Novels based around a game like EVE may have a special opportunity, because EVE relies so heavily on the imagination. You can't land on planets, see your character or walk in stations (yet), but you can see out into the vastness of space and know that there are a bunch of people on their daily EVE routine.
Unfortunately, if you sit still too long to dream in EVE you will get your ass handed to you and there is very real danger of losing good bits of time you have invested in the game. It will teach you patience, risk, reward and loss. Losing a ship you worked countless hours to build or purchase in an anticlimactic explosion will hit you hard. Experiencing all of these aspects of reality with the right mindset in a virtual environment can give a novel writer some powerful buttons to press and help to create a story fabric that players feel even more connected to.
If you're only in a small corporation with a few friends or even soloing, it becomes difficult to work your way up the ladder without great care and persistence. In those cases, the lore around the universe can be a much more appealing way to get your EVE fix while you stay safely docked, spinning your ship and placing market orders. The option is always there though, to escape your ditch and find your calling within the game. That is one reason why it is so hard for many people to decide if they really like EVE or not, there is a huge sense of untapped potential just out of your reach next to the cookie jar.
I haven't read any of the novels, but if player actions become featured in them more specifically, I could see myself diving in just to read more embellished and refined descriptions of all that I'm missing. I suppose that's not unlike the snazzy videos, showing you pretty ships and big explosions in huge battles you will never see with fast paced techno music. The exciting difficulty level of the game does make it even more interesting to hear about the people who succeeded and made an impact.
My favorite memories from Eve involve reading (and writing) battle reports and other stories on my alliance's private forum. It's an interesting genre of fiction / reporting (?) that more closely resembles writing about a tabletop RPG campaign than anything that I would expect from a video game. Both the strategy and tactics surrounding larger battles and campaigns makes for a surprisingly compelling read.
I'm most reminded of the Dragonlance books. People sometimes make fun of the series as simply being a novelized form of a D&D campaign Weis & Hickman played. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. Especially in Eve, when I read and write about events I either witnessed or participated in, it pulls me in to the world in a way that no other computer RPG ever has.
@EnzoDadlet: For me, it's how alive the game world feels. It's so player run and player defined that it doesn't ever really feel like a world frozen in time. I really need to get back into it, I was doing fairly well.
The dynamic nature of the Eve world has always interested me, more so than other MMOs, because there's so much more player input into what happens. Rather than Guild X beating Raid Y and then Having Guild Z do the same thing, there's enough flexibility for the emergent history of the game to be really fascinating, and unsurprisingly none of the things that happen in Eve are all that different from what happens in the real world. Can't imagine why, though...
This sounds a lot like historical fiction. Working with past events, creating small fictional characters to play along with large events. In a sense, it is true historical fiction - the history of human players in this virtual world.
About chronicling the history of a game: I always thought it would be cool to have a timeline or historical map in games like Civ IV. I could look back and see periods of my civ and when the most wars were clustered or at what point my civ really made a name for itself.
One of my favorite parts of the EVE universe is the lore, and Abraxas (Danielsson) seems to outdo himself over and over with each passing chronicle. (http://www.eveonline.com/background/potw/) While not always written by him, they largely are, and the stories function as little windows into the people who inhabit the universe, whether they be crewmen, old men, or other extremely minor characters. After reading all of those, as well as the short stories on the site (http://www.eveonline.com/background/stories.asp), I have a real interest in reading this book because Danielsson never disappoints and the long format really gives him a chance to weave a long tale, something that he's rarely able to do in the chronicles and that has real potential. Looking forward to picking it up.
"With the emergent storytelling that naturally sprouts from games like Eve Online it begs the question, when will game-based novels write themselves?"
In all honestly we are almost there with the arrival of social messaging apps being tied to games.
Now all your achievements, kills, failures, actions, deaths, wins, losses, messages, and etc. can be saved and shared real time for all too see as they happen.
It's a novel in bullet point form minus the prose.
@TaggarT6: "It's a novel in bullet point form minus the prose."
And that has both fascinating and terrifying implications for the future of literature in general.
@TaggarT6: While I cannot disagree with your premise, I find it's implication to be more than a touch frightening. Imaginative fiction is far more than a listing of achievements, or dry reporting of related facts.
Taken to perhaps too fine a point, the concept of a "game written" novel as you propose it to me is yet another, albeit distant, point on the spectrum of the distortion of language. I write this in full knowledge that we of the Internet generations are by far the worst offenders in this regard; i.e. 'lol', 'teh', and a hundred other abbreviations we casually throw about.
When we have gotten to the point that we passively accept the removal of prose in fiction, and yet still call it art, then do we have any right to word?
Please do not take this as an attack against you, but if we ultimately hope to have our hobby accepted as 'art', then these kinds of issues must be debated, discussed, and thought about.
@TaggarT6: Madlibs will only go so far and there is a certain consistency missing from a story written unintentionally by various people. At best I think it may be a scatter-brained story abstract, though there is admittedly a lot of potential there anyway.
There are games like Alan Wake, Penumbra and many others that give you a feel of reading through a story that has already been written or that you are the one writing it, but they are typically giving you one or more fixed stories.
Some RPGs have their stories, but give you much more freedom to piece it together out of order and to customize your character to a greater extent. With this comes a different sense of individual attachment that leads to this logical next step of the players writing their own story.
I could see a game being designed specifically to write a coherent log of your important activities in story form, even to the extent that it uses flashbacks and foreshadowing. There might need to be a mechanic in place to meter how that part of the game made the character feel so that it doesn't devolve into a flavorless pile of words that the player can't even identify with. If a game can write a story around a player's actions that the player will actually enjoy reading, there will be some damn near magical code behind it. Unless of course they cheat and pre-write a giant database of scenarios and plop them together, in which case after you've read one or two of them, you might be noticing a lot of replication.
One of my favorite little touches for Eve is the little news feed with all the fictional articles at the character selection screen. It's just a nifty little touch that also happens to incorporate a lot of info of the happenings in Eve, like wars, discoveries, first-times, and what not.
Hopefully the new lvl 4 epic missions will be more story/event oriented and less task oriented.
You know, people, its a book. Can we leave the whole "EVE is a slow game" thing behind? Its a book based on the backstory of EVE, nothing more. You don't mention the WoW books being stories about a repetative dungeon grind when they release a new one, so why the one-sidedness?
To be fair to CCP, the fact they went from what was an indie company to a global dev like they are today means they did something right, and its always good to see companies making some success these days.
I read the last book as a science fiction fan rather than an EVE player (something I don't play any more) and it was a decent book, so I'll probably be getting this one.
@Jon: A WoW novel? It would probably go something like this:
"And after defeating Onyxia for the 13th time, the great warrior Garland rolled a need on his weapon but suddenly, out of nowhere, the rogue ninja A55F4CE stole it from him just to sell it in the auction house.
Some time passed and Garland stood tall against Onyxia once more. "I'm needing!" He shouted over and over "Don't ninja the loot!". This time, his 25th time, the sword of shinyness would be his."
@CarlMarssilas13: I found Contact Harvest a bit boring. Yes, it has Johnson, but they could have got so much more out of it. First contact, but brutes instead of elites? Only one ship?
@Zezibesh: Contact Harvest is all about the aliens... and the AIs. About the first point, of course, I'm referring to the amazing Unggoy/Huragok friendship. About the second, I found Mack annoying at first, but the epilogue was very well thought out and written.
OTOH humans are annoying and obnoxius, all of them, as always in Halo... marines and soldiers, war and duty, where's my sniper rifle blah blah blah
@lachinay: You may want to correct Brians usage of "novelize" in the title of this article. According to you, if it doesn't translate something exactly from game to novel, it's not a novelization.
@ThursdayNext: Why would you assume that? There is plenty of CCP-written story that player-driven doesn't even need to exist. The players drive the game, more than they drive the story. The story is the backdrop for their actions; they shape the player world, but they have very little effect on the actual story.
@SeraphX2, Jon: Oh, well, that's a little disappointing. I was hoping this was going to be original. I thought it might be based on "actual" events because:
Eric Raab said, "The game is beyond awe-inspiring, and its intricacies deserve stories."
I assumed these "intricacies" to be a reference to the player interaction. Alas, not.
I'll admit that I am more of a TOS/TPM fan of Star Trek, the original Star Wars Trilogy (Seriously Lucus, WHAT TE HELL, MAN?), and even moreso a fan of Babylon 5 and FireFly.
That said, if they enable a way for me to recreate the feel of "The Wrath of Khan" in my online experience, or (even better) allow me to recreate Khan to do my mischief on this game, then I'll be there on Day one!
Meanwhile, In Rick Berman's basement, as new breaks out about Star Trek Online story being unraveled, and J.J. Abrams making a new story for The second Enterprise Crew:
Rick Berman: NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...!
(Gene Roddenbury and Majel Barrett are heard listening in the background, as if harmony found it's way back and ways for Kirk to come back come to mind in the hearts and thoughts of "Trekkies" - Note, not "Trekkers", come to mind.) :)
Soldier_CLE says DON'T STOP AT THE STAR! REVOKE THE WHOLE DAMN THING, OWEN!!! was starred
Soldier_CLE says DON'T STOP AT THE STAR! REVOKE THE WHOLE DAMN THING, OWEN!!! was unstarred
The Star Trek mythos continues to grow beyond all comprehension. Wow.
Mr. Fahey, I swear I'm not a grammer police a-hole, but with all due respect must you continue to use "chomping at the bit"? It's CHAMPING at the bit. Champing, sir. I really do feel bad for pointing this out...
champ 1 (chmp)
v. champed, champĀ·ing, champs
v.tr.
To bite or chew upon noisily. See Synonyms at bite.
@-MasterDex-: No, look at your links. The words chomp and champ are synonymous, yes, but the correct use of the phrase is champ at the bit. Goes back to the 14th century. Horses champ, friend.
@WhitePoop: After further study (following the links :P), I concede my comment. Well played, good sir. I personally would use 'chomp at the bit', my view is that the english language evolves enough to allow more than just the oldest word to be the correct usage, pity I'm not the regulator. :(
@dxgirly: I think most people are. I'd say in a room of 10 people, about 7 enjoyed at least one series of Star Trek. The funny thing is that all those 7 people could be laughing at each other for being Star Trek fans just because being a Trekkie got so stigmatized as a result of the outspoken extremists in the mix.
@-MasterDex-: That's almost certainly true, actually. I think it's time for a new series, the world is ready. We need something easier going than all of these cop/crime dramas (not to say I don't enjoy law and order, but still) and we need something new. I think a good series would be perfect.
07/12/09
Unfortunately, if you sit still too long to dream in EVE you will get your ass handed to you and there is very real danger of losing good bits of time you have invested in the game. It will teach you patience, risk, reward and loss. Losing a ship you worked countless hours to build or purchase in an anticlimactic explosion will hit you hard. Experiencing all of these aspects of reality with the right mindset in a virtual environment can give a novel writer some powerful buttons to press and help to create a story fabric that players feel even more connected to.
If you're only in a small corporation with a few friends or even soloing, it becomes difficult to work your way up the ladder without great care and persistence. In those cases, the lore around the universe can be a much more appealing way to get your EVE fix while you stay safely docked, spinning your ship and placing market orders. The option is always there though, to escape your ditch and find your calling within the game. That is one reason why it is so hard for many people to decide if they really like EVE or not, there is a huge sense of untapped potential just out of your reach next to the cookie jar.
I haven't read any of the novels, but if player actions become featured in them more specifically, I could see myself diving in just to read more embellished and refined descriptions of all that I'm missing. I suppose that's not unlike the snazzy videos, showing you pretty ships and big explosions in huge battles you will never see with fast paced techno music. The exciting difficulty level of the game does make it even more interesting to hear about the people who succeeded and made an impact.
07/10/09
I'm most reminded of the Dragonlance books. People sometimes make fun of the series as simply being a novelized form of a D&D campaign Weis & Hickman played. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. Especially in Eve, when I read and write about events I either witnessed or participated in, it pulls me in to the world in a way that no other computer RPG ever has.
07/10/09
07/10/09
07/10/09
About chronicling the history of a game: I always thought it would be cool to have a timeline or historical map in games like Civ IV. I could look back and see periods of my civ and when the most wars were clustered or at what point my civ really made a name for itself.
07/10/09
07/10/09
In all honestly we are almost there with the arrival of social messaging apps being tied to games.
Now all your achievements, kills, failures, actions, deaths, wins, losses, messages, and etc. can be saved and shared real time for all too see as they happen.
It's a novel in bullet point form minus the prose.
07/10/09
07/10/09
And that has both fascinating and terrifying implications for the future of literature in general.
07/10/09
Except void of any character, growth, tropes, or imagery.
I get what you're saying, but having a list of gaming-related numbers makes for a fraction of a narrative.
07/10/09
07/10/09
Taken to perhaps too fine a point, the concept of a "game written" novel as you propose it to me is yet another, albeit distant, point on the spectrum of the distortion of language. I write this in full knowledge that we of the Internet generations are by far the worst offenders in this regard; i.e. 'lol', 'teh', and a hundred other abbreviations we casually throw about.
When we have gotten to the point that we passively accept the removal of prose in fiction, and yet still call it art, then do we have any right to word?
Please do not take this as an attack against you, but if we ultimately hope to have our hobby accepted as 'art', then these kinds of issues must be debated, discussed, and thought about.
07/11/09
We really are a destructive lot.
07/12/09
There are games like Alan Wake, Penumbra and many others that give you a feel of reading through a story that has already been written or that you are the one writing it, but they are typically giving you one or more fixed stories.
Some RPGs have their stories, but give you much more freedom to piece it together out of order and to customize your character to a greater extent. With this comes a different sense of individual attachment that leads to this logical next step of the players writing their own story.
I could see a game being designed specifically to write a coherent log of your important activities in story form, even to the extent that it uses flashbacks and foreshadowing. There might need to be a mechanic in place to meter how that part of the game made the character feel so that it doesn't devolve into a flavorless pile of words that the player can't even identify with. If a game can write a story around a player's actions that the player will actually enjoy reading, there will be some damn near magical code behind it. Unless of course they cheat and pre-write a giant database of scenarios and plop them together, in which case after you've read one or two of them, you might be noticing a lot of replication.
07/10/09
Hopefully the new lvl 4 epic missions will be more story/event oriented and less task oriented.
07/01/09
To be fair to CCP, the fact they went from what was an indie company to a global dev like they are today means they did something right, and its always good to see companies making some success these days.
I read the last book as a science fiction fan rather than an EVE player (something I don't play any more) and it was a decent book, so I'll probably be getting this one.
07/01/09
"And after defeating Onyxia for the 13th time, the great warrior Garland rolled a need on his weapon but suddenly, out of nowhere, the rogue ninja A55F4CE stole it from him just to sell it in the auction house.
Some time passed and Garland stood tall against Onyxia once more. "I'm needing!" He shouted over and over "Don't ninja the loot!". This time, his 25th time, the sword of shinyness would be his."
07/01/09
07/01/09
07/01/09
07/01/09
Ass.
The Cole Protocol was amazing though.
07/01/09
OTOH humans are annoying and obnoxius, all of them, as always in Halo... marines and soldiers, war and duty, where's my sniper rifle blah blah blah
07/02/09
07/01/09
Almost.
07/01/09
07/01/09
07/02/09
Eric Raab said, "The game is beyond awe-inspiring, and its intricacies deserve stories."
I assumed these "intricacies" to be a reference to the player interaction. Alas, not.
01/03/09
That said, if they enable a way for me to recreate the feel of "The Wrath of Khan" in my online experience, or (even better) allow me to recreate Khan to do my mischief on this game, then I'll be there on Day one!
Meanwhile, In Rick Berman's basement, as new breaks out about Star Trek Online story being unraveled, and J.J. Abrams making a new story for The second Enterprise Crew:
Rick Berman: NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...!
(Gene Roddenbury and Majel Barrett are heard listening in the background, as if harmony found it's way back and ways for Kirk to come back come to mind in the hearts and thoughts of "Trekkies" - Note, not "Trekkers", come to mind.) :)
01/02/09
Mr. Fahey, I swear I'm not a grammer police a-hole, but with all due respect must you continue to use "chomping at the bit"? It's CHAMPING at the bit. Champing, sir. I really do feel bad for pointing this out...
champ 1 (chmp)
v. champed, champĀ·ing, champs
v.tr.
To bite or chew upon noisily. See Synonyms at bite.
v.intr.
To work the jaws and teeth vigorously.
Idiom:
champ at the bit
To show impatience at being held back or delayed.
01/02/09
[www.thefreedictionary.com]
[www.merriam-webster.com]
[www.answers.com]
[www.yourdictionary.com]
01/02/09
01/02/09
01/02/09
Of course, I said the same thing before SWG came out and was disappointed.
But I will still hold out hope!
01/02/09
01/02/09
01/02/09
01/02/09
01/02/09