As you may have noticed if you’ve followed us for a little bit of time, we here at the Android’s Closet Incorporated subscribe to the theory that video games are a valid form of artistic expression. Not everyone agrees with us, of course, and that’s fine– but Mister Adequate and I are pretty heavily biased in that direction. We’re both writers, and we’d both like to think that we can recognize and appreciate a genuinely good narrative in any form. Hence why we’re big, big fans of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Because not only was the gameplay solid, but the story– worthy of placement along side the best of science fiction novels– blew us away.
As it turns out, our initial assessment of the quality of the game’s story was accurate. Too accurate. SMAC’s story, you see, was a Herbert novel long before it was a game.
I didn’t know this until yesterday when I randomly ran across a reference article somewhere pointing out the game’s inspiration. At first, I thought it was an interesting little tidbit– lots of media homages other media, of course, not a big deal– but the more I read, the more I was shocked and then the more I was genuinely bothered. The game pretty much pilfered the book’s plot wholesale, even down to borrowing a couple of names. Oh, and those amazing tech quotes you get as the game progresses? Guess what book had similar quotes before every chapter? Yup. Suddenly, the game that I’d felt I could hold up as a paragon for originality and storytelling in video games was actually just taking it all from an existing novel.
The Five Stages of Grief promptly followed:
- Denial: “But… but… it was just an homage, right? They aren’t really that similar… right?”
- Anger: “WHAT? How could you guys do this to me, Brian and Sid? Why didn’t you tell me!”
- Bargaining: “Oh Gaming Gods, can’t I please just go back to my blissful ignorant existence beforehand? Back when SMAC’s story was the best original story in video games?”
- Depression: Mostly in the form of unintelligible IMs that I sent to Mister Adequate for about an hour. And that brings us to…
- Acceptance:
See, I’ve been thinking, and I’ve realized three things. Firstly, despite the many, many similarities– the game did make a few fairly notable changes to the plot, most obviously in the ending, which diverges wildly from that of the book, at least as far as I can tell (I haven’t read the book; I’m going off of Wikipedia here).
Secondly, the whole discovery did not change how captivating the game’s story was to me the first time I played.
And lastly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the very fact that the game is so very heavily inspired by an existing work of art merely cements its status as art. I have long been a proponent of the theory that the best artists are not just the people who invent tropes, but also the ones who take existing tropes and rearrange them or retell them in a new and interesting manner. Everyone’s done it, the best authors and filmmakers have done it (note how this book also inspired the movie Avatar), and heck, I’ve done it– the book I’m currently working on pilfered so much from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that it’s silly– so who am I to talk?
So in the end, I can live with this. What Alpha Centauri did was take the deck of cards that was an existing story, shuffle those cards around a bit, and present them to the audience through the unique prism that is video games. By doing so, they were able to bring the audience into the story in a way that a book alone couldn’t do. Shakespeare did something similar when he breathed life into old legends and had the resulting plays performed for the masses. I’m okay with that analogy.
Also, SMAC is still a damn fine game, and you guys can all expect a Let’s Play on it soon.
Originality is worthy, but presentation is the truly important part. The game may be derivative, doesn’t change the atmosphere it evokes or how engrossing it is or anything like that!
Frank Herbert was one of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time; in fact, it’s debatable that he invented sci-fi, demarcating it out of the mish-mash of scifi/fantasy that precluded Dune.
To say that “Oh, no my sci-fi video game is ripped off of Frank Herbert” is akin to saying, “Oh no, my fantasy video game is ripped off of Tolkien.” Tolkien made fantasy what it is today; there’s no getting away from that, and the same could be said of Frank Herbert for sci-fi.
As to the idea that the plot itself was ripped off…well sheesh, the idea of a planetary neural net/Gaia hypothesis can be found lots of places, Serial Experiements Lain (my favorite anime!) among them, Avatar…there was even an Outer Limits episode about a scientist who created a miniature planet in his lab, and the planet eventually developed a “presence” of sorts and this ghostly being broke out of the lab; they had to shatter the planet before it got any more powerful.
If they ripped off names/how the plot progresses, then they should have at least put the book in the credits, but if they didn’t then oh well.
Video games can still tell a great story, with memorable characters. I still remember being like “Oh crap Tassadar don’t crash your ship into the Overmind!! Don’t do it!!!” Or yelling at the screen, “No way! Damn you Mengsk, I won’t leave Kerrigan down there to be overrun by Zerg!” or being horrified at Arthas’ Anakin-esque march down the dark path in Warcraft 3, as he butchers his own men and sacrifices his old friends for Frostmourne. Some people claim, and this is debatable, that the purpose of literature or expressive art in general is to incite specific emotions. If that’s the metric, then video games certainly pass that lemon test of being ‘art’.
In fact, I would be curious to see a coherent argument as to why video games are NOT art. You might be able to say that Tetris, for example, is a only puzzle and thus not art, or something along those lines. But to say that Halo is any less art than some random shoot-em-up action movie, (like the Expendables) seems a bit of a stretch. Are there people who claim that video games are not art? Aside from the Jack Thompsons of the world, who (in my view) will simply say anything to lambaste M rated games and have never offered a coherent argument that video games are not art. If so I would be curious to see what they have to say; it seems like a very strange position to take.
Whoa whoa, I agree with most of what you said, but there was plenty of extraordinarily important and formative sci-fi before Herbert. Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Pohl, van Vogt, Lem, and so on. If there’s an equivalent to Tolkein in sci-fi, it’s the triune of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Herbert, whilst hugely talented and important, didn’t play quite so vital a role.
Yeah, Asimov and Clarke are the HUGE influential figures in sci-fi, not debating that. But nevertheless, Herbert was one of the pioneering authors, even if slightly lower on the proverbial totem pole, and they all wrote around more or less the same time period.
My main point was that Herbert was one of the prominent (even if he was not the most prominent!) authors who consolidated sci-fi out of the pulp comics that came before it, which largely meshed sci-fi and fantasy (see Krull).
Thus, ripping off Herbert’s ideas (as SMAC seems to have blatantly done) is akin to ‘ripping off ‘ elves from Tolkien or talking animals from Narnia. So even if SMAC ripped of the plot mostly wholesale, it’s kinda like…well yeah, aren’t most fantasy villains a rip-off of Sauron?
I wasn’t trying to say Dune was better/more influential than Ender’s Game; just trying to console poor, disillusioned Pike lol. SMAC may have ripped off the plot, but it was copying one of the sci-fi pioneers; an author of the caliber that pretty much everybody has to copy, to some extent, to be in classified as within the sci-fi genre.
Although the plots are incredibly similar it’s still worthwhile to read the Jesuys Incident. Quite frankly, the book is amazingly well written. I suggest that you don’t just read a synopsis on ‘pedia but actually delve into the book proper. Have you read any other Herbert books?
As they say, imitation is the sincerest flattery. :)