ChocoboMogALT posted...
The
twist
relies somewhat on
duping the player
, something that's not experienced the same way in other mediums. There's also the subplot of the little sisters which attempts to allow the player to make moral choices.
None of the other games mentioned really hit those notes. Metal Gear, especially, could probably exist as a 12 episode shitty Netflix series (with guest appearance by Kurt Russel).
No, it's very much like other games.
What it does is make it more personal in the form of you doing the things, but as a whole the actual story would not change all that much if it was put into any other medium. A book? You could do it just fine. A movie? Same boat: while it would still be less personal the actual twist would be completely unchanged by the medium.
This is as opposed to something like Baiten Kaitos where the twist *could not* function outside of a game at all.
In a movie, book, etc. you cannot make the same assumptions that you have in a game so having the main protagonist be a villain the whole time doesn't work as a movie or book that left the "camera" as the main character would immediately the main protagonist to switch over to them and it wouldn't cause the twist to happen at all. Only in a game can you go "well, technically you aren't Mario you're a Lakitu following Mario with a camera" and still have the person experiencing things directly assume the role of the non-camera character as that is who they control.
Similarly saying that Metal Gear somehow would work in any other medium is absurd.
How would a book plug the controller into port 2? How would it tell you to look at the back of the box? These things aren't things that make it literature or anything, but as an experience the entire premise of Kojima's games is that you deal with a bunch of random fourth wall breaking actions, things that cannot actually function in a different medium. This is very different than anything from Bioshock, where the feeling of dread from the desolate and somber rapture can be written in a book or how the visceral action can be shown on a movie: you cannot give a feeling of WTF in the same way as Kojima's stuff if you are not actively the one that is doing the thing in question.
So no, Bioshock is very much something that is based on a book author with content that could work just fine in a movie/book. The act of getting the person experiencing things becoming more intimate with the played character is not something that alters the story in any way meaningfully and only acts as a way to say that no medium could ever possibly be transitioned into another medium because of minor differences in how they function: it's just silly. Whether or not it would be as good as the original is mostly irrelevant as they all of their strengths and it is just as reasonable to assume a "perfect" scenario where the new product greatly capitalizes on its strengths as opposed to just assuming that they do a half-baked job and only directly transition what is on the screen onto the paper (or "why video game books basically all suck").