Quote:
Originally Posted by Kubizo
Very interesting, thanks a lot for busting a couple of myths for me. I've been on this forum for a couple of days and I've already learned a lot! :-)
Ciao!
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Quite alright mate, I'm new here myself. It's a very common myth that seems to perpetuate thanks to, mostly, other mediums. Whenever you see a gamer in a hollywood movie he fits the archaic stereotype, same with books.
To answer the OPs question; there's far more books that I like than games, despite being not just an avid gamer but also a game developer. The basic fact is this; non-interactive fiction does not translate well into interactive fiction (or vice versa). It really isn't any harder than that. That's why almost -all- movies that get turned into games stink, and why all games turned into movies smell even worse.
Now, there are exceptions to this rule. There's a vast quantity of Dungeons and Dragons novels and that's a franchise that has been avidly licensed by a variety of games companies. The difference between a D&D novel and Seven suns? The former was written in the context of an interactive sequence while the latter was not.
Let me give you an even better example of why non-interactive fiction has absolutely no place in the games industry. FMV (Full Motion Video) games. They were a desperate attempt to turn games into movies. I have absolutely no idea why, except that movies used to generate more revenue than games. The concept absolutely bombed since what players want is interactivity, not cinematic sequences.
This can be directly translated to the topic of books. What would you expect out of a a game that licensed, say, the Belgariad by Eddings? Would you expect to play Rand? But then what? Do you just slavishly follow the novels? Any interactivity you get is an illusion that would quickly be dismissed by most players (we're notoriously picky after all). Observe the game Heavy rain, which was extremely interactive yet you had almost no freedom at all.
The length of my post is getting out of hand (again, something about this forum that just makes me want to type). Let me end with this; there is a market for book licenses, but the games would have to license the concept or the world that the book takes place in. Trying to translate a book directly into gameplay is doomed to failure before the project has even begun, for the reasons stated above.