Bergsonian Critique

“Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: by Mary Shelley is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel ever written. That makes it the perfect title for our first Literary Design Challenge BoRT. Many attempts to translate Frankenstein to other formats have fixated on the science of bringing the monster to life, but the book itself doesn’t focus on this aspect at all. Instead, it examines what it means to produce life and the impact that has on those who comes are directly and indirectly involved with the process.”

Two years ago, when I took Major British Writers class in college, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was included in the syllabus as a required reading. On the first day we began discussing the book, my professor began the lecture on lamenting those who referred to the Gothic novel only by its first name. He stressed that referencing the book without its subtitle didn’t foretell anything imperative about its premise, particularly since Frankenstein and his monstrous creation were indecently profuse in their pop culture manipulations.

While my professor’s grandiose remark might not hold any merit to those who haven’t experience the “literary edition” of Frankenstein’s truthful trials and tribulation, his emphatic intimation of the book’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, is something I wholeheartedly endorse. You can imagine my surprise – as someone who has been dabbling in English literature somewhat recently- when I fathomed the book’s allegorical and thematic underlings for the first time, particularly in the utter implication of the monster (a.k.a., The Modern Prometheus). My meek expectations of the narrative’s usage of horror were met with a profound appreciation once I finished the novel and had an informative class discussion and an “A” grade paper analysis (no, I’m not conceited).

Indeed, the concern that occupies Frankenstein most prevalently and explicitly is that of creation, manifested in a variety of forms. Shelley signaled the significance of this to her reader with her subtitle and her epigraph: the one referring to the classical myth of Prometheus, and the other taken from Book Ten of Milton’s Paradise Lost, referring to the Genesis story: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” The three characters invoked by these allusions – Prometheus, Lucifer, and Adam – share a history of rebellion, of a desire to “steal” some of the godly fire of life or knowledge for themselves. Shelley reflects the many layers of this mythology in her own rendering, with the temptation and power that Frankenstein finds in knowledge, as well as the danger that surfaces once it becomes apparent that he has either misused his knowledge or overstepped his bounds in acquiring it.

Now, while the thought of videogames adapting a body of literature is a prospect that I both dread and hearten, a great numbers of games have marginally incorporated the idea of Shelley’s modern Prometheus. Will Wright’s Spore, Peter Molyneux’s Black and White, or any god game that has eve been released, are concocted on a similar idea when a mortal owns a godly power that is capable of creating species and avatars on whim.

Nonetheless, even I consider the aforementioned abstraction as a bit of stretch. If Mary Shelley were a videogame designer (as noted by the BoRT entry) she wouldn’t dare to construe her vision on those games, principally since they lack the thematic implications of her original story. Yet, this remains to be a difficult task for the imagination: how to imprint the narrative’s themes onto the game’s central mechanics, making sure they would translate well to the core design overall?

First, it is essential to regard the narrative design or structure of the original work before adapting it to another medium. In this case, we know that Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a series of framing narratives: one narrator’s story told within the framework of another narrator’s story. The events described by the creature (which Shelley composed first) appear within Victor Frankenstein’s narrative, which in turn appears in a letter written by Captain Robert Walton -an explorer who met Frankenstein in the North Pole – to his sister. Consequently, the reader’s experience begins at the end of the drama, when Frankenstein and his monster have removed themselves from human society and are pursuing each other in perpetuity across the tundra. Walton then relates Frankenstein’s story, which returns to his childhood, when Victor developed his initial interest in science.

Thus, the game’s narrative could be configured with a similar design. In fact, Silicon Knights’ Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem provides an excellent template to build the adapted game around. Similar to the book, the central character of the game is jointed with other ones within a single thread of destiny, almost sharing the same consequences and experiences. Perhaps, that main character is a reclusive novelist who sought a woody mountain cottage (a homage to a setting of the original story) as a solitary confinement to embellish his latest and overdue novel of short stories, ala Alan Wake (another game that might prove to be resourceful). The tone or the genre the writer would write is up to the imagination of the developer, but perhaps a Gothic story might be more ideal here.

Furthermore, in spite that Frankenstein contemporarily embodies the quintessence of monstrosity in its purest convention, it is also necessary to bear in mind that Shelley’s own contemporaries are regarded as a serious novel of human ideas and fragilities. As mentioned previously, the book is served as an explicit opposition to the idea that man can achieve perfection and that any attempt to attain perfectionism will ultimately end in ruin – remember, the Romantic Gothic mode was a reaction against the rationalist literature of the Age of Reason – its mechanical influence spurs the premise of the novel, which is stirred by the utter loneliness experienced by three protagonists, Captain Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster.

Thus, I deem it pivotal that the game incorporates this propensity in the narrative, in which the main character is driven by his/her loneliness rather than a preconceived conviction or a certain striving aspiration. Another source of inspiration comes from Captain Robert Walton’s descendent to loneliness in the North Pole when he lost his zeal for adventure there. Regardless of plot and characterization, loneliness or solitude is a catharsis for that character’s imagination. For example, the laden writer draws his muses from his lonesomeness, intricately translating them to the working pages of the novel and the arcs of his characters.

However, the moral here is not the danger of isolation but the monstrous nature of the imagination that emerges out of it, that is, the effect of permitting one’s ambition to push one to aim beyond what one is capable of achieving. This sounds almost the antithesis of contemporary games design; most gamers would easily attest that they strive for perfection when playing a game. So, possibly a clever adaptation would still evoke incentive but by propelling it with minimal resources. For example, after the writer has experienced an arc of reverie invented by his own imagery devices, the game would ask the player if he wants to incorporate that particular inspiration(s) to the novel or not.

Perhaps, too many perfected inspirations (or a certain combination of inspirations) would either result a “good” or a “bad” ending. In other words, the strife to embellish the perfect novel might not yield desirable outcomes for the writer. His unprepared success and fame would prove nuisance to him as they’d only bring obsessions and temptations with them to replicate another creative work, thus, triggering a nervous down. To my surprise, the aforementioned upshot serves a good initiation plot for the game as well.

Alas, my basic knowledge of videogames design hinders me from producing a structural in-game blueprint that is not derivative or has not been tried before. The conventions of survival horrors do seem to bode well with my modest proposal, but I believe it would be more creative if it would be adapted from another creative stance. Nevertheless, I stand by my statements and ideas, or any proposition that features a faithful adaptation of the original work. Mary Shelley has been rolled over in her grave countless of times already over insipid revisions that slaughtered her creation, so let’s not make it more monstrous than it was originally intended.