In preparation for our interview with Richard Morgan going live tomorrow, we thought it might be beneficial for those who may not know that much about the author-turned-game-writer to learn something of the man’s background. We touch upon his novels, the current state of game writing in general – an arena he is now entering – and just why marrying the gaming and literature worlds could herald in a new era of story-driven entertainment for the gaming industry.
Flashback a mere few weeks and the name Richard Morgan might not have meant much to you. At least, not around these parts. To ardent acolytes of hard-hitting cyberpunk literature, however, Morgan’s name is somewhat revered. An author who not so much arrived on the scene back in 2002 with his debut novel, Altered Carbon, but practically detonated it, Morgan’s name is well-known in certain cyber-junkie circles. And with genre gurus such as Gibson and Stephenson leaving the future-noir setting to focus on novels about modern day sub-culture and historical science fiction respectively, Morgan didn’t so much as usurp the title of Cyber King, but passively take up residency on a vacated throne. And we’ve been enjoying his reign ever since.
Altered Carbon, a groundbreaking, visceral treatise on societal descent where death is an inconvenience, and violence a natural by-product of an advanced civilisation hell-bent on personal survival, was a hit with critics and the public alike before going on to pick up the Philip K. Dick Award. It also managed to snare Morgan a sizeable cheque when Joel Silver, producer of such films as The Matrix trilogy, recognised the novel’s twisted, malcontent themes and glossy high-tech ultra-violence as the perfect backdrop for a cinematic jaunt through amorality.
Silver is known to have an eye for the slick, and with Altered Carbon sporting one of the most enigmatic and deliciously unethical lead characters to grace literature since Bester’s Gully Foyle in The Stars My Destination, its remarkable leading man was unlikely to go unnoticed.
Morgan presents a world where consciousness and memory can be digitised, personalities backed up on stack and ownership of your own body something that can be taken away while you quasi-exist in a computer. When one of the richest and most ancient men on Earth commits suicide (only to be resurrected into a private ‘sleeve’ sometime later), all round bad-ass Takeshi Kovacs is drafted in to unravel the mystery due to his unique – and unflinching – abilities.
Silver had his work cut out for him (the option on the novel has now lapsed) as Morgan’s protagonist is hardly the next Neo. Volatile, acerbic and literally borderline psychotic, Kovacs as a character manages to not only shirk off the hero tag with aplomb, but even dispel the concept of anti-heroism. In fact, in some ways, Kovacs is almost a villain. A self-serving, tightly wound instrument of death and mayhem who places the importance of heroics and justice far lower than personal motives such as survival and revenge, Kovacs is the epitome of wrong place, wrong time, but right person. He’s a chaos magnet; a fulcrum of every bad idea or sick practice the universe can concoct, simply because, in a world where life is so cheap and death incidental, Kovacs is a master merchant. And though some of this irreverence toward life has its roots in Kovacs’ former membership of an elite organisation where killing is actively encouraged as a means of keeping the population in check, the balance of this turmoil is the sum of his fragmented psyche since leaving the group.
Morgan went on to write two more Takeshi Kovacs novels, mixing themes once again with the introduction of war-fiction into Altered Carbon’s follow-up Broken Angels, and finally Woken Furies; a story that sees Kovacs come full circle, returning to his home world and facing the mythology that helped shape the man he ultimately became.
At this point in his career, the author shifted gears and explored some new ideas. Evident that Morgan is not one to rest on his laurels or content to simply ride the gravy train (he could easily have continued to churn out Kovacs novels until the genetically modified cows came home), instead he wrote Black Man (Thirteen in North America), a story about gene manipulation and a society perturbed by the consequences of messing with life’s blueprint.
It still contains common themes that Morgan so obviously enjoys writing about: crime, a convoluted maze of deceit and malfeasance. It even has its own version of Kovacs, this time the titlular black man Carl Marsalis. A genetically tweaked ‘variant,’ Carl is the embodiment of Morgan’s predictions of a future where selective genetic engineering is a reality. Progress that has resulted in a society both fascinated and fearsome of a fraction of the population who are now not only inherently different and potentially troublesome, but who also look just like you and I. Danger in plain sight.
He also asks some hard questions. The big one of course is whether or not it’s ethical to experiment with mankind’s genome. For example, tinkering with the building blocks of what makes a soldier, reverting the inner make-up of a person to include atavistic tendencies (such as a predilection to violence and obedience toward a dominant male – the concept of pack mentality), inclinations and dispositions evolution has weeded out over the thousands of years it has taken man to become civilised. Traits that, while making the aforementioned soldiers more aggressive and effective in battle, concordantly has created testosterone-jacked belligerent hot-heads always a fraction away from losing control.
Morgan also extrapolates the possibility of genetically modified women. He presents the concept of the bonobo, an offshoot of the variant program both lusted after yet despised by a society already on the brink of mass hysteria thanks to the program’s covert nature. Objectified playmates made more subordinate to cater to the whim of their male partners; women bred to be complacent, sexually adventurous and, primarily, obedient.
It’s a question Morgan likes to ponder: how will society react as a whole when the boundaries between technology and ethics become blurred? Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should.
Similar grassroots questions of morality are explored in his 2004 novel Market Forces (which came out before the final chapter in the Kovacs series) where, forty years from now, huge international conglomerates invest in wars and rebellions for a stake of the future GDP of the countries they’re gambling on. It’s a swipe at the practice of PMCs, a concept we’ve seen recently touched upon in Zipper Interactive’s MAG. Private armies fighting wars, not out of allegiance to a flag or an ideal, but for money. The ultimate gamble.
So, Morgan knows science fiction. He knows how to weave a story replete with nuance and subtext, a tale that can amaze with its plethora of futuristic prognostications and what effects such advances have on the human condition without turning the story into a show-and-tell at a science fair. Just as Asimov was determined to prove science fiction is not a restrictive genre incapable of supporting other themes such as mystery and crime (as found in his famous Robot series), Morgan writes noirish, highly sexed and hyper-violent cautionary yarns that fit well in the fuzzy what-if location of the future. He presents warnings; portents wrapped in the guise of über-coolness; worrying events fuelled by technology’s tangible threat of dehumanisation. Omens that suggest the path we’re currently on as a global community will ultimately end at a precipice.
Now you know something about Richard Morgan other than what he thinks of Halo. You know he’s hot shit when it comes to crafting inventive and engaging narrative, and if you’re not completely convinced, there are best-seller lists out there with his name on them that can back this claim up. All fine. But what is Richard Morgan doing writing a game? Why would such an eminent, successful and popular author deign himself to invest time and creative effort into a medium where story and plot have traditionally been relegated to the incidental pile? And, more importantly, with the confirmation that Morgan is working as lead writer on the EA published and Crytek developed Crysis 2, what might this signify for the evolution of what is still a burgeoning – though now highly lucrative – industry?
Of course, historically, games didn’t have or even require a plot. We didn’t need to know Pac-man’s motive for eating all those dots. Dude just liked dots. Equally, we didn’t need to know why the ghosts wanted him dead. Maybe they were their dots. Who knows? More importantly, who cares? But as gaming advances as a viable entertainment industry; the demographic of the typical gamer transforming from teenage troglodyte into mature twenty-somethings who wouldn’t mind knowing why they were fighting in a war or looking for an ancient amulet etc., gaming – and by association game writing – had to improve. The consumers demanded it, the publishers and developers acknowledged it, but, in terms of quality, story elements of modern games still often fall exceptionally short of what the game consuming public expect.
You only have to juxtapose plot and character development with the primary requisite of gaming – that of gameplay – and recent offerings from the industry, though an improvement to some degree, still lag far behind the quality gaming’s ever-increasingly sophisticated customers are calling for. Shouldn’t gameplay remain the primary focus of all game makers, the writing element always somewhat second fiddle? Perhaps. But there’s second fiddle and there’s downright broken instrument. Modern Warfare 2’s plot was a disjointed, shambolic mess. Assassin’s Creed put in some groundwork at the beginning. Before its story quickly descended into an inessential vehicle to simply move the character around the game-world of course. These two games are highlighted purely because they both enjoyed sizable budgets. Surely their respective plots should have matched the games’ presentation in terms of quality.
There are better examples, of course. BioShock is universally extolled as a landmark title in terms of setting and theme – a game that is intrinsically narrative by its very nature. The Uncharted games also have received widespread acclaim for their approach and recognition of story and character. Unfortunately, such examples are the exception rather than the norm. If we’ve reached the point on the graphical evolution scale where photo-realism is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality, the next advances in gaming will likely not be technical in nature but in other more traditional areas. Areas such as story and character development.
Things are changing though, and for the better. Even titles like ModNation Racers now have a narrative slant. You could argue that this particular game doesn’t need a plot, sure. But the fact is, it’s there. It’s there because the designers believe that, no matter what genre your game inhabits, having a narrative angle fosters a connection between the player and the game, and such feeling of familiarity aids game immersion and interactivity – all qualities we look for in a good gaming experience.
Gaming is big business, and has been for quite some time. Putting money, effort and time into a game’s story is a concept game designers and publishers are starting to recognise as a worthwhile investment. Having writers such as Morgan pen the script for a AAA title like Crysis 2 shows a commitment of progressing story-telling in gaming to the next level.
Indeed, Morgan’s involvement in such a game franchise is not the first of what we assume will soon become common collaborations between the gaming and literature worlds, with award winning British author Graham Joyce announced last year as the writer of id Software’s upcoming Doom 4. Who knows where this new marriage of game and book might end. In terms of right man for the job, however, it’s difficult to imagine a writer better suited to tackling a genre game. In fact, Richard Morgan writing Crysis 2 literally could only be topped by an announcement stating Stephen King is writing the next Silent Hill.
Check back tomorrow for TheSixthAxis’s interview with Richard Morgan. We talk about Crysis 2, what he really thinks of its competition, and how he’s going to be a very busy man for the next few years.