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Stories That Would Make Excellent Games
Have you ever read a book which made you think it’d make a better game? Every so often I come up with a book that fits this category. In a novel you follow one path, that of the hero. Events unfold once, and whatever the setting, whatever the wider world of the book, you only ever see how things play out once.
In a game, your options open up. You can run the experiment over and over again and see what other outcomes are possible. Tolkien says of The Lord of the Rings that, had he wanted to make it a retelling of World War II the Free Peoples would have allied with Saruman and used the One Ring as a weapon to ultimately defeat Sauron. Would that have worked? Could they have done it with the alliance but not with the Ring, or the other way around?
Not every story makes a good game. You could speed-run Hamlet: The Video Game by stabbing Claudius the first time the two of you are on stage together. While I’d devour a Starship Troopers bug hunter first-person shooter, I think it’d be lacking the political philosophy that imbues the book. Sometimes though, and this happens most often in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, the setting is more interesting than the story. Sometimes an author is better at coming up with interesting problems than compelling solutions for them. Sometimes the conflicts that determine the fate of nations and civilizations beg for more thorough analysis than one case study can provide. Let’s look at a few.
Case 1: The Cosmic Computer, by H. Beam Piper
Conn Maxwell is returning to the planet Sorisende after six years attending university on Earth. Half a century back, the Terran Federation had used Sorisende as a forward base in a civil war. They had imported trillions upon trillions of credits of war materiel. Then, abruptly, the war ended. The planet is covered with bases and guns and tanks and supplies that it’s no longer economical to ship back out. The Federation abandons them there.
Half a century on the entire economy of Sorisende is based off of salvaging this abandoned war materiel, with the people wearing old uniforms and driving old scouting vehicles and so forth. Conn had gone back to Earth to research this war, to learn of possible locations of other depots worth salvaging, and in particular to find the secret computer Merlin which the Federation had used to win the war.
I won’t spoil the plot, but pretty soon there’s a battle with space pirates, and a damsel to be rescued, and I just want to get back to the salvage operations. Space pirates are great and all, but I was really enjoying the prospecting.
As a video game, this would work with a pretty standard economy builder setup, using the abandoned paraphernalia of a sci-fi war as your set dressing. Acquire loot. Sell loot. Buy upgrades that let you acquire loot better. Occasionally fight off space pirates. It’s a fairly standard loop, but none the worse for wear.
Case 2: East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by John Ringo.
This is book four of Ringo’s Council Wars series, which is science fiction so far into the future that it’s bent back around into fantasy. For example, in the first book — before civilization collapses — a teenage girl turns herself into a unicorn with all the foresight today’s teenager puts into a body piercing. It has to do with nanites.
In book four, we learn that the civilization powered itself with sixteen fusion power plants, which are supplied by one spaceship going out to Jupiter to harvest hydrogen. The ship is piloted by robots, it has sixteen longboats that robotically reenter, resupply the power plants, and return to the ship, and nobody’s bothered fixing or upgrading or really even thinking about the system for centuries. Until suddenly, that power becomes a critical war asset. If you could take control of the ship, you could starve the other side of power.
Eight boats are coming down into allied territory. Fill the boats with your people for the ride up. Eight will come down into enemy territory. Who are they going to send? You need pilots to control the ship, you need soldiers to fight their party, and each side gets one wizard.
The boats dispatch to power plants in a random arrangement, so you don’t know where your teams are docking in the ship. You can control all the ship’s functions from the bridge, but you can shut the engines down manually from engineering, but even with the engines shut down you can maneuver the ship somewhat by turning on engines in the (now docked) longboats …
It works all right as a story. It would make a really excellent two-player board game.
Case 3: The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
I’m a steadfast admirer of the Lord of the Rings, and I don’t think I could make a game that’s half as good as these books are. I’d go so far as to say that 98% of the story couldn’t be done better as a game. As I’ve been reading through them again, I find my mind dwelling on certain points, things that would make for wonderful video games. Let’s talk about Moria.
Advance time past the end of the series. Sauron is cast down, the strength of Barad-dur is broken, and Elessar reigns as high king over Gondor and Arnor. There are still dark things in the world, but they are fleeing and hiding. The time is now ripe for the assembled Dwarves of the world to retake Khazad-dum.
I would design this as a computer game, where you have an army of dwarves that you have to keep supplied. Start at the western gate of the mountains. You tutorialize the game with a brief battle with the orcs for the first hall, and then you come to the now bridgeless chasm where Gandalf stopped the Balrog, and have to build a bridge across in order to continue the conquest.
Your host is initially supported with patronage from the Lonely Mountain, but soon you must rely on trade with the elves that remain in Lothlorien, with the Beornings to the north, and further afield with the other peoples of Middle Earth. To do that, you need to start the mines and the smithies up again even as you’re conquering the orcs and mountain trolls that remain. Even though Durin’s Bane has been cast down, there are still things fouler than orcs in the depths of the world.
I would play the heck out of that video game. And the DLC where you hire dwarves to dig through the ruins of The Dark Tower to see if any treasures might be salvaged.
Case 4: Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper
At this point, the Galactic Civilization has collapsed. The Sword Worlds were settled by people that wanted to get far enough away from the galaxy that the Terran Federation couldn’t tell them what to do. By the time the Sword Worlds made contact with the federation again, they found worlds that had descended into barbarism. They do what any self-respecting Viking would —loot!
The story follows a gentleman named Trask; he’s setting out into the galaxy in pursuit of revenge, but it’s almost impossible for him to find the man he’s searching for. He bides his time setting up on the planet Tanith, building a civilization out of the pre (or perhaps post) industrial natives. He raids some neighbors, and trades with some neighbors, trading with some that he previously raided building up his own planet, all the while waiting for rumors of his nemesis.
The vengeance plotline is okay, but again, I’d rather play that video game. You start with one planet, you have the option of raiding your neighbors, or trading with them. Trading is worth more in the long run, but if you trade with them you’ve got to protect them from the depredations of other Space Vikings. You can sell your services to other Space Vikings and trade with your home world, but you’ve got to be careful that they don’t just plunder you either. Vikings gonna Vike.
Case 5: Cytonic, by Brandon Sanderson
For reasons I won’t get into, our hero Spin is trapped in a world of floating islands. Each island is a different biome torn out of some other reality and set floating here. The empire (there’s always an empire) has a station in this universe where they mine the floating stone. It’s useful in lifting any number of things, particularly space fighters.
There are four bands of pirates. Because of the peculiar nature of this universe you don’t need to eat there, so they don’t really raid each other for resources, more for entertainment. Star fighters are highly prized, so they’ve ritualized combat such that ships are disabled rather than destroyed, and the agreed-upon wager for a single skirmish is the transfer of one ship from the losing pirate faction to the winners. But ships are only as good as the pilots you can put into them.
This setting is already so much like a board game I can almost see the pieces. Instead of a board, sell it with a stack of hexagonal tiles like Settlers of Catan. Shuffle the tiles and flip them up randomly and you can create a new archipelago of floating islands each time you play. Four pirate factions, four players. You start with a given number of ships and pilots of various grades. What doesn’t come naturally is a reason to go exploring.
I’d set it up this way; each person starts with seven hexes, one for their base, and the six surrounding it. Then you can go exploring, which flips up new hexes from the box, which get interlocked into your grid. These hexes can come with random lost wanderers, whom you can recruit as pilots or ground crew, and maybe even a brand-new ship. If you get too close to one of the other players they can ambush you, or you could go and try and ambush the empire (which I’d have play as an NPC). The game ends when one player has conquered another pirate faction or beaten down the empire outpost.
What Else is Out There?
Do you have anything to add? What games would you like to play? Maybe the fierce infighting of the Landsraad over CHOAM directorships entirely unconnected with the maneuverings of the Atreides and Harkonnens over the planet Dune. Maybe the same thing, but in Terry Pratchett’s Truckers, where nomes from Housewares plot to steal the domain of the Lady del Icatessen, and from there are poised to seize control of the entire store? Maybe you think that Battle School was rigged in Ender’s favor by setting the other teams to work with questionably effective formations. Maybe Asimov’s Foundation series should be a scenario in Stellaris.
What games would you like to play?
Published in Literature
Not to invoke the outer dark
That is the law
Are we not men?
Do you have an opinion on World Of Tanks, the one where I saw ads on youtube with Ahnald?
Other than “Any game that can afford Ahnald as a spokesman costs too much?”
Never played it myself. I’ve seen it played. For some reason the specifics of various pieces of military hardware never appealed to me as much as my brother Sam, for example, so I never got into that game. Playing as one tank commander in a team in a battle seems like a solid way to while away the hours.
It was probably an online game, which means the ad cost can be amortized over thousands or millions of people who pay a small amount each to play, or maybe playing is free but you pay for “upgrades” etc which seems common with online games.
It’s run on the freemium model; free to play but then you can pay to get better tanks. Which means if you’re playing the free version you’re always fighting like you’re Poland against the Wehrmacht, which means you’re strongly incentivised to at least even the playing field. Then in three months time there are new tanks introduced, which means you have to pony up again or you’ll be left behind.
I don’t like the freemium model. I’d much prefer to buy a game once at a fair price and have done with it.
As far as properties that could make good games. A RTS game based on the David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories could be pretty entertaining. I suppose those books indirectly are reflected in the Battletech universe, but a more direct representation could be interesting. It is also sort of interesting in that during the great RPG explosion in the 70s and 80s there really wasn’t a pirate themed RPG, at least not one I can remember.
Buy-once can work for home/board games, but not for online where ongoing support is required. (“Support” even just in terms of the servers etc to run the game, not like tech support for players.)
In H. Beam Piper’s The Cosmic Computer (originally Junkyard Planet), the planet, discovered by a fan of James Branch Cabell, is called Poictesme, and the capital city is Storisende. Whether the supercomputer, Merlin, ever existed is an important plot point.
The seminal interstellar warfare novel, Space Viking, is set in the same universe. The Space Vikings are descended from refugees from the defeated side in the civil war that resulted in Poictesme being littered with mothballed nuclear weapons and suchlike army surplus.
Interstellar travel is by hyperspace and there is no communication faster than a ship; which means that if you take your ships and devastate your enemy’s base, you won’t know until you get back if he has done the same thing to you. (This really happened to navies during the Age of Sail, Piper notes.) How a game designer might implement this, I don’t know.
It’s basically the fog of war on a much larger scale. The only way I’ve ever figured out to implement it in a board game is to have multiple copies and each player (or group of players) is playing in a different room and moves are given to a referee to make, and then the referee updates each side on what they can see.
You can also do it to a certain extent with cards or tiles, like in Stratego. What I’m not sure about is whether or not you could scale any of those ideas up to an interstellar level.
Using computers might make it a lot easier, with even players within the same room only able to see what is on their own screen.
It would not be that difficult for Space Viking. A player writes the destination system down and the number of turns it takes to get there. The ships departing from a system are removed from the game board and do not reappear until they arrive at the destination system. (Put them in a box with the card giving destination and arrival move upside down on the box.) At the appropriate turn, turn over the card (which has the destination system and arrival turn on it) and the ships arrive at that system. That is what we did, using 3×5 cards for the move cards.
Remember, there were no deep-space battles in Piper’s universe. You had to be in normal space to fight, and you always fought in stellar systems.
Are there any universes that do have other-than-normal space fighting?
Also that seems kind of similar to Junta, in that you say where you’re going to be for the turn and everyone reveals it at the same time.
In this case ships disappeared for an unknown number of turns. What you are talking about is like Wooden Ships and Iron Men where everyone plotted their moves and did them concurrently.
Remember King’s Quest V and the 1.5 seconds you had to throw a shoe at a cat chasing a mouse, never to be seen again and absolutely necessary to progress in the game? After I found out about that, I never felt bad about cheating in a Sierra game ever again.
My friends and I did manage to beat the Space Quest remake in one night without cheating, however.
In the Star trek universe ships can engage in warp space. Fighting is considered to be in a bubble where both ships are moving at the same relative warp speed. I think in Warhammer 40k space battles can occur in the Warp but I am not quite sure about that. Most systems though have the battles occur in normal space.
To an extent yeah, to another extent no. Craftsman Tools does it just fine.
Book three (I think) of the Honor Harrington series there was a fight in hyperspace. Since both sided were using the same gravity wave to speed up travel time they encountered each other, and also weren’t able to use the wedges or sidewalls they’d use for defense in normal space combat. The weapons still worked though. The result was both attacking and defending forces were destroyed.
In the Galactic Civilizations line of video games they use the excuse that all the distances are actually in hyperspace, which is why they can randomize the galaxy each time you play. Technically speaking that makes most of the combat in hyperspace. That’s all I’ve got off the top of my head.
Next question: Anyone know of a video game that was made post 2000 that had that kind of a gotcha mechanic?
That the convoy raiders fight?
I think so. I think it was one place where Buckley bit it.
Buckley also bit it during Storm from the Shadows as I recall, although that time it was a warship named for a mad scientist type.
He died in every other book or so for a while.