It’s not a new idea to take a best-selling novel and change its delivery to suit a wider audience. Film makers have been doing it since the beginning of the modern film era. You probably notice as you drive by any movie theater that nothing is off limits when it comes to adapting the written word to film. Most recently I remember watching the films The Road and Angels and Demons, both best-selling novels. Though both films achieved varied success, it was interesting to watch them having also read the novels.
In the classroom, it seems to be standard practice to view the film version of a novel as an end-of-unit assessment or just for fun. As my own students are reading Of Mice and Men, at the end of our discussion of the novel we will watch the film and discuss the various differences and similarities between the two. Additionally, we will discuss why the director made certain choices to omit or change parts of the novel that, upon first reading, seem very important.
However, with all of this in mind, can the same ideas be transferred to games?
Though it also seems commonplace for film companies to cut out a quick, easy, usually pathetic video game based on a blockbuster film, it is not so common for companies to roll out games based on novels.
In the recent past, Dante’s Inferno was released by EA and Visceral Games as an adaptation of the poem The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. THQ and 4A Games released Metro 2033 on the Xbox 360 as a direct adaptation of the novel Metro 2033 by Dmitri Glukhovsky. Both games will be the focus of future blog entries as I delve into their worlds of adaptation and determine if these games would be useful games to use in the classroom if used simultaneously with their written partners.
I pose the question to you first: Do you think a novel can be adequately adapted into a game? Let me know your comments. Happy gaming!
I believe that you can take a novel and make it into a video game, for instance when you play a Call of Duty story mode it feels as if you are reading a novel about a war. I also believe that when a video game has a good story line like a book it makes it much more enjoyable for the gamer as it would for a reader. The downfalls I think are possible is that video game makers would take the story line from a novel and change it around a lot making a person who loved the book not enjoy the game as much, I'm not saying this is sure to happen but when directors make a movie they usually change put some changes in that didn't happen in the book.
ReplyDelete