I didn’t realize it until this list was staring me right in the face, but there
are quite a few games based on books.
And one on an epic poem —
— one series based on the 1972 post-apocalyptic novel Roadside Picnic.
And ten games based on The Great Gatsby.
GATSBY?
Can you really turn the Great American Novel into a game?
Gatsby: Why, of course you can!
That was the question that was on my mind when I found: Gatsby Jam.
Jess Geyer: Gatsby Jam was a game jam that we created on itch.io.
Simone: Gatsby Jam was hosted by Jess Geyer and Alex Sprague of Wannabe Games in January
of 2021.
Jess: It was a 30-day long production where we invited people, anybody who wanted to make a
game based around the Great Gatsby —
Simone: Gatsby Jam struck me as something special.
Gatsby is maybe the only classic novel to provoke a whole game jam.
I wanted to know why.
Also, I love the book, and I wanted an excuse to make a video about it.
First, a quick refresher on The Great Gatsby:
Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel follows Nick Carraway, a good ol’ midwestern guy who
moves East to work in the stock exchange.
He rents a house on Long Island from the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a millionaire who throws baller
parties.
Conveniently, Nick’s cousin Daisy and her terrible husband Tom Buchanan live right across
the bay — WAIT A MINUTE IS THIS GONNA BE IMPORTANT.
Turns out, Gatsby and Daisy had wanted to get married when they were younger, but by
the time Gatsby returned from THE WAR, Daisy had already married wealthy Tom.
Nick reintroduces Gatsby and Daisy, they rekindle their romance, making Gatsby hope
that she’ll leave Tom and choose him after all.
She doesn’t.
Jess: I mean, The Great Gatsby is obviously a book that has touched a lot of people's lives,
especially in the United States where it's required reading for so many high schoolers.
You want me to say that again?
Without my dog sneezing?
Simone: Like many “required reading” books, Gatsby is polarizing.
I personally love it.
It’s gossipy, poetic, and above all: short.
But when Gatsby first came out, most people seemed to feel more like Alex:
Alex Sprague: I had a notoriously bad experience reading The Great Gatsby in high school.
I don't think the book’s that bad anymore, but man do I loathe the “Oh, woe is me. I'm
so rich, hanging out with white supremacists and woman beaters.
But I'm better than them, even though I'm just chilling with them all day, every day
drinking gin.”
Simone: Gatsby undersold, sending Scott Fitzgerald on a decade-long depression bender.
In the next 15 years of his life, he only published one more full novel — a cascade
of short stories that made him feel like a sell-out — a collection of essays about
his mental breakdown that should’ve stayed on the locked Twitter — and one more posthumous,
and unfinished, novel.
Fitzgerald was only 40 years old when he died.
He didn’t live to see Gatsby take on a second life: as a paperback sent to soldiers
serving in World War 2.
In this crowd, Gatsby was a huge hit: maybe something about the doomed romantic idea of coming back from
war as a self-made millionaire was appealing.
Anyway, Gatsby’s newfound popularity stuck, and it became widely taught in U.S. high schools
and universities.
Jess: I do think the Great Gatsby is very well-written … there are books that have
depth, and themes, and something you can bite into, something that can make you, like Alex,
hate it, have a lot of strong opinions, or to make you love it, and wanna reread it.
Simone: So: The Great Gatsby has clear themes and aesthetics.
It’s so ubiquitous that even if you haven’t read it, you probably have a preconceived
notion of it.
That makes it perfect for this kind of adaptation — and perfect for parody.
Jess: …You could make an infinite amount of iterations because everyone has their own
interpretation. Everyone gets something different out of it.
Everyone feels something different...
Simone: The Great Ratsby is a journaling game where the player is a rat living in Gatsby’s
mansion trying to win back their lost love.
Over the course of the game you draw cards to create scenarios, and write what happens
to you.
On the game’s website, its creator M. Davis writes “I have never read the book, nor
watched the movie.
I find this makes things funnier.”
Ratsby picks up on The Great Gatsby’s romantic melodrama and just scurries with it.
But Following Gatsby, by AlooWalking, is much darker.
It takes place in the valley of ashes — which in The Great Gatsby is a part of Queens, and here is
a dystopian junk heap the players are trapped in.
Each players’ goal is to escape and find someone important to them on the outside.
They scheme and build relationships and make increasingly desperate attempts — but they
never escape.
Because it’s impossible — just like Gatsby’s dream to reunite with Daisy.
But it also mirrors how Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, never had a chance of escaping her own
situation, and becoming anything but a disposable body for Tom… and for the plot.
Any upward mobility the characters feel they have, just falls apart.
The two digital games in the Gatsby Jam collection draw from the book’s imagery: Rhythm Action
Gatsby uses the book’s 1925 cover as the backdrop to an HONESTLY GREAT RHYTHM GAME.
~The Great Gatsby~ turns a chunk of the novel into an adventure/platforming game.
It’s possibly the most literal adaptation of the book — using the text and following
its events, until the end, when it all breaks apart.
It’s the second game in the Jam to mention the valley of ashes, which Nick travels through
with Daisy’s shitty husband Tom on the way to the city.
“This valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and
hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising
smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling
through the powdery air.”
It’s an incredibly evocative setting, and maybe one of the more explicit moments where
Fitzgerald is rubbing the book’s themes in your face SO HARD.
Between the glittering wealth of Long Island, and the exciting world of NEW YORK CITY is
literal hell on earth where working people are trapped.
Oof!
But the real reason Gatsby Jam happened wasn’t because of evocative ash heaps or clearly
defined themes.
In fact, it has nothing to do with The Great Gatsby’s material at all.
Alex: So it did not come out because we love The Great Gatsby or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
It came out because we hate copyright law.
Jess: We made this game jam because it was entering the public domain — The Great Gatsby
was — and it was kind of a celebration.
You can do whatever you want with this text now.
Simone: That’s the idea that fueled their creation for the game jam: The Great Gatsby:
The Game: The Movie (The Game) LIVE!
On Stage.
A very loose roleplaying game that takes on new rules depending on what pieces you can
steal from other board games you own.
Jess: Using other elements from board games that was really intentional, again, another
commentary on what you can and cannot take, building off of other people's stuff, stealing other people's
work.
There's like so much baggage with that word, to “steal” something.
But we talk about stealing from other people's games all the time.
Like, in a great way — steal from other people's games!
Alex: I want more people to steal the things I made up.
Jess: Steal our stuff!
Simone: Video games, like books and movies, are subject to copyright, but games have a
gray area that these other works don’t.
According to the American Bar, “procedures, processes, systems, or methods of operation”
are not copyrightable.
To way oversimplify this, it means you can’t copyright a game’s rules or mechanics.
And it is impossible to overstate how important this has been for the growth of games as a
whole.
Jess: I mean, can you imagine if, like, Wizards of the Coast copyrighted “roll D20 and add
a stat.”
There would be like, four games, five games.
I mean, that's not true.
We've really innovated but —
Alex: It would have stifled the beginning growth, which is where all games come from
— that core new idea that you see is where a bunch of stuff spreads from.
And if you stop it from the very seed of the idea, it does way more damage.
Simone: Wizards of the Coast recently came under fire when it proposed changes to its
Open Gaming License, or OGL.
Per the OGL, creators were allowed to make and crucially sell their own DND-compatible
creations, like whole adventures, items, creatures and characters.
They didn’t need to get permission or pay Wizards any royalties.
This is obviously a huge benefit for homebrew creators who couldn’t afford to license
anything anyway.
It’s also led to successful companies.
Paizo’s roleplaying game Pathfinder — editions of which have occasionally outsold DND — was
published under OGL.
So were Kobold Press’s spellbooks, monster books and campaigns.
In late 2022, a supposedly new version of the OGL leaked that would invalidate the original
license, and require that creators report their earnings to Wizards of the Coast, and
pay royalties if they earned above a certain threshold.
Everyone hated this!
They hated it so much that, as swiftly as a multi-million-dollar company can, Wizards
walked the whole thing back, doing away with the royalty agreement and other controversial
proposals.
For what it’s worth, they are still working on a new revised version of the OGL, and it
has creators worried.
Copyright?
More like copyWRONG.
[clown horn honking]
[crowd applauding uproariously]
huuhhhhhh
Tara wrote that one.
Now, game mechanics might not be subject to copyright, but! sometimes new game features
can be patented.
Copyright is for published works, patents are for inventions, and only the creator can
use, make or sell that invention while the patent is valid.
And patents have been used to stifle innovation in games.
In 1998, Namco famously patented, for some ungodly reason, a system for playing a minigame
on a loadscreen.
It was originally used in Ridge Racer, which let players enjoy a quick-load game called
Galaxian.
That patent expired in 2015, a day that was celebrated by what else but: a Loading Screen
Game Jam on itch.
More recently Warner Bros. patented the Nemesis system that it used in its Lord of the Rings
games, specifically the way that the orc army hierarchy changes depending on the outcome of your battles,
and specific procedurally generated orcs will remember you and be promoted for killing you.
Alex: …And what they did was never use it well again, and ruined a really cool idea
in games.
That Nemesis system should be in every action-RPG.
Simone: Games have done things similar to the Nemesis system, although no one has come
close to building enemy NPC relationships that are as deep.
But in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, there is a character hierarchy of bounty hunters that
will remember you and hunt you down.
It’s really fun!
But the point is: Ubisoft is a huge publisher with an army of lawyers who could make the
case that their system is just different enough to not infringe on Warner Brothers patent.
And that’s just not the case for indie creators.
Jess: It is just a threat, because it can be wielded against you like a weapon.
It's scary.
Most people don't know about law.
…that's gonna make you panic.
Alex: I'd say only recently, we've heard from people we know of, they got bullied into stopping
making a game that they were working on, because they were afraid to be sued.
They don't have the money to handle that.
So they backed down. Even though the person kind of admitted, I'm more bullying you to stop this,
because it messes with our bottom line.
Then, maybe it's legal. But we'll jam you up in court. So what are you gonna do.
Jess: I mean, it's a leash.
It's a collar on creativity and freedom.
And it does suck if no one else can use it.
It's stopping other people from developing something that could have been really interesting.
Simone: And that’s what Gatsby Jam is all about!
The idea that you can, and should, riff on someone else’s ideas.
Alex: And for game jams specifically, I think it's way more about just getting something
down than it is trying to make a perfect game.
Yeah, you never make a perfect game.
Except for Rhythm Action Gatsby, which is a perfect game.
Jess: I think that's another way that you're just contributing to the canon, this big conversation
that people are having with literature, and movies and games themselves.
It's this big conversation back and forth.
And it's kind of a conversation that copyright stifles, you're not able to have as clear
of a conversation, when you have to tiptoe around what you are able to write.
Simone: Art isn’t made in a vacuum, it’s made in conversation with the rest of the
world, and that includes the people we talk to and the media that we consume.
That’s what Alex and Jess — and broadly the developer community on itch — are all
about celebrating: the act of just making stuff.
Alex: And someone please make a game based on the Chao Gardens from Sonic.
I don't think that's gonna get in there but.
Just call it something else.
[laughing]
[dreamy techno music rises]
Clayton: Here's what I think happened in the book?
The Great Gatsby — and he throws REALLY big parties.
The main character, whose name I don't know, is like "This Gatsby guy's cool, I wonder what his deal is about."
He discovers that Gatsby is actually sad.
He was in the War?
And also there's a lady. She is, knows Gatsby's dark secret.
I think he... killed somebody in a car accident?