[BoRT] Books & Game Design
In the last week or so, I’ve applied for a couple of jobs and internships that are – one way or another – to do with the creative side of the games industry. Not (necessarily) limited to computer games, but types of games and game structures that mesh with my academic/research interests in narrative, technology, and place.
As such, I need to get my shit together. Start laying down some of my thoughts down on paper the internet. Through a tangential link-grab from Juliette Culver, I stumbled on the nifty Man Bytes Blog and his Blogs of the Round Table project. Which is awesome. Wasted a significant chunk of the last week reading some brilliant responses to the question – “What would your favorite piece of literature look like if it had been created as a game first?”
Responses were varied and stimulating, envisaging:
- Wodehouse’s Drones Club stories as a fast-paced card game
- Solaris as an enigmatic MMOG
- Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as … Who Killed Fyodor Karamazov? or Murder in a Russian Province – a creative and rather wonderful mix of Cluedo and Broken Sword
- The Crying of Lot 49 as a collectible card game
- House of Leaves as a classic text adventure
- Jane Austin for the Nintendo Wii (Pride and Prejudice: Adventures Among Polite Society in the Village of Longbourn!)
And, perhaps most excitingly for me, China Mieville’s Iron Council as a German-style boardgame – more on which tomorrow.
