News

When J.R.R. Tolkien was coming up with the mythology that would lead to the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he assembled a trove of materials detailing everything about the world and culture he imagined, from the taxonomy of the flora and fauna to explicit details about the formation of languages.

Tolkien was inventing a world from the ground up, and he used the medium of the novel to tell stories about that world he created.

Today's Tolkiens are just as likely to use many media forms — books, comics, film and television, even interactive — to reveal the worlds they've created. Not simply adaptations — of books to movies; movies to video games — but original stories that may share characters and plot points, but are self-contained entities, all illuminating a common universe.

Joss Whedon, for one, is further developing the Buffy-verse with comic series for Buffy and Angel that pick up where the respective television shows left off. That is partially because he can't continue telling the stories on television, but also because there are more stories about that world that he wants to tell.

Using various media to tell stories about these invented worlds isn't simply cross-merchandising for profit. It's the future of storytelling, and video games are at the forefront of the philosophy.

The video games Mass Effect and Halo are supplemented with books that can't even be classified as novelizations of the interactive experiences. The novels for each franchise tell stories about different characters and events than those that make up the games, providing a greater context for the game story. The Halo universe was further enhanced by the alternate reality game — I Love Bees — that was created to market and promote the second video game.

You don't need to read the Mass Effect novels or play the Halo ARG to appreciate the video games. But the fans and aficionados who chose to immerse themselves are rewarded with a much richer experience, a sense of the larger worlds in which the games were established.

Ubisoft's Lost: Via Domus and Atari's Enter the Matrix (criticisms of game play aside) are excellent examples of how worlds created for other media can be exploited in video games by using the interactive medium to further develop and explore those worlds.

The Wachowski brothers, who wrote and directed the Matrix trilogy, were involved with the video game from the start. While Neo and Trinity, the protagonists of the films, appear in Enter the Matrix, players take on the role of secondary characters Ghost and Niobe. The plot of the game is identical to The Matrix Reloaded, but the stories are different.

While the film follows Neo and Trinity on their mission to get Neo to the Source to confront the Architect, the game is about the supporting missions undertaken by Ghost and Niobe. So when the movies refer to certain things happening — such as when Trinity is waiting for the security systems to go down at the power station — players of the game are making those things happen, in this case by co-ordinating an assaulting on the power plant. The films give one perspective, while the game provides a completely different perspective of the same incident. You can watch the films or play the game to get the story, but watching the films and playing the game gives you a more complete picture of what happened.

In Lost: Via Domus, players also take on the role of a background character, in this case photographer Elliott Maslow. Producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelhof had oversight for the story being told in the game, and made it clear that they — and originating network ABC — did not want big secrets to be revealed in the video game, reasoning that fans of the television show shouldn't have to play the game to get answers. Everyone involved with the creation of the game realized, though, that divulging extra details to gamers was essential. That's why, in the game, players can explore the Swan hatch, get more information about that hatch and the Dharma Initiative, and even discover what is behind the mysterious magnetic wall that viewers saw on television.

Later this year, Sierra Entertainment will publish The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. While expected to be primarily a repackaging of 2004's Escape From Butcher's Bay and an expansion pack — recompiled to display next-gen graphics — the first video game acted as a prequel to Pitch Black, the film which introduced the character of Riddick.

The game and the direct-to-DVD release Dark Fury, an animated short film, were both part of the merchandising and marketing campaign for the highly anticipated sequel to Pitch Black. While the movie, Chronicles of Riddick, failed to meet expectations, the Butcher's Bay video game exceeded expectations and served to firmly establishing Riddick as an anti-hero for the times. Re-releasing the first game as Assault on Dark Athena is Sierra's attempt to regenerate the character and the franchise for future games.

We've come a long way since Tolkien. At the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sims creator Will Wright gave an informal talk at an Electronic Arts event in which he ranged for an hour about "worlds," his word for an entertainment franchise or intellectual property. Wright believes that the existence of these worlds, into which we project ourselves, leads to stories that need to be told. Telling those stories further illuminates the world, which leads to even more stories. It's a generative process, a self-sustaining cycle of play and creativity, and video games are at the heart of it.