Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren as a game.

(Putting the Game Before the Book What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first? In a time when bits of Dante’s Divine Comedy are being carved out and turned into a hack-n-slash game, I find myself longing for intelligently designed games–games with a strong literary component–not merely literary backdrops. So rather than challenge you to imagine the conversion of your favorite literature into games, I challenge you to supersede the source literature and imagine a game that might have tried to communicate the same themes, the same message, to its audience.)

Delany’s Dhalgren is a massive, complicated novel, and since I’ve read it several times in anticipation of the extended critical essay I’m writing for my MFA, I’m going to talk about it as much as possible. Dhalgren, despite its complexity, is the perfect novel to inspire an amazing game. Since Corvus has asked us to reimagine the literature we choose as a game that precedes the novel itself, I’m using the structure of the novel as a design guideline instead of the plot.

Dhalgren has a particularly interesting structure. The novel is a circular narrative that ends where it begins: a fragment. The opening sentence is the second half of the thought that begins on the last page. Delany describes the novel, through K. Leslie Steiner, as a Necker Cube. Since the beginning and the ending of the narrative can’t logically exist side by side, the reader is forced to look at each as a possible reality, which changes the meaning of the often nonlinear events that occur between the book’s covers.

The game I imagine is a graphical adventure game (because I love and miss them). The player can swap between two characters that have conflicting goals and exist in separate, but linked, realities. The characters are not protagonist and antagonist, but simply twisted reflections of each other. In order to solve the puzzles, the player must use both perspectives in unique ways to eliminate obstacles. Since the characters have conflicting goals, actions taken by one character will seem to negatively affect the other, but will actually spur conflict for the opposing character that enables them to complete the challenge. In addition, the NPC’s each character meets will be different, but connected in interesting ways.

Aside from the “twisted reflection” aspect of the characters, the setting, time period, and narrative distance from the player will be manipulated as well. In one situation, the characters will seem to be separated from each other by a long period of time, say a century, and the puzzles solutions will require the player to think about cause and effect based on time. In another situation, the characters will appear to be conversing with each other, though each character’s idea of their own appearance and their “alter-ego’s” will be different. The player must figure out a way to help each character through their dilemma without hurting either character. In a third situation, one of the characters will ostensibly be the player, and he or she must interact with the other character in order to proceed.

Dhalgren challenges the reader’s perception of the relationship between author, character, and audience, as well as the authority or validity of the text. The main character, Kid (or Kidd, or the Kid, depending on the situation), writes on blank pages and in the margins of a journal that contains previous writing that may or may not be his own. The primary text of the journal appears to be the novel itself. When snippets of the journal are revealed to the reader, they may be sections from earlier or later in the novel. The last chapter of Dhalgren is direct entries from the journal, including marginalia. Also, at one point, Kid looks into a mirror and sees Samuel R. Delany instead of himself. These metafictional elements would be interesting to explore in my imaginary game.

Delany pulls the reader into the morass by establishing an elaborate system or signs, or symbols, throughout the novel. These “clues” become an obsession to the reader, who wants to figure out the meaning of the novel. When Kid tries to find meaning in the signs, the reader does also. As Kid becomes less and less reliable, sometimes not even acknowledging the symbols that appear, the reader still blindly attempts to attach meaning to them. By the novel’s end, the symbols are both meaningful and meaningless, depending on the reader’s perception of the “Necker Cube.”

The identity of the characters in my game would be questionable, in order to allow mutability. The system of signs would be developed in order to cast doubt about each characters origin or purpose. Are they characters? Are they the developers/creators? Are they players? Their purposes will twist accordingly. The player may create a situation for one of the characters that puts them in the role of creator, but the tables will be turned later on. The game will depend on the tension created by the player’s doubt, and both the gameplay and the narrative will reinforce this unpredictibility.

The game will incorporate elements of an ARG into its design. Each player will provide an e-mail address, a phone number, a mailing address, etc. at the game’s start, during a required registration. Players will be contacted in a variety of ways by “developers,” characters, and other “players” in order to disguise the boundaries of the game.

The visual and auditory experience of the game will also be disruptive. It will have a strong visual style that exists in a concrete “world,” but sometimes the world will fade away, revealing code, the desktop, or a website. The character will sit down at a computer and read their e-mail, but it will actually be the player’s e-mail. Or they will surf the web and connect to actual websites, even the player’s blog or the developer’s site. Sometimes the player must quit the game in order to proceed, using the web to progress the narrative and bring information back to the characters.

Dhalgren’s conclusion is fragmentary, and Kid’s exit from Bellona, the city he enters at the novel’s beginning, is chaotic. My imaginary game ends in a similar way. One of the characters will be eliminated most of the way through the narrative, leaving a single character and the player. The game will deconstruct itself, slowly losing its visuals, then its sound, and then all traces of the game on the players computer. The game will delete itself from the hard drive. The conclusion will be conducted via text message or e-mail. The end will probably be inconclusive, after all, was it truly the end or just another point of entry into the game? Reinstall and try again.