BioWare - The Greatest Shame of All

A little different but this article involves Drew Karpyshyn discussing game novelisaton.

"Honestly, I think many games wouldn't make compelling novels," Karpyshyn says. According to him, there are many aspects inherent to games - most notably their interactive nature - that make it difficult to translate them to other, more linear forms of storytelling. Yet that didn't stop him from writing books based on the PC and Xbox 360 RPG Mass Effect, also developed by BioWare. For Karpyshyn, that game was a special circumstance. "The reason the Mass Effect novels worked so well was the depth of the universe we created for the games," he says. "At BioWare, we spent a full year developing the Mass Effect galaxy before we even began work on the story of the game. By laying the groundwork for such a rich, widespread setting, we opened up the possibility to tell all sorts of stories beyond the plot of the game."
Much like Star Wars, the Mass Effect mythology encompassed a vast array of alien species, planets and technologies, punctuated by dozens of interesting characters and events. Creating a universe like this clearly lends itself well to different types of storytelling, literature included. There were many characters and events the game only touched on briefly that beg for further exploration. However, as Karpyshyn explains, most games don't feature that kind of fully fleshed-out game world, making the transition difficult. Instead, many authors are forced to slavishly follow the events of a particular game, often with unsatisfactory results.

Click to expand...

More information.

Their was a series of novels based on the Doom games that (unlike the movie) were pretty good. That means you can make novels based on almost any kind of game and depending on the author it can be good.

the depth of the universe

Click to expand...

What depth?

At BioWare, we spent a full year developing the Mass Effect galaxy before we even began work on the story of the game.

Click to expand...

They mean they spent a full year copy-pasting from other sources, right?

When reading the title, I thought it referred to Mass Effects inventory system.

The most well-written world I ever saw in a computer game was Dungeon Siege 2. Wading through all descriptions of monsters, books you found, artifacts etc built up a world complex enough to play a pen and paper campaign in it. Your journal was pretty much a library.

According to him, there are many aspects inherent to games - most notably their interactive nature - that make it difficult to translate them to other, more linear forms of storytelling.

Click to expand...

Gimme a break. If there's anything less linear than one of Bioware's slideshows, I've never seen it.

Essaliad said:

What depth?

Click to expand...

Did you read the codex?

I read/explored evertyhing in mass effect and it was plenty enough imho. Any more and I would have given up.

Stormwaltz said:

Did you read the codex?

Click to expand...

I skimmed a few entries and found them as shopworn, half-baked and derivative as the rest of the game. You appear to be confusing an appendix for depth, which is a mistake common to really bad or really young writers: depth should come through every aspect of a medium. When you read a novel, it should come through characterization and dialogue and the quality of the prose. Since ME is hardly more than an interactive movie, it should also come through character interaction/dialogue, the way the setting is represented. Given that the "setting" in question is a bastard melange of bits and pieces stolen from better works, I'm afraid I don't find much to commend. Given that the characters are mono-dimensional stereotypes, well... ME's depth is doubtless impressive to people who think Harry Potter or Eragon is great literature.

Go read a good book of speculative fiction to see how it's done.

Essaliad said:

I skimmed a few entries and found them as shopworn, half-baked and derivative as the rest of the game. You appear to be confusing an appendix for depth, which is a mistake common to really bad or really young writers: depth should come through every aspect of a medium. When you read a novel, it should come through characterization and dialogue and the quality of the prose. Since ME is hardly more than an interactive movie, it should also come through character interaction/dialogue, the way the setting is represented. Given that the "setting" in question is a bastard melange of bits and pieces stolen from better works, I'm afraid I don't find much to commend. Given that the characters are mono-dimensional stereotypes, well... ME's depth is doubtless impressive to people who think Harry Potter or Eragon is great literature.

Go read a good book of speculative fiction to see how it's done.

Click to expand...

Okay, I've kept silent until now, but I have to say that you're really starting to get on my nerve Essaliad.

You are of course entitled to your own opinion AND to voice that opinion, but I think it says a lot about your character that every time you do so, it comes at the expense of those who don't see the world as you do.

It is not necessary to ridicule others to make a point and it is not necessary to constantly belittle everyone who dare voice a different opinion than your own.

I'll probably be flamed now but I felt I had to speak up. Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way and if so you can just write me off as a cranky old coot. If not ... well, you be the judge.

JemyM said:

Wading through all descriptions of monsters, books you found, artifacts etc built up a world complex enough to play a pen and paper campaign in it. Your journal was pretty much a library.

Click to expand...

Divinity was imho similar.

Plus C-RPGs based on P&P sources.

I think, BAK should have a vast background, too.

Essaliad said:

I skimmed a few entries and found them as shopworn, half-baked and derivative as the rest of the game. You appear to be confusing an appendix for depth, which is a mistake common to really bad or really young writers: depth should come through every aspect of a medium. When you read a novel, it should come through characterization and dialogue and the quality of the prose. Since ME is hardly more than an interactive movie, it should also come through character interaction/dialogue, the way the setting is represented. Given that the "setting" in question is a bastard melange of bits and pieces stolen from better works, I'm afraid I don't find much to commend. Given that the characters are mono-dimensional stereotypes, well... ME's depth is doubtless impressive to people who think Harry Potter or Eragon is great literature.

Go read a good book of speculative fiction to see how it's done.

Click to expand...

What's wrong with Harry Potter? it was imaginative and interesting to read!

fatBastard() said:

Okay, I've kept silent until now, but I have to say that you're really starting to get on my nerve Essaliad.

I'll probably be flamed now but I felt I had to speak up. Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way and if so you can just write me off as a cranky old coot. If not ... well, you be the judge.

Click to expand...

No one seems to be flaming you, so you must not be a cranky ol' coot.

I liked Harry Potter a lot more than I thought I would. I actually read the series twice.

fatBastard() said:

You are of course entitled to your own opinion AND to voice that opinion, but I think it says a lot about your character that every time you do so, it comes at the expense of those who don't see the world as you do.

It is not necessary to ridicule others to make a point and it is not necessary to constantly belittle everyone who dare voice a different opinion than your own.

Click to expand...

My, aren't you ever so brave and heroic, the lone soul who dares speak up! How did I belittle or ridicule anyone, exactly?

purpleblob said:

What's wrong with Harry Potter? it was imaginative and interesting to read!

Click to expand...

Will you fly off the handle screaming for blood if I tell you exactly what I think of HP?

off-topic...

please do tell ;-) ... I started reading the first few pages of HP Book I (whatever that was called) which I was sent as a 'leaked' PDF. I thought it was a joke. I chuckled, read a page or two...and then discovered it was the real thing. I have read much better, more imaginative children's fantasy that sadly did not have Ms Rowling's marketing machinery behind it. As for Eragon - I soldiered through the book and vowed never to read such derivative crap again. I know many who feel the same way. Perhaps it's an age thing - my time is too precious to waste reading rubbish. Yet he managed to get a movie deal, produce several more books, a computer game... Again, a triumph of marketing/PR over substance. And the fact that Daddy is connected in the publishing world. Dragons are old hat - did anyone send him that memo? Guess not.

I do agree, though, that simply having detailed codices does not increase game world immersion that much. I did the same when I wrote my first bit of fantasy (which never saw the light of day - fortunately). Simply collecting game world info and leaving it for people to read is not really that satisfactory, unless you like reading encyclopedias. Ideally I'd like it to be part of the unfolding story - finding out surprising and relevant historical, social, geo-political etc info as I go along.

purpleblob said:

What's wrong with Harry Potter? it was imaginative and interesting to read!

Click to expand...

You think? IMO it was anything but imaginative -- there's nothing there that hasn't been done before, and done better.

(For a few examples, try Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy for a "kid goes to wizard's college" story, Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising cycle for a "kid discovers he's a Chosen One and enters a mysterious parallel reality to vanquish a great evil" story, Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain series for a "kid starts from humble origins and gradually matures to be a great hero" series, with the mythology done right, or anything by Madeleine L'Engle for "fantasy parallel reality discovered at right angles to where we live". Or anything by Astrid Lindgren, especially Mio, my Mio, Ronia the Robber's Daughter, or Brothers Lionheart, or Finland's own Tove Jansson. All of these write circles around JK Rowling. Hell, Enid Blyton writes circles around JK Rowling, and Harry Potter is basically Malory Towers with funny hats.)

It's not all bad by any means (in particular, it does a decent job of getting into the head of a teenager, and the prose flows nicely, making it easy to read at a sitting), but I have to say that I agree with Essaliad about its literary merits.

(As to Eragon, give the man Paolini a break -- he wasn't even sixteen when he wrote it. I read Eragon, and I thought it was pretty good for a self-published teenager, although not so good I bothered to read the sequels.)

Edit: Interesting that all of the authors on that off-the-top-of-my head list are women, other than Lloyd Alexander.

booboo said:

I do agree, though, that simply having detailed codices does not increase game world immersion that much. I did the same when I wrote my first bit of fantasy (which never saw the light of day - fortunately). Simply collecting game world info and leaving it for people to read is not really that satisfactory, unless you like reading encyclopedias. Ideally I'd like it to be part of the unfolding story - finding out surprising and relevant historical, social, geo-political etc info as I go along.

Click to expand...

Which is really hard to do well. I mentioned somewhere else that I just re-read the Dune trilogy, which is IMO one of the all-time best sci-fi/fantasy series.

But it too gets terribly bogged down in exposition. Essentially the first 150 to 200 pages are exposition, and it's not until well into Dune Messiah that it starts to shed that baggage (by which time the author has already gotten most of his brilliant ideas down and out of his system). Frank Herbert had a brilliant imagination, but he wasn't all that good at writing.

Ursula Le Guin does this really, really well. You're immediately drawn into the human drama of her stories, and the complex, rich, and beautifully imagined world unfolds in the background, so that you barely even notice it. It takes a magnificent command of the writer's art to do that -- and a magnificent sense of humility not to jump up and down and go "look at me! look at me!" as you're doing it. Yet she manages it so well it seems almost effortless.

Essaliad said:

You appear to be confusing an appendix for depth, which is a mistake common to really bad or really young writers: depth should come through every aspect of a medium.

Click to expand...

I think you're confusing "depth of the background" with "depth of the story."

Here's what Drew said: "The reason the Mass Effect novels worked so well was the depth of the universe we created for the games."

That is to say, the cultures, histories, and technologies underpinning the setting of Mass Effect were given development time aside from what was shown in the actual story of the game. The result is a world with, for lack of a more technical term, "possibility space." It's possible to see where other stories in the milieu can be written.

Personally, I feel that the depth and detail of the backstory in Lord of the Rings - including the thinly veiled and obviously derivative mega-appendix known as the Silmarillion - has been a contributing factor in its longevity and resonance.

Prime Junta said:

Y

(As to Eragon, give the man Paolini a break -- he wasn't even sixteen when he wrote it. I read Eragon, and I thought it was pretty good for a self-published teenager, although not so good I bothered to read the sequels.)

Click to expand...

Ah, and there we have the usual defense of Eragon: "but he was a teenager when he wrote it". Sorry, that doesn't work for me - either a book is good (interesting, novel concepts/exposition, clever writing style - and you mentioned many of those) or it's not. Age is irrelevant. Eragon is the kind of book I would expect a 16 year old to write, if they had a decent command of english and the benefit of a good education (and wanted to have a pet dragon). If he had written a book like Joe Abercrombie's "The Blade Itself" *then* I would have been mightily impressed. Now, somone just needs to mention how wonderful Eragon is in my presence and a tic starts in my one eye...!

skavenhorde said:

I liked Harry Potter a lot more than I thought I would.

Click to expand...

Same here. I only read the first few books, but I was biased when i began reading them : "oh, children books ..." I thought.

I was taught that even "children books" can bind me to them meanwhile reading.

From then on, I've given up my bias and now look at "children books" differently.


By the way, just to mention : I read *every* book in Divinity and BVeyond Divinity I could find in the game ! (Except those which contained the same text.)

And I found my interest well fed. I like browsing through books. When I read one article in wikipedia, I usually hop and hop and hop along links - until i find something fascinatingly new ! I think I couldn't stop reading Wikipedia, if I had enough time and no constraints ... My "thirst for knowledge" has always been strong, even in childhood, but I've narrowed my interests more and more to some points.

The last time I really felt good was two months ago, when I was in the main library of the university of Cologne and was browsing through Science, New Scientist, Nature ... A whole new world of discoveries ! New theories ! New Knowledge ! New ... stuff !

The last time I felt so great was almost ten years ago, when I left university (had to break it up for various reasons).

I think, my attribute value for curiosity is quite high.

booboo said:

Age is irrelevant.

Click to expand...

I doubt so, because the sheer vastness of knowledge and sheer training in "1337 writing skillz" just CANNOT be as high in a teenager than in a 70s year old literate ...

To me, it is simply unfair to say "age is irrellevant", because it just doesn't take the environment into count.

That's why I don't watch or listen to Wunderkinders. They are brilliant, but they represent a ridiculously small amount of human variance of talent, skill and whatever, that concentrating on them is just unfair against the whole mass of people who are not so much gifted.

Wunderkinder are the creme de la creme of giftedness and training. To concentrate on them would be like eating luxury foods everyday.

To say "age is irrellevant" is just as if I was comparing an 5-year-old child against a 75-year-old adult.

To me, this is simply unfair.