Starting on the 12th and ending through the 16th, it's Speak Out with Your Geek Out week! Which means that there will be a post every day! Which means that, for the entire week, we'll be covering the general gaming pizazz: favorite non-casual/more hardcore titles, reasons why we geek out over games, whether or not games adapt well to other media environments, and so forth and so forth. All that Noriko Matsueda jazz. Wednesday's flavor of the day: a typical pixel thought, this time about all our "favorite" game spin-offs in books, movies, and more.
Games are at war. Not with the news anchors, although they still read anti-violence PSA scripts. Not with the teachers, who love games so much they started integrating games into curriculum or publishing overly metaphysical theses on abstract theory concepts.
Games are at war with their own fan bases--indeed, an ironic and occasional phenomenon that occurs when a popular game or series decides to go outside the (X)box and into lower evolved forms of entertainment: most popularly, film and literature.
Do "trans"media spin-offs ever work? It depends.
Games are often considered the best of both worlds: the visual arts and the written word. Spoon into that mix some good music and sound computer science, and you've got a grand melting pot of academic disciplines that bakes some of the best entertainment we've encountered in the last two to three decades. And while we've been bouncing the term "transmedia" around ever since artists realized the value of combining different signature styles into the same artwork (think collages), in the digital sense, games were the first real transmedia and set the standard (and justification) for creating interactive art pieces. And from the storytelling/narrative perspective, they've already achieved one of the highest levels possible in the hierarchy of escapism—because of their interactive format, they feel real enough that we identify pretty instantly with the player-characters, without totally messing up our heads the way alternate reality games do (the transmedia equivalent of Nolan's Inception.)
So my question is, if games are already at the height of their evolution, then why in Equestria are we making spinoffs in lesser-evolved media? Because "it'll expand our target audience/market"? No it won't. If the 1993 Super Mario Bros. film flop happened to be my absolute first exposure to that particular Nintendo brand, I'd hardly be motivated to run over to the game store. Because it's "for the fans"? Maybe, possibly. But given that Tomb Raider's designers more or less admitted that their busty protagonist is Indiana Jones's identical twin, the fans would get infinitely more enjoyment out of yet another Lara Croft interactive venture than a flat movie with nothing for appeal but Angelina Jolie. Who, granted, looks great, but she's still a static image on a screen.
Let's look at the child prodigy that was Final Fantasy VII. Given its day and age, the graphics were absolutely stunning, its story and characters were relevant to the audience, and it was one of the first JRPGs available to the North American market, so it had major novelty appeal. Some years later Square-Enix put together a prequel (Crisis Core), a sequel (Dirge of Cerberus), a Japan-localized mobile phone prequel (Before Crisis)... and a 90-minute movie, Advent Children. Which, as everyone knows, is a spectacular CGI montage, but makes absolutely no sense to even the diehard fanbase, much less the outsiders and newcomers like me who stumbled upon it via YouTube and thought, "Hey, I could get into this." To be fair, Advent Children isn't even a proper movie--it's a collection of FMV (full-motion video) clips, exactly the kind that are interpsered throughout the original game to cover narrative and character development in between fights and choose-your-own-adventure dialogues. Undoubtedly it was meant "for the fans" and its Internet popularity coincidentally did "expand the target audience"--but just imagine what might have happened with a couple plot loopholes closed up and a professional screenwriter on board.
Then we get a series of games like Myst, whose atmosphere is melting, practically exploding from the pressure of the entire enigmatic gameplay and characters. The player's own identity throughout is simply the "Visitor"; whether this is the actual player or an unidentified character with its own history remains intentionally vague, just like the wordless lock-and-key puzzles and mystical "books-can-literally-take-you-to-another-place" fundamental story arc. Most of the games' plots revolve around unlocking the very backstory that caused all the events to occur as they did in the player's eyes, and for clarification and enlightenment reasons, the designers put their heads together to make a literary trilogy: the books of Atrus, Ti'ana, and D'ni, respectively, settling all the pieces into place through textual descriptions and dialogue of underground worlds and political intrigues--actually, the kind of stuff one might find looking in one of the "linking books" inside the Myst games. Aha. Now this kind of spin-off makes sense. Truly complimentary to the games themselves, while providing a thorough standalone extension that non-Myst players can enjoy for their own sake, because they're actually rather brilliantly written.
Do spin-offs work? Sometimes, and very carefully. It all comes down to how the story best translates.
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