tall tales” (193-95). By using these short stories as a case study, Mukherjee explores the seeming lack of historicization of science, notting Suvin’s neglect of the intersectional and race-based facets of sf that depend on such historicization—partially rectified, as he notes, by the work done by various scholars in SFS (196-97). “The Afterlife of the Post-Apocalypse: Dmitry Glukhovsky in China” by Jinyi Chu discusses the cross-cultural exchange with Glukhovsky. He has become quite well-known in fandom, pop culture, and literary circles in China (216-17). Primarily focusing on historicizing and comparative translations, Chu’s contextualization of the Soviet-Chinese “friendship” is enthralling, offering background to just why Metro 2033, Glukhovsky’s 2005 novel, was not only such a big hit, but also how transformative fandom and archival fandom mixed to create their own interpretations and translations where the official translations lagged behind, or even censored content. This piece was my personal favorite, as I am a fandom studies scholar. Chu describes in a nuanced manner the many translations of Chinese to Russian, Russian to Chinese, English to Chinese, and Chinese to English works. Most intriguing to me was the process of fans attempting to translate Metro 2033 after the video game adaptation’s release, with one netizen (now an official government employee) publishing a translation on a fandom website that became so wellknown that she was tapped to do the official translation of the novel’s sequel, Metro 2034 (2009). She even consulted the gamers to discuss names that were not localized in the original novel or on which she was a bit hesitant (228-29). Combined with Chu’s translation of a fan-made parody of a famous Cold War ballad that had been translated from Russian into Mandarin, this chapter is a fine examination of translations, localization, and fandom discourse and engagement with sf. Each chapter offers a new analysis of global sf. The first section, “An Other Transatlantic,” takes a historical lens to Russian, Mexican, and Cuban sf to contextualize cross-cultural exchange between world cultures and how these literatures were able to work around the constraints of government censorship. The second section applies these ideas to Eastern Europe, especially regarding translation studies. The final section takes readers into Bengali myth and history to examine a subtle undercurrent of racism, and then to early-2000s China, where fandom practices keep Russian literature in translation alive and well online and in gaming. These articles continuously engage with the work of Suvin, Jameson, Žižek, and many other notable scholars, placing each into conversation relevant to contemporary literature. If one has any interest in global sf, Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East is a valuable book.—Katherine Randazzo, University of Iowa Meeting the Alien Face to Face—in Italy. Simone Brioni and Daniele Comberiati. Italian Science Fiction: The Other in Literature and Film. STUDIES 121 BOOKS IN REVIEW IN GLOBAL SCIENCE FICTION. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 289 pp. €62.03 hc; €43.42 ebk. When I co-wrote with Arielle Saiber the introduction to SFS’s special issue on sf in Italy (42.2), we decided to end the text—which complained about the scarce interest in sf in Italian academia, the rarity of studies devoted to Italian sf abroad, and the prejudice against sf in Italian culture in general—by optimistically declaring that the cat was out of the bag. This book by two relatively young Italian scholars based in the US and France (Simone Brioni teaches at Stony Brook University in New York and Daniele Comberiati at the University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3 in France) seems to prove that Saiber and I were not over-optimistic. It also confirms that scholarly work on Italian sf seems to be at home only on the border between Italy and the rest of the world. This book is the work of two...

Enactive spectatorship, critical making, and dramaturgical analysis: building Something Wicked, the Macbeth video game

ABSTRACTThis article examines the design, construction, and dramaturgical concerns of Something Wicked, the author’s combat video game adaptation of a scene from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In addition to offering a new close reading of the source play, this article aims to offer insights to scholars and practitioners on the process of creating digital adaptations as practice-engaged scholarship.

“Game Over, Man. Game Over”: Looking at the Alien in Film and Videogames

In this article we discuss videogame adaptations of the Alien series of films, in particular Alien: Colonial Marines (2013) and Alien: Isolation (2014). In comparing critical responses and developer commentary across these texts, we read the very different affective, aesthetic and socio-political readings of the titular alien character in each case. The significant differences in what it means to ‘look’ at this figure can be analyzed in terms of wider storytelling techniques that stratify remediation between film and games. Differing accounts of how storytelling techniques create intensely ‘immersive’ experiences such as horror and identification—as well as how these experiences are valued—become legible across this set of critical contexts. The concept of the ‘look’ is developed as a comparative series that enables the analysis of the affective dynamics of film and game texts in terms of gender-normative ‘technicity’, moving from the ‘mother monster’ of the original film to the ‘short controlled burst’ of the colonial marines and finally to the ‘psychopathic serendipity’ of Alien: Isolation.

The Game of GAME OF THRONES. George R.R. Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and Its Video Game Adaptations

The Game of GAME OF THRONES. George R.R. Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and Its Video Game Adaptations

The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore by W. Joyce

Joyce, William. The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore. Shreveport, LA: Moonbot Books, 2011. iPad app. It seems strange that a story that expresses such love towards books as physical objects was first produced as an award-winning animated short film, and then adapted into an “interactive narrative experience” for the iPad. The protagonist, Morris Lessmore, is transported via hurricane to another land where he encounters a young woman held aloft by a flock of anthropomorphized flying books. One book leads him to a house full of more books, where he ends up living. He takes care of the books, and lends them to drab, black-and-white people who bloom into full colour (à la Wizard of Oz) as soon as they receive their reading material. Finally, as an old man, he is whisked away by the books, and the book that he wrote is used to draw a young girl into the house to take over his role as caretaker.It is usually the fate of new media to be unfavourably compared to more established media forms, but in this case, Morris Lessmore also suffers from being an adaptation rather than an original work. This iPad version seems uncomfortably caught between the fluidity and liveliness of the original animated film and the sequential narrative of a traditional picture book. Like a video game adaptation of a major motion picture in which the player re-enacts a simple replay of the movie plot, many of the interactive features of this book app seem contrived, acting as tacked-on gimmicks rather than being truly integrated with the story as a unique experience. However, that does not mean that the narrative experience is entirely without merit. The animation (taken directly from the film) looks amazing on the iPad’s vibrant screen, and finding the hidden “Easter eggs” on each page is quite entertaining for all ages. Moonbot Studios also gets extra credit for its inventive use of the iPad’s touch interface - readers will enjoy swiping, coloring, dragging, and even playing the piano on the screen, even if these activities are sometimes tangential to the narrative itself. Despite its shortcomings, Morris Lessmore stands out as exceptional in comparison to other picture book apps currently available for the iPad. As a final incentive, it is very reasonably priced; for only $4.99 at the iTunes Store, the app is much less than your average print picture book (although there’s not much chance of finding it at your local library).Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Dale StorieDale Storie is Public Services Librarian at the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. He has a BA in English, and has also worked in a public library as a children's programming coordinator, where he was involved with story times, puppet shows, and book talks.