How Have Best Selling Sci Fi Novels Influenced Modern Video Games?

You can see the influence of ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ in many open-world space games. While they may not follow the story, they try to create an alien culture that is as strange as possible to the player. There are many games, such as ‘The Outer Wilds’ or even aspects of ‘No Man’s Sky’, that try to evoke the sense of anthropological discovery found in the novel. The novel taught an entire generation of science fiction readers that ‘alien’ does not have to mean strange to look at, but rather strange in psychology and sociology. Successful games of this nature try to emulate that sense of wonder as well.

The influence of foundational sci-fi on 4X games can also be seen in the resource management systems of the genre. By far the most influential work here is Frank Herbert’s Dune, in which the rare and powerful spice harvested from the desert planet of Arrakis is the key to interstellar civilization. Other classic works of sci-fi have also explored the kinds of scarce resources that their characters must struggle to obtain and manage in order to survive on remote or hostile worlds. The vocabulary of scarcity and conflict between different factions and groups of characters developed in these works has largely been translated into game systems, where the management of different resources is a key part of the gameplay experience.

Resource limitation in games is often borrowed from science fiction, which long ago explored the dangers of rare and precious materials and how they can be used as leverage to manipulate entire civilizations. Herb Solow, a television producer who produced Star Trek, says “Science fiction is almost by definition about issues of today, tomorrow, and the next day, rather than about hardware of today.” Frequently, the “big ideas” from a science fiction novel are implemented into games, which in turn are used to further expand upon and explore those ideas in a new context.

Innovations to the space marine archetype come from military sci-fi novels. Many famous space marines (Halo, Gears of War, Destiny) have their origin in novels such as ‘Old Man’s War’ or ‘The Forever War’. Typically they wear powerful armor and have gone through tough training. The feeling of being a small pea in a large cannon for these type of military personnel is highly translatable to games and feels realistic for characters such as those found in many Halo missions.

I’d also like to note how slower, more meditative novels have had an impact on the medium. ’Solaris’ is a good example of this type of novel, as it focuses largely on man’s attempts to understand the incomprehensible rather than engage in conflict. Games such as ’SOMA’ and ’Observation’ try to tackle similar ideas, having the player grapple with things that are beyond their control in order to prompt questions about the nature of life and what it is to be human.

Pacing: Sci-fi novels can spend a lot of time to develop an idea. This can be replicated in story-driven games through environmental storytelling and audio logs that enable gamers to experience a lot of depth without cutscenes. A good example of this would be the BioShock series, in which all of the major ideas are presented through the game’s various dystopian settings and the narratives that unfold as the player makes their way through the environments.

The cyberpunk visual style of games is in part a result of influential science fiction writers William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Most notably, Gibson’s concept of the ‘jacked-in’ cyberspace in ‘Neuromancer’ spawned a plethora of digital realms, complete with respective hacking minigames to explore within them. The notion of a globally interconnected yet highly corporatized data-sphere has been the ubiquitous backdrop to most near-future science fiction for decades, and as such has heavily influenced how such worlds are presented in games.

However, I am curious whether interactive media doesn’t itself have a large impact on what writers of novels do in terms of developing closed narratives with clear conflicts and ends, which may not be fully represented in more open-ended works of literary science fiction. Perhaps the tendency of games and novels to develop moral complexity into simple binary choice situations or, in the case of many a 4X, faction allegiances, stem from the particular demands of an interactive medium.

Many of the archetypes and characters found in video games have their roots in sci-fi literature. Hard-boiled detectives in space, gruff old soldiers, and enigmatic aliens all have their origins in pulp novels and hardcover editions. The captain of a starship, a technical wizard, a suited corporation agent – these are all stock characters that have been developed and expressed in countless works of science fiction literature before being reworked and reexpressed in video games.

I’ve always been most interested in a games lore and how a great novel builds a whole history of a world through seemingly irrelevant comments or even an afterword. Games, such as the Metroid series and its extenseive Chozo lore, and the lengthy and detailed universe of Halo, all aspire to that same Novella style of lore development and are some of my favorite examples of building a rich game world that players can get lost in.

My point with all of these examples is that not only are video games drawing from the concepts of literature, but they are also going through a similar evolution in parallel to the novel. At the moment a lot of sci-fi novels are drawing from current scientific aspirations and fears. They are tapping into the culture around us. I suspect that a lot of the games are similar in that they are inspired by the exact same wells of cultural thought as the novels themselves.

But maybe, just maybe, this is simply parallel evolution. Authors are writing from the same well of our current scientific anxieties and wishes as the game developers. So while Frostpunk is essentially a way to play through a climate catastrophe novel, that doesn’t necessarily mean the game was influenced by the novel. Possibly the author just read the same article as the game developers.