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Archive The Influence of Literature and Myth in Videogames at IGN (by Douglass C. Perry)

  • 18 May 2006 4:13 pm
  • By Douglass C. Perry, Denis Dyack, Amy Hennig, Mike Verdu, Ken Levine, David Jaffe, and IGN

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... Did you know Bungie's Halo series is believed to be influenced by Larry Niven's books Ring World and Known Space? (Or is that too obvious?) Or that much of J.R.R. Tolkien's work is largely influenced by Norse mythology? That novelists T.S. Eliot and James Joyce influenced the direction of Crystal Dynamics' Soul Reaver series?

"I would go as far to say that all literature and all entertainment are influenced by myth," said Denis Dyack, head of Silicon Knights, the development team behind the original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Eternal Darkness, and the upcoming Xbox 360 game, Too Human. "Whether people think so or not, basically, we are immersed in the mythologies in our culture. In some sense, mythology defines culture. It's unavoidable. Any typical storyline almost always falls back to some mythology."

...

"J. R. R. Tolkien has probably had the greatest influence on games since the beginning -- from Dungeons & Dragons and the first text adventures and dungeon-crawl games, to role-playing games like The Elder Scrolls, and contemporary MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft," said Amy Hennig, the current game director at Naughty Dog and former Crystal Dynamics designer behind the Soul Reaver series. Without Tolkien's groundbreaking works, there might not even be a fantasy genre - or, at least, it wouldn't look anything like it does now.

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A handful of contemporary videogames are directly influenced by Lovecraft's work, from Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness to Atari's Alone in the Dark to Bethesda's Call of Cthulhu. Less directly, games such as the Silent Hill series also strangely fulfill Lovecraft's vision of impossible creatures too powerful and terrible for most humans to comprehend. "H.P. Lovecraft could be called the father of the modern survival horror game, as well as a key influence for horror-based action/adventure games like Eternal Darkness, Quake and even Soul Reaver," explained Hennig.

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Naughty Dog's Creative Director Hennig has drawn from different, yet nonetheless vital literary sources in her game creation.

"Every project draws on different inspirations -- half the fun of making a game is the research that goes into building the foundation and framework of your story," she explained. "In the Soul Reaver series, I focused on a handful of core ideas -- but the main theme revolved around the question of free will in a universe apparently ruled by fate. I saw both Kain and Raziel as Oedipus figures (Sophoclean, not Freudian), being railroaded by fate and all the while fighting for their free will. They are heroes because they refuse to submit, even when all the odds are stacked against them.

"Raziel's story is also based on ideas in Gnosticism -- the core idea being that the material world is an illusion, a lie perpetrated by a false and malignant god whose aim is to keep the human soul in darkness and ignorance. In this world system, the hero's goal is knowledge, enlightenment, and the exposure of the truth.

"I was also inspired, in oblique ways, by writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce -- particularly Eliot's Four Quartets, with its themes of despair, hope, and illumination. For the dialogue in Soul Reaver, we were influenced by the literary style of period plays like Becket, The Lion in Winter, and A Man for All Seasons."

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"I'll tie this back into our game. Too Human, though it may seem like the typical hero story on the surface, is not like that. The trilogy, and I won't say what the subtitles are, is a journey that the player goes through. The first is a discovery, the second, we concentrate on revenge, and the third, we concentrate on enlightenment. Especially with Joseph Campbell, a lot of people generally tend to concentrate on a young boy who is very immature, who kills the bad guy, and grows up. A lot of different kinds of literature have gone beyond this Conan the Barbarian-style story-telling. More people from our industry are starting to turn that light on. They're saying, 'Hey, it's all about content, it's all about story.' Silicon Knights has a department dedicated to content. All they do is create content. Ken McColluch and I have been writing these stories for 14 and 15 years now. He and I came up with the story of Legacy of Kain; we came up with Eternal Darkness, and now, Too Human. The people in our content department are people with master's degrees in literature. You can't get by with just throwing together a really good gameplay demo and then writing this crappy story around it."

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In the mid-1990s, Crystal Dynamics, which was then a publisher, split with developer Silicon Knights, which created The Legacy of Kain series starting with Blood Omen. Hennig continued on the series with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2, and finally, Legacy of Kain: Defiance. Kain bucks the trend of young innocent heroes prepped to travel the world, fight bad guys, and restore order. In the original Blood Omen, he damns the world.

"Blood Omen was really an unusual game for its time," Hennig explained. "On the surface, it was a fun, vicarious hack-and-slash adventure -- but it was also a very literary game, with thoughtful dialog and an atypical hero. Instead of the standard, plucky young hero on a quest to save the world, here we had Kain - a brooding, intelligent, vengeful vampire who ultimately must choose to save the world or damn it.

"I've always been a sucker for antiheroes and tragic heroes, so Kain had a special appeal for me. There were many latent themes in Blood Omen that I thought would be interesting to expand upon in the Soul Reaver games - issues of trust, manipulation and betrayal; questions about the nature of good and evil; and most important, man's struggle for free will against the immovable forces of fate." ...
―Douglass C. Perry[1]

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