Battlefield 1943 versus Crash Commando: Two Perspectives on Spatiality

This entry is my contribution to the Blogs of the Round Table for this month.

I've been playing Battlefield 1943 and Crash Commando on the PSN quite a bit lately and it recently dawned on me that they are nearly the exact same game played out in different perspectives. They share an underlying pick-a-weapon-and-kill-or-be-killed mechanic but because one is a 3D first person shooter and the other a 2D side-scroller they are drastically different experiences for the player. I'm going to look at five ways in which they differ as a direct result of their spatial representation then decide if this makes one mode of representation stronger than the other. But first a quick run-down of the games.

Battlefield 1943

If you've played one online FPSer you've pretty much played them all but the general gist is as follows. You pick one of three soldier types (which determine the weapons available to you) and you and your team battle it out on small islands trying to capture and control specific bases on the map. Along the way you try to kill as many opposing players as possible. You see through the eyes of your soldier and have full control over direction you look. This is important because it is vital that you pay attention to the space around you. Attacks can come from behind, to the sides, and even above. Play continues until one side depletes the other's "energy bar" by getting the requisite number of kills, with more energy deducted per kill based on how many bases your team controls.

Crash Commando

The fundamentals here are the same as in Battlefield - pick a soldier (in this case a set of weapons) and destroy the opposition. Unlike Battlefield there are several game modes such as a free-for-all deathmatches and objectives-based maps where one team has to blow up certain objects while the other team defends. Crash Commando, however, is not an FPSer. You can see your character at or near the center of the screen at all times. Enemies are clearly visible when you are in range of their weapons and for the most part all the action occurs on screen. It's your classic 2D side-scroller so you never have to worry much about anything happening off screen.

Here are the key differences I see between the games.

Point #1: Crash Commando is less frustrating.

It's par for the course with either of these games that you are apt to get killed frequently when you first start playing multiplayer. However, repeatedly dying in Crash Commando doesn't make me want to throw the controller at the screen as much as it does in Battlefield simply because in almost all cases you can see who killed you. Heck, as a general rule you can see them before they kill you so you know you at least had a chance of taking them out first. Dying in Crash Commando is a matter of not being fast enough or accurate enough rather than being ambushed by an unseen enemy. In Battlefield you are often killed without ever seeing your killer. Without the HUD that indicates who killed you and how you'd never know who or what took you down! This sort of dead-but-don't-know-why is a staple of the FPS genre and generally what drives new players away from them, but it's largely unavoidable because your perspective leaves you blind to a large portion of what's going on around you at any given time. In Crash Commando your local area awareness is nearly complete regardless of how skilled you are at the game. You don't have to worry about controlling a camera to focus on threats so you end up feeling responsible for your own deaths because you could see them coming.

Point #2: Battlefield 1943 is more visceral.

Crash Commando is very bloody. Any death, even a clean sniper shot, causes a player to erupt into red bits. Battlefield lacks any blood - deceased soldiers disappear leaving only their packs behind. Yet Battlefield leaves me feeling more uneasy, more terrified, and more shaken after I've taken a hit or been fragged. The limited field of view makes you agoraphobic, always frightened of what may be lurking behind or to the side, or who may be straight ahead but too far away to see. Space in Crash Commando is far less open and far more visible and that makes you feel more secure at any given time, especially when no enemies are around. In Battlefield you feel as though you are at the center. Taking a sudden hit raises your heart rate as you scramble to find an all but invisible threat before it's too late. The difference in effect is similar to the difference between horror films that rely on shock value and those that are more subtle, showing less and letting the viewer's imagination create the scares.

Point #3: Battlefield 1943 encourages more team-based cooperation.

For the most part Crash Commando's "teamwork" consists of doubling up on firepower. Because any and all threats are visible on screen at all times there is little need to flush an enemy out into the sights of an awaiting teammate. Battlefield encourages this type of team work because it allows you and a partner to watch each other's back, letting you focus on threats in one direction without worrying about what may behind you. Without any real ability to ambush or need to protect one other other than when threats come from opposing sides Crash Commando's teamwork ends up feeling like little more than a Contra clone.

Point #4: Battlefield 1943 has a greater variety of distinctive weapons.

Strictly speaking Crash Commando has more basic weapons than Battlefield (11 compared to 9), but for the most part its primary weapons are identical. They may have different levels of damage, speed, or reload times, but with the exception of grenades and grenade launchers each weapon has the same range - the length of the screen. The 2D playing field limits the weapons' distinctiveness because you don't have weapons that are better or worse at different ranges. In Battlefield you have long-, short-, and mid-range weapons, each of which can be used at different ranges but with greatly diminished returns. Each weapon, then, has a unique feel to it and will appeal to different types of players leading to more diverse player types. In Crash Commando most players tend to play the same because once you've learned how to use one weapon you've basically learned them all.

Point #5: Crash Commando lacks a Roshambo dynamic.

One element common to many multiplayer games is the psychological guessing game offered up by some sort of rock-paper-scissors dynamic. In Battlefield this is based on the type of unit a player chooses and the range at which they fight. A sniper will take out an infantryman any day of the week, but a fast moving rifleman at mid range will make him wish he'd never picked up a scope. Crash Commando lacks this because its fast pace, relatively limited active playfield, and similarity of weapons means any player's weapon choice has a nearly equal chance of defeating any other player's weapon choice at any time. This puts the emphasis much more on your physical reflexes than the ability to analyze and predict what sort of weapons and strategy your opponent will use.

Overall it looks like 3D is the clear winner in this contest. While the way in which it limits a player's view may be a bit frustrating and therefore discourage many new players from getting into the genre there's a reason that side-scrolling fragfests haven't really caught on. Both the level of immersion and the depth of strategy are greater in Battlefield than in Crash Commando. It's unclear whether 2D side-scrollers are inherently incapable of delivering the dynamics of an FPSer at as high a level as an FPSer itself. Any thoughts on how to overcome some of these limitations?

The Politics of Appeasement

Time for another fascinating BoRT topic!

Turning Over a New Leaf: February's BoRT invites you take a game design suggested by another blogger in last month's Round Table and build upon it. You should ignore the literary source of the original design, but attempt to communicate the same themes and/or convey the same mood as the original game. This means you can alter the game genre, change the setting, and add new layers to the game mechanics. This is not an opportunity to critique a previous design, but to honor it by striving to reach the same goals, while adding your own personal touch.


The Source

Last month's post that I'm choosing to work with is Chris at ihobo's entry on Pride and Prejudice. You really should take a look at it before continuing - after all, that's the point of this month's topic!

What I really like about the design of the game is the simplicity of the mechanic: A engages politely, B engages rudely. This allows for a lot of fun in anticipation. You know you want to engage rudely, say, but you're excited to see exactly what form that rude interaction will take. Will it be a barb-tongued statement? I disrespectful hand-gesture? I've always enjoyed this element of thematic dialogue trees where the general tone of your options is presented but the specifics aren't revealed until after you make your choice (a la Indigo Prophecy or Mass Effect).

So much for the mechanics, what about the theme of the game? While Chris isn't specific as to the theme it seems that the game is more of a sandbox for exploring various interactions with people in high Victorian society. At the end of the day the point is in the interactions themselves and playing it might give you the feeling, qua the novel, that there really is no ultimate point, that the rules of etiquette and games of intrigue played by the characters are just shallow ends in themselves. It's enjoyable, yes, but serves no purpose beyond its own enjoyment (despite what purpose the characters may think it serves).

What kind of game could I design with the same mechanics and theme? Call me a bitter cynic - I am, depending on which philosopher I last read - but one thing enters my mind when I think about people engaging in varying polite/rude interactions and taking themselves all too seriously when at the end of the day none of it really matters. Politics.


The Thought

Ian Bogost's phrase "procedural rhetoric" is foremost in my mind with this project. You can read a great hashing out of the concept here but in short the idea is that the way a game's mechanics are designed and how we ultimately master them to drive the game forward tells a story in itself, often a very loaded story. Much of the recent dialogue about Far Cry 2, for example, concerns the idea that its mechanics portray imply that seemingly meaningless violence is the only solution to even fairly mundane problems. As a developer one has to be very aware the story the mechanics of the game tells, not leaving such things up to mere chance. Not that you can't portray this underlying mechanics-driven story any way you want, you just need own it and be aware of shaping it (hence the rhetoric).

With that in mind I figure that a game about politics developed by a political cynic like myself would have to very much express through its game play the utter futility and meaninglessness of it all. (Perhaps that's a gross exaggeration but hey it'll be a Wii game so it has to be grossly exaggerated and not taken seriously anyhow! Oh, did I mention I'm a Nintendo cynic as well?) The game would follow you as a newly elected Congressman embarking upon your brief two-year term with the only directly expressed goal being re-election. In fact this should be so explicitly stated so early in the game that it makes the player question the entire logic: "You've just been elected to US Congress, now what are you going to do?" "Get re-elected!"

That's the general theme and the mechanics enhance this by pretty much giving you little control other choosing which members of congress to talk to and whether you want to act politely or rudely towards them, or in the parlance of the game, appease or displease them. You're trying to get re-elected, but in the context of the game the interests of your constituents are irrelevant to you. Building relationships and coalitions with with senior Congressmen is what will get you re-elected, not trying to gauge what your constituents want. Of course building bridges with some Representatives invariably burns bridges with others. . .


The Game

The Politics of Appeasement begins with a brief cut scene which shows your Mii avatar (in a nice suit of course) barely winning the race for Representative of your district. The incumbent which you have defeated congratulates you and offers you the following piece of advice: "Make sure you meet the right people and ignore all the rest. Otherwise you'll end up like me." It's never made quite clear what state, let alone district, you are representing.

After the intro you are given control of your Mii using the same point-and-click interface found in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the Mansfield Engine). Your new secretary is showing you around your office in Washington and explaining the control scheme: generally A interacts with objects and people positively, B interacts with them negatively. Instead of politeness and rudeness, however, your interactions are meant to appease or displease and to this end only really have an affect when others are around. You are promptly introduced to the congenial Representative from a neighboring district and instructed to appease her. Pointing your Wiimote at her and pressing A brings up a short quip congratulating her on winning re-election and making a passing remark about the clear-headedness of her constituents. This invokes the appearance of a Sims-style happy face above her head and an increase in her attitude towards you (detailed below). Interacting with A on objects in the room causes somewhat obvious but awkward interactions with things that would appeal to the Representative: pointing out a recent photograph of you with a well-liked Senator, making her aware of congenial literature on your bookshelf.

After his departure your secretary announces the visit of another Representative, one which she clearly indicates as your rival, a man a bit disgruntled by your predecessor's defeat. Before the meeting you are given instructions to use B to interact with him in a displeasing way. Doing so presents dialogue that is very cleverly dismissive in a way that seems cordial but contains undertones of hostility and the corresponding angry/unhappy face above your rival's head. Similarly you may interact with the objects in your office in a manner that promulgates displeasure: putting your feet up on the desk or straightening pictures (an indication that you aren't playing full attention to the Representative).

After this intro you are left on your own to peruse the Congressional directory and make a few calls to fellow Representatives. Much like the Sims you can chose to simply talk or invite them to to an event (mostly fundraisers) for more detailed interactions, all of which involve use of the appeasement/displeasement mechanic. On any given weekday (when Congress is in session) you may only make a set number of calls (say 5), attend 1 fundraiser/function, and, if available, cast a vote on a Bill (more below). Each Friday new poll numbers are released indicating where you stand with your constituency. It must be noted that in addition to there not being any direct line of connection between you and those you represent (indeed, the player has no idea who they are!) these poll numbers are the only visible indication that they exist, though it provides the one structured goal of the game.

In addition to it not being clear exactly where you are from nor who you are representing it's also never made explicit what political party you align with or what your campaign platform was. These details seem extraneous to game play - you re-election depends upon the relationships you make with other Representatives (and maybe the occasional Senator) rather than on pushing a specific agenda. With that in mind you proceed making calls and visits to other political figures. At any point you can press 1 to call up a window showing your relationship to other Representatives (for simplicity's sake the number is limited to 50 or so rather than the full 435) and a handful of Senators. Below each face/name is a scale from -10 to +10 (replacing the Notoriety meter from Jane Austen). A good number of Representatives are neutral with you from the outset, though you can get a sense of who may be a member of your or the opposing party by noting trends in positive and negative associations.

By selecting a specific Representative you can pull up more details about them including humanizing touches like their personal likes and dislikes as well as their political leanings (bills they've recently authored or voted for/against, more on that below). Most importantly you can see a graph tracking the changes in their relationship to you. By comparing days when a particular Representative's attitude for you shifted to your interactions with them or others you start to get a sense of who likes whom and who you may need to appease or displease to influence more powerful figures that you may not be able to directly interact with (depending on the specific Representative and their attitude towards you they may not take your calls).

The core mechanic of the game is a complex logic puzzle that represents a system of relationships. The design needs to be such that feedback is obvious yet the underlying threads are obfuscated enough that the player needs to put in work to discover them. For this reason there may not always be an immediate cause/effect relationship between my actions and the attitudes of others. For those directly involved yes, it should be immediate, but for others it may take a day or two for word to spread and attitudes to change. Ultimately, of course, even the logic of these connections is tied into the weekly poll numbers in a somewhat more inscrutable way. Figuring out having who on your side makes for good numbers and in turn figuring out who to go through to appease those people is where the real strategy comes in. Then again there's no need to appease everybody or even anybody. I hear tell sometimes being a maverick can pay off...

Now this is a game about politics so eventually we will need to actually do what the legeslative branch is supposed to do, namely craft and pass new bills into law. As a first-term Representative you won't have the power to craft a new bill (there's always the second-term sequel/expansion for that) but you may occasionally be asked to sponsor one by a well-liked colleague. Sponsoring a bill has enormous consequences, and the biggest shifts in others' attitudes toward you comes from agreeing or refusing sponsorship. Voting, which happens more often than sponsoring, also affects attitudes greater than individual interactions do.

As for the bills themselves it's important that they not engage the player's personal political leanings. In the spirit of the game these bills avoid anything resembling a hot-button issue and instead are light-hearted and comical as well as mundane. One bill might mandate that all federally funded schools use green chairs in their classroom. Another may levy a tax on people who keep walruses as pets. Again it should be unclear what, if any, interest the player's constituency has on these bills, though conversations occurring before the bill is put to a vote will indicate where particular Representatives stand on the issue. Also you vote yay or nay on the bills from your desk at the end of the work day - it becomes obvious by its omission that at no time do you actually sit in Congress and debate politics or cast your vote.


A Second Term?

Well that's it. Reading it over this definitely represents a very narrow and cynical view of politics but I suppose that's the point! At the end of the day, if done correctly, the game should leave the player feeling a certain sense of exhilaration and fun at the politicking yet be consciously aware that they're not really doing anything in the interest of public-service. Playing the game is an end in itself. If it's a means to anything it's merely a means to re-election. Why be re-elected? That's obvious: so you can continue to play the game!

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.

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