Ronald Moore And Harlan Ellison On Games

I was thinking a lot about the problem of video game adaptations of movie and television shows during the Screenwriting Expo 5 last month, well before I even subjected myself to the torturous experience of Reservoir Dogs. As luck would have it, I attended one of the most enlightening keynote discussions I've witness in quite some time when "Battlestar Galactica's" Ronald D. Moore took the stage with legendary science fiction author Harlan Ellison. Ellison interviewed Moore about "Galactica" among other things. During the end of their discussion [more on that later this week], the two opened up the question and answer session for the audience. Luckily, Ellison saw my hand raised high and called on me toward the end of the Q&A.

Me: Mr. Ellison, you worked on a computer game several years ago based on one of your short stories. I'm curious to see what that process was like for you and whether either one of you see potential to bring storytelling to that interactive medium of video games and computers game.

Slide Show!

Ellison: Well, my answer will be very, very short and quick. I was offered an enormous amount of money - and promised an even enormous-er amount of money - to adapt my story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" as a CD-ROM [game].

I do not have a computer. Susan [Ellison's wife] has one, and I have no objection to it but I call down from my office wing and I say: 'I'm coming downstairs,' and she hides it because if she doesn't and I see it, I'll kill it. So I have very little use for the Web. I know most of you swear by it, but it is all of a piece to me as Wikipedia. I have a vast library in my house; I have three quarters of a million books and - okay, that's a lie, sorry - I have a quarter of a million books. I have 250,000 books or more. Anything I want I can find there or in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and I don't have to worry that some schmuck rewrote it 15 minutes ago to take care of his secret agenda.

But there is Website that you can go to called harlanellison.com and I occasionally go into one of the little chat rooms there - occasionally - to answer questions. I'm not a moron; I can in fact operate a machine. But when it came time to do the game, they had a game designer come and sit in my kitchen and we sat side by side and I worked my typewriter. I work on a manual typewriter and I do 120 words a minute with two fingers and I make no mistakes. And so we did a game. And I would say something like: 'Let him [a player] go into the women's bathroom.' And he said: 'What?' And I said: 'Yeah, let him go into the women's toilet and he opens each stall and in one of the stalls he finds, hanging on a meat hook, his ex-wife. And there's no other exit from this stall. And he has to figure out that he has to take her off the hook and then the back wall will open and the game would go on.'

Well, he did all these things. This was a game that I created that you could not win. There's no way to win. But depending on how ethically you respond to the challenges, you will end up losing better than others. You can lose nobly. And that was my one experiment. The money ran out. I did not get the vaster amounts I was promised and we are still selling the game through our Website. And that's it. I have no interest in [games] at all. My interest is in the page, whether it's a screenplay or teleplay or a book. [To Moore] Take it.

Moore: I've spoken to video game manufacturers and computer game people several times. I went to the Game Developer's Conference [this year]. I think it's a fascinating world, but it's unclear how to translate some storytelling skills into that environment because the experience is so different. The gaming experience is fundamentally different than the reading experience and the viewing experience. And being able to tell an interesting and challenging story and make it a fun game at the same time is not so easy. It's fascinating, but in my conversations with game developers, they were struggling with the same issues. They want the characters and the situations and the stories to be deeper and more meaningful. And they love "Galactica" and they've said, 'We'd like to do a game that's as rich as "Galactica" and it would be great but we couldn't quite figure out how you do that in the game environment.' But someone will figure it out, I'm sure. And it will be the next great thing.