Reading Games. An analysis of the Alice books' adaptation into game format

摘要

The purpose of this essay is to examine the consequences following an adaptation from literature to video game formatby comparing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with American McGee's Alice and,primarily, Alice: Madness Returns. In order to answer this, aspects of both game theory and literary critique are takeninto consideration, regarding for example the narrative potential of the game medium and the gameplay's possibleresemblance with Wolfgang Iser's theory of the reading process.The analysis shows in what ways the original narrative has been altered in order to fit its new medium. Some of thebooks' main ingredients are simply retold in the games' so called information spaces, i.e. text and video sequenceswhere the otherwise playable character is not controlled. Others, instead, have undergone a ludolization or ergodizationwhere the story events are experienced as playable elements in the games' action spaces. Both games are structured witha notable imperative narrative that each player has to follow, while Alice: Madness Returns allows for more explorationand, consequently, greater possibility to expand the story told. This is mainly done by finding details and memoryfragments in the game's different environments and is, to some extent, comparable with the reader's filling in on thestructured blanks in a written text. In this regard the game scenario, however, is understood as a visual and ergodicmanifestation of the reader's mental process. This shows that, in the case of these particular game adaptations, theincreased degree of interactivity has brought with it a greater focus on the narrative as such. Both games also focusmore on the character development of Alice, as opposed to Carroll's original stories, while the complexity of the latter'spossible meanings instead is simplified into a single interpretation where Wonderland comes across as nothing morethan Alice's own delusion. Thus the two game adaptations in question are best considered as complements rather thanpossible substitutes to the original literary works.From a didactical point of view the aspect of comparing narratives in classic literature to that in different media,such as video games, is discussed in Raine Koskimaa's terms of electracy as a new form of literacy. Also considered isJames Paul Gee's notion of video games as something more relevant than literature for today's students, which is whystudies of the medium come across as more important by the day. The significance of relating the literary canon to themany different forms in which it is expressed anew is therefore emphasized as a didactic goal to strive for.