Solaris: The Impossible Game
Recently Corvus from Man Bytes Blog gave an intriguing task for his newest Round Table: take a book and imagine how a game would look like if that book was based on the game. That’s a mind twister and quite the challenge.
I immediately thought of my favorite and Sci-Fi writer: Stanislaw Lem. I think Lem was one of the brightest minds of our times. Basically, he used the Sci-Fi genre to construct scenarios for analyzing some mind-boggling philosophical paradoxes. The way he was able to bridge the gap between Science and Humanities should be an example for … well everybody. Especially in today’s times, there seem to be a growing separation between the scientific community with their skeptical and analytic way of work and the humanities with an interpretive, relativistic approach. Lem is an excellent example that those two aren’t exclusive and can (and should) be combined to create a better understanding of our world…
Compared to Lem’s books, other Sci-Fi seems like childish, pointless razzle-dazzle with technology. Actually, at some point Lem himself chose not to distance himself from the Sci-Fi community, rejecting an honorary membership offered to him by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was not only smart but also had some major balls.
One of his best-known works is Solaris. I’m not sure if I would call it his best work but I would rank it pretty high. Many tried to adapt his works into other media and Solaris was made into two movies. As all Lem adaptations, they both failed. They weren’t exactly bad movies. The Tarkovsky one was very artistic and at that time technically impressive. I do like the Soderbergh movie. It has some great production design, great music and is quite bold for a Hollywood flick. It’s just that none of them nails what the book is about.
So as a self-imposed challenge, I tried for some time to come up with an idea for a game based on Solaris. I wanted to finally give Lem’s work the credit it deserves. The recent round table task seems like a good context to share my thoughts with other people.
However, I the movies failed for a good reason. For exactly the same reason, a game might be doomed even more. You see, the book is ultimately all about failure and the limits of human understanding. Lem speculated that if we leave our planet, we might not be able to understand everything we would meet out there. We dream of other worlds and alien life-forms but what we expect are always things very similar to what we already have seen on earth. As he himself put it:
I must tell you, that we have no wish to conquer space at all. We want to extent earth to its utmost limits. We don’t know what to do with other worlds, we don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.
Lem actually spoiled me EVERY other Sci-Fi right there. Each time I see yet another humanoid alien in Star Trek or Star Wars, I can’t forget those words.
In Solaris, Humanity meets a REAL alien life-form (or “something”) and just completely fails to communicate or learn anything from it. The whole books shows the struggles of the crew to solve one of the peculiar riddles of the anomaly. In-between, we get glimpses into the scientific discussion and development by thousands who already tried to understand the phenomenon many years before. Even though the crew manages to “resolve” the acute situation in the end, they are no more smarter than they were at the beginning. The final scene could be interpreted that the protagonist basically gives up and accepts that the alien will forever be no closer to him than now.
Both Solaris movies avoided that difficult topic. Failure is not really something that goes well in a movie, especially not a Hollywood production. Or rather - failure can work but only as a tragedy; A meaningful failure. Simply giving up is quite unsatisfying. That’s why both movies always added something in the end. The Tarkovsky one is a nice, crazy (but pointless) plot twist in the very last second. Soderbergh took upon that and even added a happy end, showing a first contact scene which Lem denied us.
So how would I make it RIGHT this time?
I thought about an MMOG where players can freely explore Solaris. New content would be added manually or procedurally. Players could take pictures, add tags and post then on a Wiki/Social Network Site. They could then discuss theories on what Solaris is. There could be some simple puzzle players could solve together in order to get to more hidden places but ultimately, they should deliver more new questions than answer old ones. In the end, players would indefinitely continue this game of pretend-science until they succumb to the churn rate.
There is one problem with that game: nobody would play such a game if the KNEW there would never be able to solve the game. Sure, you can’t “win” World of Warcraft either but you get a clear sense of progress. Solving puzzles is different from the experience of a MMORPG. Action games are already fun and engaging even before the score is settled. Even if you fail, you often get a sense of how far you got. Puzzles (or rather riddles - Tetris is also a puzzle after all) are very result-centered. The reward comes from figuring things out, not necessary from struggling to get them. A puzzle game where there is no answer will be quite frustrating with no hope of redemption. Players won’t even try if they know the task is futile.
So releasing such game now, after Solaris is already availible as book makes little sense. You would have to refrain from making any reference to the book to keep up the illusion that there is an explanation.
But the idea actually works in the context the round table: imagine if Solaris hasn’t been written yet. There would be this new mysterious MMOG and players would struggle to find out its secret. On after another, they would fail and give up. Some players could get so depressed by the experience that they might actually write something not unlike Solaris.
But that’s not entirely satisfying. In Solaris, the characters face a natural phenomenon. They don’t solve a riddle created by another human. That’s the whole point of the book. The experience of failure to understand a natural phenomenon is very different from failure against the wit of a human game designer. In a way, we have an approximate Solaris MMOG - the TV Series LOST. Many people complain that the producers will never be able to solve the show’s mysteries. The critics don’t blame themselves, they blame the producers.
Genuine failure seems to be in fundamental conflict with what a game is. So seems like what I’m trying to do is impossible. In a double-sense, the Solaris Game is an impossible game and just like the protagonist of Solaris, I have to give up. Do you see any possibility I missed?
Please visit the Round Table’s Main Hall for links to all entries.
Popularity: 14%
Written by on January 13th, 2009 with
no comments.
Read more articles on Consoles and PSP Games.
- [+] Digg: Feature this article
- [+] Del.icio.us: Bookmark this article
- [+] Furl: Bookmark this article
