The Poseidon Adventure - The Game

Corvus has gone and given us liberty to write a second blog post for the Round Table this month and my cup runneth over! Seeing as how the BoRT was one of the parents involved in this blog's conception (try getting that image out of your head) it's fitting that it should now be so encouraging and supportive of its progeny's interests. So before this metaphor gets too ridiculous let's refresh our memory of the topic and get down to business ('cause it's business time... do'h!)


The Prompt

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.


The Thought

There's definitely a spirituality-theme focus emerging with my blog posts. It's not intentional I swear! Well inasmuch as there may be a spirituo-religious element to post-emo-existentiell gaming it's intentional, but since I've yet to explain exactly what this blog's title means that probably makes little sense. I'll get to it. You'll just have to take my word for it and settle for another IRS IOU .

The spiritual crisis this week has concerned the difference between viewing salvation as innate/inherent versus viewing salvation as the result of good works. Put another way: does God help those who help themselves or does God help those who wait passively and pray?

I'm not a religious person, but the more generalized question of when to rely on others and when to take matters into your own hands is one for the faithful and faithless alike. In Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure this has very immediate consequences: do we wait for rescue or navigate the perilous hallways of a capsized ocean liner in an attempt to rescue ourselves?


The Novel

You may not know that The Poseidon Adventure was a novel before it was a film. Hell, you may not even know it was a film way back in 1972 if you've only heard about the two films from a couple years back (neither of which I've seen). I'll admit that I didn't know it was originally a novel until I read it just last year either, but the Gene Hackman film has been on my favorites list since I was a boy.

Though the film and novel differ substantially as far as the personalities and fates of individual characters are concerned the basic plot and themes are consistent. A luxury cruise ship is hit by a wave in the middle of the ocean and capsizes. It doesn't sink, however, and a goodly number of people who were in the ballroom (roughly the middle of the ship) survive. Reverend Scott, a hulky, adventurous Ivy-League footballer-turned-preacher tries to convince the survivors that they need to begin climbing towards the ships hull where rescue workers would have to cut through to find them. He's met with much hostility, both from people who have resigned themselves to their fate and those who believe it's the rescue worker's job to find them and that they'd likely get themselves killed if they did anything but stay where they are. After assembling a handful of "adventurers" Scott's party begins their ascent.

The majority of the book concerns the struggle of the survivors not only against the constantly shifting and hazardous confines of a ship that wasn't designed to be navigated while inverted, but also against the constant bickering and break-down of morale that is the hallmark of any group of people under duress. Several members of the party die during the treacherous ascent but eventually a handful reach the propeller shaft where a rescue party cuts through the hull and saves them.

One very important difference between the novel and the 1972 film is that the film makes the moral of the story obvious. Scott's group are the only survivors the rescue crew finds. Everyone who stayed behind and "waiting for a miracle" perished. God helps those that help themselves.

In the novel, however, Scott's group discovers that they aren't the only ones to survive. The story of the other survivors is never told - it is unclear what role, if any, they played in rescuing themselves. That ambiguity - whether or not more of the group might have survived if they'd simply stayed put - is the main point of The Poseidon Adventure game.


The Game

The Poseidon Adventure incorporates four general gaming/rule sets:

• Platforming At it's heart the game is a variation of 2D platform/puzzlers along the lines of Lemmings or The Lost Vikings. Your goal is always to head towards the propeller shaft - generally up though detours will have to be made. You have a cast of characters with different skills - some can climb, some can swim, some can lift heavy objects, even some who apparently can do nothing but complain. You can take control of any character at any time and use them, often in concert with others, to create paths that the less able bodied members of the party can traverse. Ideally, through teamwork and ingenuity, you can lead your party safely to rescue. The trick, of course, is that the environment is not only inhospitable, it's constantly changing. Water levels are constantly rising, fires flare up and burn out restricting access to some areas temporarily (or permanently), and pieces of the upturned ship break hold from the floor/ceiling to block or reveal passages.
  

• Dialogue Trees The members of the survival party are largely strangers to one another and have varying philosophies of how to approach the situation. Some are more gung-ho Reverend Scott type characters, others are much more reticent and apt to complain that the group should simply stop and await rescue. Their skill sets are not immediately obvious. By directing some characters to engage in conversation with others the player can learn what skills each character has (thereby "unlocking" them for use). These dialogue trees are also used to discover individual character motivations, useful in case they lose morale (indicated by a morale meter) and refuse to go on. Dialogue with surviving members of the ships crew can illuminate alternate pathways to the propeller shaft. While dialogue is an essential part of the game the player must always remember that time spent talking is also time spent waiting, time in which the ship could be changing - for better or for worse.

• Logic Puzzles One of the key components of both the dialogue and the platforming is the incorporation of SAT-style logic puzzles of the "Suzie won't share a boat with Richie but must sit next to Johnny" variety. Certain characters (like families) work better when they're near each other, others will prefer to take the lead or bring up the rear. Some character's skill sets only become available if they are near other characters - Martin's desire to protect Nonnie, for example, gives him the strength and esteem be a leader. Throughout the game the player will need to establish some sort of marching order, but of course that order will be compromised when the group must separate to conquer multi-part obstacles within a given level.

• Ludonarrative Holism I can't think of a pre-existing phrase for this last rule set and in truth it's not a discrete rule set at all but more the result of combining the three previous elements of the game. Taking a holistic ecology type of approach the game ultimately ends up resembling something like the Grow/Cube series in which each action has an affect on both previous and future actions forming a very complex web of interconnectedness. Your ultimate goal, of course, is to escape the ship. But the ship is constantly changing and the really evocative ludic point is that some of the ship's changes happen regardless of the character's actions, while others are the result of who you have in your party and what they do. It should be difficult if not impossible for the player to know the extent of this interconnectedness, thus creating uncertainty as to whether a take charge attitude is helping or harming. The extremes of both views will be expressed in dialogue between characters.

There is no central character in the game. "Winning" means getting a character - any character, even if it's just one - to the propeller shaft to be rescued. Not having a centralized main character puts emphasis on the relationships between characters. The major theme of the game is the value of activity versus passivity as it is expressed by people in a disaster situation.

Though the player controls the characters they don't have unlimited control. Some characters will refuse to do certain things, or will refuse to do them under certain circumstances. The morale meter mentioned above is quite important because if it gets too low a character will altogether refuse directions by the player . They will simply sit resigned to the fates and have to be left behind.

Make no mistake: characters will get left behind and characters will die. Sometimes these sacrifices must consciously be made. A switch has to be pulled but doing so is obviously suicide. Who will do it? Who has the skills to do it and moreover who is willing to do it (or can be talked into it)? Some characters may not have the skills necessary to take the path created. Do you leave them behind or try to find another way? Other times death is entirely accidental. An explosion happens, a boiler tears loose, the ship shifts and someone falls to their death. Was it foreseeable? Some characters may think so (there's that pesky morale problem again).

Information is power or, if you prefer, knowing is half the battle. This is certainly true in The Poseidon Adventure. Dialogue between characters is crucial both for learning their skills and learning how to keep them motivated. But because time plays such an important role in the game, the tension between taking action and waiting being paramount, all dialogue is spoken and unskippable. Time spent talking and time spent thinking is time for water levels to rise and for the ship's geography to change. The player is largely in charge of when and where dialogue happens. They select who talks to whom and the general tone of the conversation - think Mass Effect. The game play effects of conversation are immediately evident in the form of new skill availability and/or morale shifts. Plus the player learns information that will help keep morale strong in the future.

The dialogue is also idiosyncratic and personal, really adding to the depth of personality in each of the characters. When it comes time for the player to make choices about who lives and who dies the player should have to weigh game play needs (skill sets) against their personal likes and dislikes of individual characters, not to mention the characters' relationships with each other.

There's a prologue level in which the player has the opportunity to cause interactions among various characters and explore the ship prior to its inversion. Like the rest of the game time is limited in this prologue, but it does let the player gain access to some character's skill sets ahead of time. The trick, of course, is that the player has no way of knowing which characters are going to survive the inversion so some of the discovered skill sets may be moot, though the knowledge gained in the form of the ship's layout and the relationships between characters may be valuable.

The uncertainty associated with who will and who won't survive the initial disaster brings me to the last and perhaps most controversial aspect of the game: much of what happens is random procedurally generated. The layout of the ship, the initial survivors, the motivations and skills sets of individual characters as well as the quality and quantity of changes within the ship after the adventurers set out is different from game to game. I have in mind something akin to the nefarious AI Director in Left 4 Dead. This has the advantage of giving players an meta-narrative God-like entity to praise or blame for actions that happen in the game.

Once reaching the game's final chamber - the propeller shaft - the player is confronted with a sizable wait during which there is some dialogue among the remaining survivors (or interior monologue if only one remains) over whether they will be rescued or have possibly pushed themselves to their limits and wasted the lives of others for no reason. The player could even direct the characters back out of the shaft in search of an alternate means of escape - though to alleviate frustration the path is blocked. The point is to give the player and the characters some time to reflect and possibly even regret the choices and sacrifices that have been made. Eventually the rescue crew cuts through the hull and the characters are led away to safety and closing credits with one caveat: the player can see other rescue ships loaded with passengers from the Poseidon. They are distant and blurry so it is impossible to tell, but it is suggested that some of those other survivors might be people the player has left behind, might be just those characters who preferred to wait for rescue or lost morale and resigned themselves to their fate.

It's never made explicitly clear one way or the other, but the player should be left with the ambiguity of wondering whether their hard work and sacrifices were actually necessary.

Big Daddies Make Me Do Bad Things

Yea, I know that sounds bad. But it's really an intro to my new post up on PS3Fanboy Joystiq PlayStation. Having finally gotten on the Bioshock bandwagon I talk about the disjunct between how I thought the game would make me feel vis-a-vis the Little Sister condundrum and how I've actually responded thus far (hint: sea slugs taste good!).

It's also my last column on the site, which is particularly bittersweet given the outpouring of positive response to last week's post (disregard the misprinted byline). While I'm sad to bid the folks over there goodbye it's been a great deal of fun and will always be the cattle prod that spurred me to finally start writing my wacky philosophical thoughts about games (deadline + paycheck = productivity!). With any luck I can continue with that enthusiasm here.

For any readers coming here from Joystiq: welcome! Feel free to comment and please, please check out the blogroll ("The Good Stuff"). I am by no means the only crazy person trying to take gaming dialogue to the next level.

Check back later today for my second BoRT post, this time on The Poseidon Adventure!

Team Silent and the Narrative Me

New column up on PSFanboy. This time the train rolls through Silent Hill (with a slight detour through Liberty City and the Capitol Wasteland) to determine if games with multiple endings can reward consistency in decision making and maybe even tell us a little bit about ourselves along the way. Unfortunately, for the sake of my publisher I decided to replace "handgun felatio" with "HK45 tonsillectomy". Feel free to make the switch back in your head. It's far more poetic that way.

A Call For Ludopedagogical Suggestions

Next week, as a way of ending my Existentialism in Pop Culture course with a bang, I'm going to have my students play a few games with existential themes. As I see it, the major advantage to using games is that they allow students choice which - as will become evident when I finally get around to expounding upon the meaning of "post-emo-existentiell gaming", is probably the most central tenant of existential thought. For this to work each student has to be able to play the game for herself the first time through. This rules out any sort of class play through and means it will have to be done in a campus computer lab. Thus I am constrained to games that can be played within a browser or that require minimal hardware requirements (read: essentially none) so they can be installed on aging computers (think Windows 98).

Fortunately the games that I find best express the central themes we're covering are small indie affairs anyhow. I'd like to do 5 or 6 short games. Thus far I plan to do Passage, Execution, possibly The Marriage, and finishing it all with You Have to Burn the Rope. I'll write about my reasons for choosing these games and the themes they explore after I determine their success/failure within the course as a whole (I've only ever done Passage in a course before and even then it wasn't an ideal -individual - experience). I implore you, Inconstant Reader, to give me any suggestions you can for other games (or game-like experiences) to do. Keep in my the technological constraints and preferably they should be games that can be played in less than 10 minutes.

Social Networking in Game Spaces

New column up over on PSFanboy. This week I'm discussing the socialization mechanics within Playstation Home in an attempt to get people thinking about what they really want rather than just griping about how boring it is. Not my best work over there, but I like the little Prometheus graffito in the header graphic ;)

Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov?

Alright, here it is as promised. My raison d'blog. The Round Table prompt mentioned yesterday that provided the cattle prod for the musings you are presently so captivated by.


The Prompt

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.


The Thought

As anyone who's had more than a 10 minute conversation with me probably knows I'm in total agreement with Gordon Marino when he described The Brothers Karamazov as "nothing short of the Platonic form of the novel." It simply doesn't get any better, in my humble opinion, and despite its somewhat daunting size I try to find time at least once a year to read it. Of course this is the literary work that pops into my head the instant I read this month's Round Table question. Can it be a game? What are its key themes? There are so many it's difficult to distill them into some one or two, much less something playable, but let's see what I can do.


The Novel

Some background for the uninitiated. The Brothers Karamazov (not to be confused/abbreviated with The Brothers K, an entirely separate novel) is Dostoyevsky's last work, published serially and finished in 1880, less than a year before he died. Its plot centers on the titular brothers and their relationship, coming together after many years apart to settle affairs with their father. Fyodor Karamazov, the patriarch, is a profligate old man (I first learned the word profligate from the description of Fyodor, and I cannot think of the word without envisioning him), a drunkard and buffoon who is squandering his money away, money which at least one of the brothers, Dmitri, believes is rightfully his.

The three brothers are thinly (by which I mean not at all) veiled representations of three parts of the human soul: the sensual, the spiritual, and the intellectual. Dmitri, the eldest, spends his days drinking and carousing with women, and is locked in competition with his father not only over money, but also for the affections of a certain woman. Ivan is an academic who has returned home to help smooth out the differences between his father and brother. Alyosha, the youngest, is currently residing at the local monastery in preparation to become a monk.

It doesn't take long before Fyodor is found murdered and Dmitri is accused and put on trial. The bulk of the novel revolves around the interactions of the brothers as they attempt to find the truth, ruminating at length on philosophy, religion, and the meaning of life in the process. Ivan begins losing his grip on reality, Alyosha questions whether his faith in Dmitri is justified, and Dmitri begins to see that his way of life leads to degradation and murder regardless of whether he actually did what he is accused of or not.


The Game

How to distill this book into its basic elements in a way that would provide the foundation for a game? If I have to categorize the novel into a basic literary genre I can't help but (begrudgingly) label it a murder mystery. Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? or Murder in a Russian Province. The thing about mystery as a genre is that it has a definite answer which is revealed at the end of the work, and which hopefully you are able to piece together based on clues given throughout. With a game, however, we're not so constrained. There may be several different "endings" dependent upon player choices and interactions.

Of course when thinking about a murder mystery represented in multiple mediums, one of which is interactive, one thing naturally springs to mind - Clue. Here we have a board-game with a randomized ending and game play that revolves around sharp questioning and deductive reasoning. The film gives a nod to the ambiguous nature of the game by providing multiple endings, giving no one canonical answer to the mystery, but several. Similarly the novelization of Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? has more than one possible ending, depending on how you wish to read the text (no spoilers here, but there are two "canonical" interpretations).

With Clue, though, the "ending" is determined before game play begins. Players try to discover the truth but they do not in any way influence the truth (even if they do try to influence other players' perceptions of the truth). With a video game the opportunity exists for the player to influence the actual truth even if they they as player (narrator) are not directly involved in the acts leading up to the murder (though they could be, but I'd rather they aren't).

Yes, this involves reverse causation. Yes, I'm comfortable with that.

I'm imagining this as a game of exploration and interaction that relies heavily on the player moving along value-laden axes similar to the morality scale of games like Fallout 3. However, instead of focusing on morality these axes chart one's focus in life. Players progress along axes corresponding to Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha, possibly even Smerdyakov (the fourth, illegitimate brother). In fact, if we take the novelization as necessarily distilling down the elements of the game into more simplistic parts, then the full fledged game could have further axes representing "minor" characters such as Katerina Ivanovna or Lise (the chaotic "Joker" of the bunch).

The important point is that each of these axes would correspond with a trait (sensualism, intellectualism, Shatnerism spiritualism, etc.) that color your perception of the world as the player/investigator. The information you receive from other characters in the game - their interactions with you - would reflect your particular outlook. Of course where you stand along these axes is itself dependent upon the conversations you engage in and the places you explore. Thus if you play the game from a more spiritually oriented perspective you may not get all of the information about Dmitri's debauchery from characters wishing to spare your feelings. If you are more intellectually oriented you may not be given as many options that require leaps of faith. These interactions also afford an opportunity for some exploration of questions about philosophy, religion, life, the universe, and everything else that happens on page 42 (Garnett translation).

As mentioned above there need not and in fact should not be an exact, canonical answer to who killed Fyodor. Instead the intent is for the experience and the answer/ending to be tailored to each player based on how they play the game. Playing the game as a sensualist culminates in a conclusion in which it only makes sense (ha!) for Dmitri to have killed his father for money or jealous rivalry. Playing as a spiritualist could result in Fydor's "murder" actually being a suicide - a warning about the inevitable fate of those who lack faith. This malleability of endings mirrors the existential theme (more characteristic of French rather than Russian existentialism, clove cigarettes not included) that one's perception determines reality, that the truth we see is a choice.

Naturally questions may arise as to what constitutes the "best" ending, but those conversations themselves express the major theme of the game - the human determination of meaning and value. The feeling that I get from reading the book is that the most successful life is one that reaches an equilibrium among the brothers (with perhaps a pronounced slant away from the sensualist). This would also be characteristic of a more "objective" view that defines modern thinking and probably most players. Rather than progress too far along any one axis we should try to keep them all in balance, thereby achieving the "true" ending.

A brief aside. Dostoevsky, himself a deeply spiritual man, intended for The Brothers Karamazov to be the start of a series with Alyosha as the main character. For him the spiritual life was the best one and would therefore lead to the most rewarding ending. But given what plays out in the novel the take home message seems to be more about the importance of balance, of not devoting oneself purely to any one part of the (steadfastly Russian!) soul. Hey, this is a game, so we have to leave room for a sequel...

Hurrah for Karamazov!

Post-Script: Corvus' inaugural Blogs of the Round Table podcast (or Bortcast) includes a discussion of this very post! Take a listen here.

Post-Post-Script: Krystian over at Game Design Scrapbook has written a follow up post that focuses more on the design choices one would have to tackle with this project

Why?

Who am I and what makes me think I have anything to say worth blogging?

I'm a philosopher, a teacher, and a gamer - in no particular order (but certainly not chronological).

Psychoanalytic question: What are you avoiding by focusing your attention on writing this blog?

Vague existential answer: My death, but of course that's not unique to me.

Overly practical answer: My dissertation.

Yes, I'm a graduate student. I'm 30.5 years old, and I should be finishing my dissertation. I've been a gamer my whole life, became a philosopher in high school, and a teacher/professional philosopher after college. My formal training is in ethics but by the time I was suppose to formulate dissertation ideas I had developed a love for all things technological and internet-y. So I came up with a thesis about virtue theory and the internet, one which grows more outdated every moment that I spend not writing it. But one of the necessary consequences of writing a dissertation is that you will lose all interest in the subject matter. Quickly.

I can't deny my drive to play games. For the longest time I couldn't validate it within the academic world. I proposed a course exploring ethics (excuse me, "normative theory" :cough:) through World of Warcraft, but it got vetoed ("Ethics and war?" "Excuse me ma'am, it's WarCRAFT, World of Warcraft" "Pah! You're no Allen Buchanan, kid!"). I assumed I was doomed, like most people, to live two separate lives, personal and professional and never the twain shall meet.

But a spot of light. In March of 2008 PS3Fanboy.com put out a call for columnists. Columnists about anything related to games. Hrm, I can relate philosophy to games. In fact I have more than a few friends that like to discuss games intellectually. Let me throw my hat in and see what happens. Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a weekly column that will be read by the gaming masses! Go out there and drop some knowledge on 'em!

Preparing to write these columns changed my life. Not in the near-death experience kind of way, more like in the changing the light bulb kind of way. You still use the same wattage because it's comfortable and familiar, but the spark goes out and you have to fumble around with minimal lighting for a while before you get off your lazy ass and down to the hardware/drug/grocery store and get a new bulb on the cheap. That kind of change.

I started look around the web to find things similar to what I wanted to do, something to provide guidance. Boy did I discover a world I had been missing. It started (and always, always ends for me) with Michael Abbott and the Brainy Gamer blog. Here's an academic doing it right. Doing it beautifully. And I'll be damned if there aren't dozens of others doing equally wondrous things (I'm sure once I get the whole "blogroll" thing figured out you'll have the origins of my RSS feed vomited on the side of the page). I lurked. I posted. Mostly I desired to be a part of it. I want play alongside the Vintage Game Club! I want to participate in the Round Table!

But I'm writing for PS3Fanboy. And I'm supposed to be writing my dissertation. And most of all (and this is the real clincher) - I HATE writing! Yea, I know, I chose the wrong profession. Been knowing that for damn near a decade.

Still, deadlines make me productive (even if I'm a savant when it comes to finding ways around them) and I like having written even if I don't like writing (in much the same way I think it would be cool to have been shot, though not so much the actual getting shot part). I've still got the PS3Fanboy gig, though that whole "weekly" thing seems to have gone out the window (sorry, Andrew). I've learned a lot from it, a lot about the culture of the internet which I'd written abstractly on but not experienced first hand, a lot about how to relate to non-academics. And a hell of a lot about the world of PlayStation.

I also learned a lot about limitation and what I can't do at PS3Fanboy. Because I'm now so entrenched in the world of "intelligent gaming" blogs I can't help but want to take things to a high level, but I have to keep them accessible. That's good training for teachers. But there are still limits to what I can do in a 1000 word column at PS3Fanboy. Not to mention that it has to be at least somewhat relevant to the PlayStation brand.

Should I start a blog? Hell no! What part of "I HATE writing" was unclear? I can't even manage to garrote myself into doing my weekly fanboy posts (not to mention the D-word). If I'm going to write more stuff to put in a gaming blog, shouldn't I just save it up for that?

Probably.

What about all the stuff you'd love to say about Jason Rohrer's magnificent games?

Tough.

Damn you (bless you!) Corvus Elrod!! (Am I the only one who thinks he simply must look like Hugo Weaving whenever I see his name?) This month's Round Table really tugged at my aorta. But how can I participate in the Round Table and talk about the video game de-adaptation of my very favorite book (The Brothers Karamazov) if I don't have a blog?

You can't. So start a blog, dummy.

So I did. Maybe I can finally get into this whole writing thing. Maybe enough to even finish the dissertation. Hell I've got the post for the Round Table half written already. Not to mention this post and the outline of a second one explaining my "statement of purpose".

Or maybe you've mistakenly ran across this in a cobweb strewn corner of the web in 2018 and somehow read all the way to the bottom only to realize that this blog never had more than this one post but damn was that author prescient as to his own shortcomings.

Know thyself. Indeed.