Thoughts About Adaptations

Hey everyone,

Recently I have been thinking a lot about adaptations in the entertainment industry. An adaptation can mean a lot of different things, but I’m referring to the use of an existing property in a medium outside of its original medium. The most obvious adaptations in the video game industry are licensed based games, which are notorious for their poor quality.

I have been following the development of one particular adaptation, hoping to understand the reason for its existence. The adaptation I am referring to is Visceral Games and EA’s Dante’s Inferno, which is based on Dante Alighieri’s epic poem. I am not against the idea of adaptations, and an interactive tour through Dante’s vision of hell is a compelling idea. However, I am completely against the way it is being presented. The video game version of Dante’s Inferno is a highly stylized, super violent action game. It seems that every adaptation in the video game industry has become an action game in one way or another. While watching the developers talk about how bad ass it is to dismember people as Dante, I can’t help but think that Dante Alighieri must be turning over in his grave.

Visceral Games is a talented development team, therefore Dante’s Inferno may very well be a solid game. No matter how strong of an action game it becomes, it will still bear the burden of being tied to the original poem. Visceral Games could have taken ideas from the poem that they found compelling and crafted an original game based on them. Ideas are much easier to adapt into video games than full on narrative. BioShock, one of the most highly acclaimed games of this generation, is based on ideas originally present in the works of Ayn Rand. God of War, a game that Dante’s Inferno gently rips off, is based on many classic greek myths that are woven together in an original narrative. Even stricter adaptations, like the recent Batman: Arkham Asylum, feature original narratives, rather than preexisting ones. The quality of the games is almost always higher when the narrative is constructed from the ground up to be told in an interactive medium.

I want to tell stories that are told best through human interaction, which is why I am so concerned with the subject of adaptation. Converting a narrative from a passive medium to an interactive medium is extraordinarily difficult. Developers’ past attempts to do so rest in the boxes of unsold movie-based games in GameStops across the country.

As for what I’ve personally been up to, I have been testing a lot of student games lately. Testing is a necessary step in the game design process and it is always fun to see the ideas students are coming up with. I have never played games this early in their development before, and it is quite an interesting experience. Providing feedback is difficult, since I don’t want to come across as an asshole when I perceive potential problems with the game. This is USC though, so I’m sure that all of these games will turn out to be awesome!