January 30, 2008 10:55
Ender's Game: The Book That Cannot Be Adapted
Plenty of sources have been reporting that Ender's Game is going to be a video game. Which, you know, of course. It says 'game' right there in the title. But it kind of makes you wonder why it hasn't happened already. The book was published 23 years ago and won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as did (inexplicably) its (horrible) sequel Speaker for the Dead. But it's never been adapted in any medium: game, movie, mini-series, not even (I might be wrong about this) a comic book.
Why not? There's probably some legal stuff going on in the background, there always is. And you have to think Orson Scott Card controls the rights pretty tightly. And the movie would be damn hard to pull off: it's all child actors, all the time, and there's a hell of a lot of weightlessness going on in the battle room. That's a lot of CGI.
As for the game, well, I just hope they don't restrict it to the battle room. That seems like death to me. Like those Quidditch games, you'd run afoul of the fact that the core game mechanic just isn't that interesting. Sure, it's 3D combat, and you can make things a bit more interesting the way he does in the book, by varying the settings -- tweaking the lighting, adding "stars," having soldiers unfreeze after they've been hit, one army comes in early, change the victory conditions, etc. But bottom line, you've only got one kind of unit and one kind of weapon. Drag.
Plus, anybody playing the game already knows everything that Ender slowly figures out over the course of the novel. The enemy's gate already = down. Where do you go from there?
So I guess you embed it in the larger game-o-sphere of the full Battle School. Build in the mini-games that students play in their off-hours, especially that psychedelic adventure game with the giant's drink. (I remember picking Ender's Game up in a bookstore and thinking: oh my God, he's describing what it's like to play an adventure game! I bought it even though I couldn't afford it. I wonder if Card was the first to do that?) Build in occasional Bonzo-style naked shower-fights with rival captains! And the part that I really covet, a whole strategic player-trading eco-system whereby you swap students (who have different attributes? I guess?) with other teams. And I suppose if you really wanted to blow things out, you could have the alpha-types graduate to Command School and play out that whole sequence.
That's a lot to ask of one game. You'd need a package of Orange Box-level sophistication and diversity, which doesn't come along every day. Neh? Eh.
About Nerd World
Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman blogs about anything and everything that could be plausibly labeled geeky--science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books, tech stuff, and so on. If it could get you beaten up in junior high, it's fair game. About the Author
Matt Selman
Matt Selman has worked on eleven seasons and over two hundred episodes of The Simpsons. He currently serves as an Executive Producer. About the Author
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Reader Comments (13)
I seem to remember reading an interview/article with Card somewhere, possibly even in Time, where he said that for years he was against a movie out right because he didn't think a child actor could pull Ender off.
I remember that the article/interview came out right after 6th Sense, because he specifically mentioned that the kid in that movie was the first time he thought that may be it could work.
Truth be told, I read the first three books in the series and outside a couple of trivial moments, I don't remember anything about them. May be I need to reread them? Possibly, but not before plowing through every scrap of story that Charles de Lint has written.
And since all geek discussions can be summed up with an XKCD comic,
http://xkcd.com/304/
http://xkcd.com/241/
Posted by Matt S | January 30, 2008 12:26 PM
Read a blog about this game over at newsweek (Level up i think its called) and he quoted the two guy developing the game as saying basically that this instalment would be just the battle room but that they hadn't done any real development on the game yet. The quote made it sound like there might be more than one Ender game, i guess it'll probably depend on how successful the 1st one is. I agree with Lev tho, seems to me it's be a much better game if it incorporated most of the aspects of the book.
Posted by carlos_the_dwarf | January 30, 2008 12:31 PM
lol i suck, i basically just explained what that 1st link says, should have looked more closely. feel free to delete me.
Posted by carlos_the_dwarf | January 30, 2008 12:32 PM
Card actually addresses the issue of why there haven't been any screen adaptations in an afterward included in the audiobook version of Ender's Shadow.
The reason basically boils down to the fact that the one hard rule he has for selling the right is that the lead must be the actual age that Ender is in the book: 12. Only, every single studio to approach his has been dead set on casting a 16 year-old in order to bring in the adolescent "date crowd."
In the same afterward, Card also explains that he's met with a great deal of frustration while attempting to write the film adaptation himself, but that the idea of combining Ender's Game with Ender's Shadow has finally presented him with the writing devices he needs to compact the story into two hours.
Posted by Pipedreamer | January 30, 2008 12:42 PM
As an avid fan of the first book and then the shadow series. I would love to see an animated version of the novels. Something more realistic like they did with Beowolf.
Posted by EsotericMonty | January 30, 2008 2:38 PM
My only problem with your post (other than the whole idea of an Ender's Game video game) is that you called Speaker for the Dead "horrible." That hurt. Just because it's so different from Ender's Game doesn't make it horrible. Of course it was so different - all 12-year-olds become adults (even if they were rather adult to begin with). Anyway, bad call.
Posted by DaveR | January 30, 2008 5:29 PM
Just so you guys are aware, there IS a movie adaptation of Ender's Game in the works. There's an IMDb page: Ender's Game
Posted by Andrew | January 30, 2008 5:50 PM
WTF, somebody wanted Tom Cruise to play Ender...?
Posted by Susan | January 30, 2008 6:26 PM
It's the obligatory scientologist post. I think there's a secret group of them that go around posting that on every movie board they find. By the way...why did you bring that up...?
Posted by Andrew | January 30, 2008 9:47 PM
I followed your link, and the comment caught my eye.
I suppose some people are great victims of boredom.
Posted by Susan | January 31, 2008 12:33 AM
Some friends and I discussed the potential for Ender's Game in the gaming market, and you've got a number of possibilities: the Battle Room (duh), the Game Room, the Fantasy Game, the Genocide Game, and the overall Battle School game. They could all hold their own if built up right, though with today's gaming environment, it'd be fun to see someone pull off an MMO with all of the above playing factors (well, the Genocide Game would be tough at battle school... maybe Command School would be considered "endgame", no pun intended).
Posted by Dave | January 31, 2008 9:02 AM
An Ender's Game World MMO? Sign me up!
Posted by EsotericMonty | January 31, 2008 11:53 AM
Heck, just team up with Blizzard to make the Fantasy Game feed into World of Warcraft. "My toon leader in Ender's World has a 70 lock, and I'm pvping against myself on my 70 priest." (The lock would win)
Posted by Dave | January 31, 2008 1:01 PM