Books that would make good games

[Kpt._Rob]

*snip*

While I agree with you, to a point, I just don't think books make good games. Okay let me rephrase that, I do think some books can make good games, but said games cant live up to the books.

If you take a person, (im going to take Wizards first rule by Terry Goodkind as an example) who has never read this book, then they may find the book, to be at least an adequate(spelling?) game. But someone who has read this game, cant really expect it to live up.

So much Characterization, plot advancement, and such goes in books that a game, as much as it can try, just cant compare against.

While I may have phrased my point badly, What I'm saying is , storywise, games cannot possible compare.

I would argue that some stories though are actually told better in the format of a game. For instance, I've read quite a bit of H.P. Lovecraft in my days, and my view on Lovecraft in retrospect has been that he was a bad author with some really good ideas, and that more often than not the authors who were inspired by his works are far superior to Lovecraft himself. See, the problem is that in the stories that Lovecraft tells, often times the purpose of the story is to experience a bizarre world. I mean, does anyone really think that any of Lovecraft's characters were well written? The main character, more often than not, was the same guy in a different suit. And most of the other characters were poorly crafted. The stories often followed the same structures, and were hardly that unpredictible. But what the man had a real talent for was creating this insane twisted archaic world that you just wanted to see more of.

One Lovecraft story in particular that I think would be far superior to the original as a game than a book is At the Mountains of Madness. See, I'll be as blunt as I can, At the Mountains of Madness got real boring real fast. The problem was that crafting a visual world like that just doesn't work well in a book. Sure, it's nice to have some prompts for my imagination, but not a prompt that long. That said, At the Mountains of Madness would make an insanely cool game. Change the main character so that he's got some combat abilities, and make the ruins under the mountains a little less desolate, and you'd have the formula for an amazing game. You've got the setup for some really well done puzzle elements, and some crazy cool monster battles. In the right hands, a game for At the Mountains of Madness would be far superior to the book. The gaming medium is simply a better medium for telling the story that it told.

There is certainly an extent to which you're right, or at least given the history of gaming so far. We have yet to really set up the mechanisms by which to tell reliably deep meaningful stories with well developed characters, though I do think that we are getting better. It's all to easy to forget what a young medium gaming is. How many years have people been writing for? They've had a lot of time to perfect the medium. Still, we've got some good starts. I would say that the recently released Alan Wake, for instance, does an incredibly good job developing its main character. Granted, it kind of takes a page from the way a book would go about characterizing a character (by letting him narrate) to do it, but it's still a start. And even without characterization, a game can certainly tell a deep and meaningful story. You're free to disagree if you want, but I am not the only one who felt that Bioshock was deep and philosophical, at the same time as being a good game.

 

[lightningmagurn]

Fight Club if done well or Pygmy also if done very well. Pygmy would only be great as a super-M rated title much like Bully. Look the book up on Amazon to understand what I mean by that.

That book made me smile and vomit in turns. Turgid Weapon...heehee...

 

[Jark212]

I think Ender's Game would make a pretty cool RTS space combat game...

 

[Rasputin1]

*snip*

While I agree with you, to a point, I just don't think books make good games. Okay let me rephrase that, I do think some books can make good games, but said games cant live up to the books.

If you take a person, (im going to take Wizards first rule by Terry Goodkind as an example) who has never read this book, then they may find the book, to be at least an adequate(spelling?) game. But someone who has read this game, cant really expect it to live up.

So much Characterization, plot advancement, and such goes in books that a game, as much as it can try, just cant compare against.

While I may have phrased my point badly, What I'm saying is , storywise, games cannot possible compare.

I would argue that some stories though are actually told better in the format of a game. For instance, I've read quite a bit of H.P. Lovecraft in my days, and my view on Lovecraft in retrospect has been that he was a bad author with some really good ideas, and that more often than not the authors who were inspired by his works are far superior to Lovecraft himself. See, the problem is that in the stories that Lovecraft tells, often times the purpose of the story is to experience a bizarre world. I mean, does anyone really think that any of Lovecraft's characters were well written? The main character, more often than not, was the same guy in a different suit. And most of the other characters were poorly crafted. The stories often followed the same structures, and were hardly that unpredictible. But what the man had a real talent for was creating this insane twisted archaic world that you just wanted to see more of.

One Lovecraft story in particular that I think would be far superior to the original as a game than a book is At the Mountains of Madness. See, I'll be as blunt as I can, At the Mountains of Madness got real boring real fast. The problem was that crafting a visual world like that just doesn't work well in a book. Sure, it's nice to have some prompts for my imagination, but not a prompt that long. That said, At the Mountains of Madness would make an insanely cool game. Change the main character so that he's got some combat abilities, and make the ruins under the mountains a little less desolate, and you'd have the formula for an amazing game. You've got the setup for some really well done puzzle elements, and some crazy cool monster battles. In the right hands, a game for At the Mountains of Madness would be far superior to the book. The gaming medium is simply a better medium for telling the story that it told.

There is certainly an extent to which you're right, or at least given the history of gaming so far. We have yet to really set up the mechanisms by which to tell reliably deep meaningful stories with well developed characters, though I do think that we are getting better. It's all to easy to forget what a young medium gaming is. How many years have people been writing for? They've had a lot of time to perfect the medium. Still, we've got some good starts. I would say that the recently released Alan Wake, for instance, does an incredibly good job developing its main character. Granted, it kind of takes a page from the way a book would go about characterizing a character (by letting him narrate) to do it, but it's still a start. And even without characterization, a game can certainly tell a deep and meaningful story. You're free to disagree if you want, but I am not the only one who felt that Bioshock was deep and philosophical, at the same time as being a good game.

First of all, bear in mind the two games you referred too, Alan wake and Bioshock, I haven't played. Gaming has been telling their stories for a long time, if you count a decade or two long.(I certainly do, I don't get to live many of them) But... Gaming has a long way to go. I have never played a game purely for the story, Aside from Legend of Kain: Soul Reaver. This one game is up against the, probably hundreds, of games I've tried since I started gaming. And not one has told a story as entertaining as this.

I think the main problem that games have, is that simply not enough books are being made into games, developers don't have enough experience. Alot of games are being made purely for the amount of money they can rake in.

Call of Duty for example, not alot of the thousands of players care what the storyline is, they're just there to kill people. Killing people doesnt require knowledge of the storyline.

Characterizing characters, advancing the plot, requires alot of effort, and motivation, that so many developers just don't have. Cod is one of the biggest selling games of our generation so why would people try and make a good storyline, when they can make more money by just making a good multiplayer game that only requires aiming and pulling a trigger.

Also, Take bejewlled and such "casual" games aswell. These games rake in millions of pounds/euro/dollars a year, if not a week.

My point being, simply, I reckon that yes, Books could make good games, if developers had the motivation to actually make it so.

 

[omega_peaches]

First Person "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."
Sneak up behind the fruits, Snake-Style, than eat them, never to be seen again.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

The Night Angel Trilogy would be interesting, as would The Stainless Steel Rat series.

 

[Gasaraki]

Battle Royale would be great as a survival action game, especially if they included multiplayer; the matches would last hours and it would be perfect for LAN parties!

 

[Teeth Kicker]

The Redwall books would be so sick! 3rd person adventure game, Zelda-esque. You could do a collabos of many of them since they aren't incredibly long. God that would be siiiiickkkkkkk.

Or you could make an epic game out of Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series. Gunsling'n like a mofo and curb-stomping those lobstrosities!

 

[yoz13]

I think a few of Garth Nix's books would be cool as games especially the old kingdom series or that might be because I'm a huge Garth Nix fanboy XD

 

[Kpt._Rob]

*snip again*

First of all, bear in mind the two games you referred too, Alan wake and Bioshock, I haven't played. Gaming has been telling their stories for a long time, if you count a decade or two long.(I certainly do, I don't get to live many of them) But... Gaming has a long way to go. I have never played a game purely for the story, Aside from Legend of Kain: Soul Reaver. This one game is up against the, probably hundreds, of games I've tried since I started gaming. And not one has told a story as entertaining as this.

I think the main problem that games have, is that simply not enough books are being made into games, developers don't have enough experience. Alot of games are being made purely for the amount of money they can rake in.

Call of Duty for example, not alot of the thousands of players care what the storyline is, they're just there to kill people. Killing people doesnt require knowledge of the storyline.

Characterizing characters, advancing the plot, requires alot of effort, and motivation, that so many developers just don't have. Cod is one of the biggest selling games of our generation so why would people try and make a good storyline, when they can make more money by just making a good multiplayer game that only requires aiming and pulling a trigger.

Also, Take bejewlled and such "casual" games aswell. These games rake in millions of pounds/euro/dollars a year, if not a week.

My point being, simply, I reckon that yes, Books could make good games, if developers had the motivation to actually make it so.

Well, I think the point that I was making is that relatively speaking games have not had a lot of time to get comfortable in their storytelling skin. People have been telling stories in linguistic formats for thousands of years... that's provided quite a bit of time for experimentation with different methods and perfection of those methods. And I would argue that even that is a work in progress. Movies, if I'm recalling my film class correctly, have been telling their stories for about a hundred years, though if you start counting only since the audition of sound it's probably more like eighty or seventy years. Now, I'm not a game historian by any means, but I believe the medium was first developed sometime in the seventies. If you count since then that gives gaming only forty years to develop its storytelling methods, but in reality it's probably even shorter like that. Early videogames didn't have a lot of the tools that game developers today had, and while games like Final Fantasy or Zelda certainly had the tools to tell a more developed story, you didn't really have complex stories showing up until about two console generations ago. So, like you said, a couple decades tops... if even that. But the situation is even worse than that, since developers are having to upgrade to more advanced systems all the time. To put it in metaphor, it would be like if you did a drawing with Crayons, and people liked it, but then you had to use oil paints, and after that you had to use MS Paint, then Photoshop, and then before you know it you're having to write your paintings in code... these poor people are forced to go through ever advancing levels of complexity to release a game.

There are really a lot of problems that game developers face in writing a story. One of the biggest is that gameplay in a game really does have to come first. It doesn't matter how amazing your story is, if the game you have to play is boring, badly done, and tedious, few people will bother with playing it at all. And inversely, even if you've got a bad story, people will often overlook it if you've got good gameplay. You've got other constraints too. For instance, in a book if you want your character to fight 100 ninjas then you just write "he fought a hundred ninjas." Okay, you probably flesh it out a bit, but you get my drift. But in a game you're going to have to program each of those ninjas, design what they look like, you've got a hell of a lot more work to do, and you're forced to either create 100 ninjas that look and act exactly the same, or do even more work and possibly risk putting too much strain on your processor.

I certainly agree with you on how repetative game stories often are. Call of Duty is a good example. But the idea that the problem is that developers aren't looking to books is an oversimplification. I mean, think about the investment that you're making if you choose to make a game. I'm no industry expert, but it seems like every day I'm hearing about one game that was more expensive to produce than the last. The cost of creating modern day graphics, programing good gameplay and AI, it's getting more rediculous every day. You need entire teams of people working for a year or two, often more (as I recall Alan Wake was in the works for around five years, and considering that it's been slow to sell there's a good chance that the developer's time and efforts will not be properly rewarded, mostly because people will play a story heavy game a couple times and then resell it, and the used games business will take a huge chunk of change out of their profits). The point I'm making is that if you're making that big of an investment... you want to be damn sure that you're going to see a return on that investment. You could take a gamble on a new idea, or you could take a peak at something that's already worked (MW2 is, from what I've read, the top grossing game of all time, so it's no wonder we're seeing so many clones).

Developers who try to focus on story may very well be taking a huge risk, and if people don't like it, then the technical term for their status is "fucked." It's not just about their not being motivated enough, these people need to put food on the tables for their famalies. It's nice to talk about how games should focus more on being an artform, I agree, I would like to see more games that tell a deep and thoughtful story, and have other artistic merits, but you and I aren't the ones taking the risks necessary to make that actually happen. Still, I'll reiterate my earlier point, which is that I think that as time goes on we are seeing gaming mature as a storytelling medium. It'll have some backsteps (the rediculous amounts of shovelware and gimicky games for the Wii come to mind, as does the fact that we'll probably be seeing quite a few MW2 clones for a while to come), but in the full spectrum of time I believe that gaming will probably reflect the film industry in many ways, that being that while most games will still probably just be cash ins aimed at the people who just want fast action and explosions, we will have some absolute gems that tell marvelous stories with excellent characters. I would even argue that we already do have some gems in our midst.

 

[firedfns13]

Well, I've read a few books that were inspired by games(Splinter Cell

GOD those books were terrible. At least the Halo books have an excuse since they're in the future and aimed towards kids, but when a game thats supposed to be realistic has books written with frag grenades that operate like remote mines and explode like dynamite (instead of the whole FRAGmentation like their point of existing) it angers me. It just show's complete ignorance by the authors. They didn't even put effort into any sort of researching. I also read another terrible book about a kid in china during the crackdown on Tienanmen Square, and the author referred to the AK47 machine gun; the kid was supposed to be a nerd for weapons. GAAAHH


Anyways, ignore my rant on the ignorance of authors. I'd say "Inside Delta Force" or "World War Z" would make decent games. Delta has training, secret agent action, war action, reconnaissance, and counter terrorist stuff.

World War Z would be good because you could reenact the different little stories.

 

[aLivingPheonix]

... Harry Potter doesen't count? Damn. I wasted countless hours on the first two games.

"Pendragon" could potentially make a good game series, if executed properly. Especially if you control Loor, or Alder for a few levels.

other than that, I'm not really sure. LOTR has already been made (And produced the best Hack'n Slasher I've ever played, with the exception of "Azurik: Rise of Perathia")

 

[Jonny The Kay]

To Kill a Mocking Bird as a Pheonix Wright knock-off

 

[MagicMouse]

Wheel of Time free roam RPG PLEASE!!!!!
No one gets to play as the main characters though.

Start out as a normal village guy/girl then get enlisted as an Aes Sedai or Ashaman or Soldier. Rise up the ranks, learn new skills, do some cool quests then participate in the EPIC Last Battle.

It would be sweet as long as its just SET in the universe and not entangled in the main characters plot, because we all know it would get ruined.

 

[InnerRebellion]

The Night Angel trilogy, please. It would be a better version of Assassin's Creed, but in a fictional world that involved a few other creatures. And a complete mindgasm for me, because that series is amazing.

 

[helo87]

I agree the Night Angel trilogy might make a good game, Neuromancer by William Gibson would be an interesting idea for a game as well.

So upon further research there already has been a game based loosely on Neuromancer; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game)

 

[Extraintrovert]

None, there's a reason they're books and not games, just like the reason that a movie is not a game, and movie inspired games always suck.

Leave each medium within it's own goddamn medium and get some fresh ideas, I'm sure we would all appreciate that much more.

^This.

On topic and being hypocritical: Discworld. I don't know how that would possibly work though, so it probably is a bad idea.

 

[zyfyn]

R A Salvatores, drizzt series (final fantasy style)
steven brust, jhereg series ("thief" style)
david gemmell, any of his books would make interesting games

 

[KapnKerfuffle]

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Think about it. Play as Honest Abe: Save the US and kill vampires! What more can you want from a game?

Hookers and machine guns? Unless this game already has them

As long as it is steampunk Lincoln, I'm all over it.

You get the machine gun, now just add hookers. Hey, didn't the word hooker come from a general named Hooker during the Civil War who was famous for his camp followers? There you go!

 

[DarkPanda XIII]

I can't really say any book, if you ever really, really, really make one that's good, it would have to be influenced by the majority of the detail that the book provides to make any of the readers to be immersed...but I guess that's just me, really.