Translating Identity – March ’09 Round Table Entry

About the Author: This month’s topic turns the literary focus from the medium, to the author. If you submitted a post to either the January or February topics, feel free to write about the process you underwent in converting literary themes into gameplay. Did you struggle with anything in particular? Are you satisfied that your game design(s) communicated what you intended? Have subsequent comments or idea made you wish you could go back and start he process over? And how much does your design say about you and your own interpretation of the themes of the source material?

Our first cycle of Round Table posts is drawing to a close, and I’d like to thank Corvus of Man Bytes Blog for encouraging a continued discussion on the translation of literary themes into games. Developing ideas over a series of posts and learning from  other Round Table participants has been a great opportunity. I hope that as we begin a new cycle of topics, we can pull more people into the conversation and develop the Round Table community into a continuous, thriving discussion.

The literary source material I chose for my January entries focused on identity. The theme of identity has always excited me while reading, and it is a important theme to develop in video games. Because games are interactive, and require the player to take on a role in order to participate, they can explore issues of identity in a way that traditional literature cannot.

A writer usually tries to create identification between a character and the reader, but seldom does writing attempt to place the reader in the role of character like a game does. The use of the second person perspective in fiction is rare, and is typically considered annoying or just “experimental.”

Video games, however, require the player to take control of a character, and the perspectives used in games don’t correlate with fiction. Whether it’s an FPS, an adventure game, a platformer, or even a puzzle game, players have direct control over their avatar’s actions (or the puzzle pieces) and their identity is linked by interactivity to that avatar (or to the interaction itself). The link between avatar/interaction and player is the fascinating part of identity in video games.

I’ll examine how I tried to look at identity in each of my entries from previous months.

Dhalgren

In the novel, Delany uses a bewildering, yet intriguing, series of unexplained symbols to create identification between the main character and the reader. Secondly, the narrative relies on keeping the main character’s true identity just out of reach, and casting doubt on the character’s relation to the author and the audience. The third element that defines Dhalgren’s narrative is its structure, which seems circular at first, but becomes much more complicated. It is possible to view events and characters from more than one perspective depending on the reader’s understanding of the structure.

I wanted to convey all three of these facets in my game design, while avoiding a direct translation of the novel’s plot. The game features a literal “Necker Cube” mechanic that allows the player to switch from one perspective to another, changing the characters as well as the methods the player uses to interact with the gameworld. The player controls the characters in different forms and different configurations, and at some points, even takes over the role of a character directly. The game would illustrate a number of potential relationships between character and player.

I chose the old-school adventure genre on a whim, however, and I think Jorge Albor’s reinvention of Dhalgren as an MMO captures the theme of identity in a way I hadn’t considered.

A Scanner Darkly

My interpretation of Philip K. Dick’s novel was disappointing. Sticking to the novel’s plot may have enabled me to represent the narrative accurately in game form, but I don’t feel like my translation of the themes sheds any new light. Instead, it retreads ground covered by the novel and doesn’t completely explore the ideas about identity presented by Dick. It does, however, develop the theme of paranoia from the novel nicely, allowing the player to understand the character’s situation through gameplay mechanics in a way that the traditional narrative cannot.

“Help”

Though “Help” was primarily intended to explore the idea of an unreliable narrator in a video game, the game’s genre trends nicely with my other attempts to investigate identity. What interests me about this type of ARG is that it bypasses the middleman of narrative in video games, the character, and sets up the player to interact directly with the game world.

Though the game itself is still an elaborate illusion, I think the choices the game offers the player have more impact since the responsibility for those choices isn’t mediated through a fictional character. The game space is set up to include the player instead of offering them a Being John Malkovich-style vantage point into a character’s world.

Overall, I think my entries to 2009′s Round Table were successful, and I learned quite a bit by thinking through the transition from literature to video game. I enjoyed reading everyone else’s contributions quite a bit, and I can’t wait to see what people have up their sleeves for next month! To read other entries on March’s topic, manipulate the drop-down box below.

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table’s <a title=”Blogs of the Round Table” href=”http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/” mce_href=”http://corvus.zakelro.com/round-table/”>main hall</a> for links to all entries.