The comic is one of the most awful I’ve ever read, and it’s testament to the fact that “adaptation” in a multimedia franchise fits a fairly specific tradition, and even innovative works act within that tradition… when the tradition is ignored, it turns out badly. Generally a minimal set of story functions, or narremes, are transfered from medium to medium and then embellished as appropriate for the newer medium. In this case — whether because the writers felt a sense of fidelity to the game play, or felt that Doom didn’t have a story to embellish, or were trying to be funny, or just didn’t care — this is not only a transfer of the game’s narremes but an attempt to transfer its reading (playing) experience or mechanics, and the result is absolutely wretched.

Tom: I am not playing the Death Star trench run when I’ve already destroyed the Death Star in LucasArts games about 10 times. “Rashomon” had fewer permutations than this.

From “Gameboys” on Salon (ad viewing required).

Here’s a Mercury News article about the “Sims Shadow Government,” which is also part of the story.

Also found Control and Property in Play-Based Online Worlds, an MMOG weblog from Game Girl Advance.

Also, Game Research.

The review of the persistent world game Real Life is helpful in this situation.

An excerpt:

20031031172951 – October 31, 2003 17:29:51

<communication protocol=”cg://ara9975.lka18383″>
<bootstrap interop=”standard” value=”true”/>
<interware status=”err259″/>
<message type=”response”/>
<context_inference subject=”null” confidence=”0.0″ status=”failure”>
<support>
<subject raw_data=”what’s happening” expansion=”what is happening” type=”local_event”/>
<error local_event_count=”84720075″ heuristic_narrowing=”active” heuristic=”immediate_vicinity” candidate_event_count=”64492″ identification=”failure”/>
</support>
</context_inference>
<generalization>
<events count=”64492″>
<condition type=”foreach”>
<method id=”is_aware_of” return_type=”boolean”>
<parameter value=”self”/>
</method>
<operator type=”equals” value=”true”/>
</condition>
<result true=”64492″ false=”0″/>
</events>
</generalization>
<response type=”boolean” value=”true” confidence=”0.4″/>
</communication>

Which is perfect: XML, as a language strongly influenced by a desire for mutual human- and machine-readability, becomes an authentic way to express, to humans, a communication made by a character who is revealed, by the use of this mode of communication, to be a machine. XML is used artistically as a genre of speech.

Read the solution thread at unfiction.com and a summary of the game’s progress.

This is also a good time to point out A.O. Scott’s New York Times review of Revolutions which had some interesting thoughts going on… I was worried he was going into a grumpy “these whippersnappers with their films that look like video games” direction, but he’s actually juggling the conceptual frameworks of multiple media in a neat way…