It'll be one of those books where if you're not reading very carefully, every word on the page, you'll lose track of the story and have to start the chapter again.
I remember people saying the same stuff about the Resident Evil novels when they were first announced, but S.D. Perry did a damn good job, especially with RE1 and Code Veronica, they were fantastic reads.
Kratos sliced into the monster, issuing much blood but making no lasting wound, until, when it was sufficiently wounded, he ran up the beast's arm, and as though directed by some unseen force, began to throttle the fiend with the chain of his swords. Soon the thing was slain, and issued forth even more blood and strange glowing orbs that Kratos ran around like a loon collecting before they could vanish. The Orbs made him feel... Powerful.
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.
07/14/09
Honestly, though, I would sell my soul on the cheap for a novelization of Gitaroo Man.
Here's hoping the God of War novelization is more "GRRRRR!" and less mythological fanwank.
07/14/09
It was the age of gorgons, it was the age of harpies.
It was the epoch of chopping people in half with two big swords on chains, it was the epoch of tearing off a minotaur's head with your bare hands...
We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going some other way
07/14/09
07/14/09
"Would you like to switch to easy difficulty?"
"No!", Kratos replied "That would make no difference, would it?!"
07/14/09
07/14/09
Seriously, though, a God of War novel could work, if they spend time talking about Kratos' inner workings, why he is the way he is, and all that junk.
Barring that, just write it like a Greek myth; the last thing we need is a narrative-form reproduction of 300 with chain blades.
07/14/09
07/14/09
07/14/09
07/14/09
07/14/09
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.