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.