作者：Brian Howe

带有深度故事性的电子游戏所推出的小说可构建一个保持游戏对粉丝吸引力的虚拟世界，此类游戏包括《刺客信条》、《质量效应》、《光晕》和《魔兽世界》等。无论这些小说作品出自无名的旅行作家还是著名作家（游戏邦注：如Brian Evenson以BK Evenson为笔名撰写《死亡空间：殉道者》），小说化历来都是大预算市场巨作独享的待遇。但是，随着Rovio将《愤怒的小鸟》扩展到电影和玩具领域，更多中型游戏现在也开始有所动作。以下是我们对发行新星Casual Gaming Press四本新小说的评论。

《Tetris Fugue》（作者：BK Evenson）

Tetris Fugue(from edge-online)

尽管采用了笔名，但Evenson独有的认识论恐怖风格在这本有关经典解谜游戏的小说中依然显而易见。《Tetris Fugue》是本以冷战为背景的带有浓厚神秘色彩的短篇小说，描述了沉默寡言的Alexey在莫斯科的冒险故事。不知出于何种原因，大量石块不断从天上掉落，还会发生旋转，形成各种各样的障碍物和通道。Alexey渐渐察觉到这些坠落石块的秘密。他决心将向克里姆林宫报告自己的发现，尽管他始终能够依稀看到其轮廓，但是城市犹如迷宫一般，Alexey始终无法到达。乍看之下，小说似乎是个令人紧张的故事，运用有限知识展开的后现代思考。这些障碍物的本质是什么？为何它们必须旋转？它们为何会出现？它们是真实的，还是Alexey的幻觉？Evenson在小说中探索着这些难以解决的谜题。

《Cut The Rope》（作者：Stephen Kang）

Kang的小说作品试图为同名物理游戏提供史诗般的背景。这部逾900页的小说始于一个简单的前提，逐步向令人费解的超自然宇宙学发展。在一个古老但令人恐惧的美国东北部小镇中，5个孩子发现了一个老旧的室外音乐演奏台下住着一个讨人喜爱的怪物，于是整个夏天都陶醉于用绳索向它提供糖果的欢乐中。但是秋季来临时，惨剧发生了，怪物从演奏台下跳出，杀害了这些孩子。Kang所编写的《Cut The Rope》受到谴责的正是这点。孩子们的灵魂进入一个超自然领域，其中有个称为“The Rope That Binds All Ropes”的东西，绳子的一头是杀戮者Patchouli，另一头是仁慈的6000岁海葵Jugjugbaboom。孩子的灵魂能否切断绳索，结束死亡和破坏的无尽循环，通过某些魔法获得重生？虽然其中某些有关未成年主角的含糊色情场景和奇怪的方言令人难以接受，但Kang作品的情节的确扣人心弦。

《The Minecrafter’s Tale》（作者：Shmargaret Atwood）

在这个简单的反乌托邦故事中，Shmargaret Atwood勾勒了一个公社的日常生活，那些无名的工作者每天为某个神秘的目标将土地从一个地方转移到另一个地方。田园般的场景讽刺性地展示了各角色的徒劳：永无止尽地重新安排他们的土地，每日每夜都这样毫无意义地度过。他们是囚徒还是迷信某些事物的人？还是说他们的行为是为了个神秘的目的？Atwood丝毫没有透露相关信息。那些不熟悉作品来源的人可能会批判Atwood的小说，但是《Minecraft》狂热者着实能够理解和欣赏这部作品。

《RanchVille》（作者：L Moore Leonard）

小说将《FarmVille》中的世界表现为19世纪末的美国西南边陲，联邦军队指挥官Valdez已退休，过着休闲的生活，成天打理农场、饲养动物并与他人互赠礼品。但是，他平静的生活被恶名昭彰的Zynga黑帮所打破，后者要求他缴纳所谓的“微交易”赋税。当Valdez粗鲁地拒绝后，他被打倒在地，团伙抢夺了他的美洲驼和鸡，带着轻蔑的笑声扬长而去。这点燃了Valdez心中的怒火，他开始讨伐不怀好意的Apache地区。Leonard所呈现的对话近乎完美，Valdez的力量着实令人吃惊。恶棍们的言行使我们宽恕了Valdez充满正义的暴行。

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2012年3月26日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: Novel games

Brian Howe

For videogame series with deep fictions – from Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect to Halo and WOW – supplementary novels provide alluring opportunities for world-building and help to keep fans hooked between iterations. Whether penned by pulp-fiction journeymen or barely disguised literary authors (such as Brian Evenson, who wrote Dead Space: Martyr as BK Evenson), novelisation has historically been the exclusive privilege of big-budget blockbusters. But with Rovio expanding the Angry Birds universe into movies and toys, more modestly scaled games are now getting in on the old-media action. This month, we review four new novels from upstart publishing house Casual Gaming Press.

Tetris Fugue by BK Evenson

Despite the light pseudonym, Evenson’s unique brand of epistemological horror is evident in his harrowing adaptation of the classic puzzle game. A spare and enigmatic novella set during the Cold War, Tetris Fugue inhabits the mind of a taciturn man identified only as ‘Alexey’ as he wanders through a grey and crumbling Moscow. For reasons unexplained, chunks of masonry continually rain down from unseen elevations, rotating this way and that, forming barricades and passageways. Alexey, a synaesthetic amnesiac, gradually begins to perceive a secret language in the tumbling tetrominoes.

He resolves to inform the Kremlin, which looms tantalisingly on the skyline but never seems to draw any nearer as Alexey wends through the maze-like city. What seems at first like a thriller shapes up into a dark Kafkan allegory and a postmodern meditation on the limits of knowledge. What is the essential nature of blockness? Why must they rotate? Whither do they go? Are they even real, or are they symbols of Alexey’s psychosis? Evenson probes – never quite answering – these intractable riddles, in lean prose with Old Testament undertones.

Cut The Rope by Stephen Kang

Kang’s sprawling novel attempts to provide epic scaffolding for the physics game of the same title. It begins with a simple premise and makes its way, across 900 pages, toward a baffling metaphysical cosmology. In a quaint yet somehow creepy Northeastern American town, five children discover an adorable monster who lives under an old bandstand, and spend an idyllic summer lowering candy down to it on ropes. But tragedy strikes as summer turns to autumn and the monster suddenly comes out from under the bandstand to devour the children. This is the point at which Kang’s Cut The Rope mythology goes completely off the rails. The children’s ghosts enter a metaphysical realm where lies something called The Rope That Binds All Ropes, which is held at one end by the killer mime Patchouli and at the other by Jugjugbaboom, an avuncular 6,000-year-old sea anemone. Will the ghost children be able to sever the Rope and end an ageless cycle of death and destruction, returning themselves to life by some ill-defined magic? Kang’s plotting and set-pieces are gripping, though the borderline-pornographic scenes between his underage protagonists, who all speak in strangely antiquated dialects, are distressing.

The Minecrafter’s Tale by Shmargaret Atwood

In this elegant dystopian fable, Shmargaret Atwood captures the texture of daily life in a commune where unnamed workers spend their days moving earth from one place to another for mysterious purposes. The bucolic setting ironically underscores the grimness of the characters’ Sisyphean curse: to eternally rearrange their topographies as days and nights pass meaninglessly. Are they prisoners? Cultists? Or do their actions have a secret design? Atwood gives nothing away. However, the novel’s shrewd social commentary and existential pressure are knocked off-balance when hordes of malevolent skeletons descend upon the commune. While those unfamiliar with the source material may chastise Atwood for this giant deus ex machina, Minecraft devotees will appreciate her close reading of the fiction.

RanchVille by L Moore Leonard

Transporting the world of FarmVille to the southwestern American frontier of the late 19th century, this expertly paced, tough-talking potboiler is centred on Valdez, an iron-nerved federal marshal who retires to a quiet life of farming, animal husbandry and passive-aggressive gift-giving. But his peaceful reverie is shattered when the infamous and heavily armed Zynga gang shows up at his ranch demanding an obscure tax, the ‘microtransacción’. When Valdez monosyllabically refuses, his jaw firmly set under the shadow of his hat, the gang roughs up his llama, threatens his chickens, and rides off with scornful laughter, lighting the fuse on a vengeful orgy of violence that takes Valdez deep into hostile Apache country. Leonard’s idiomatic dialogue is pitch-perfect, and Valdez’s folkloric potency is transfixing. But the implausible black-heartedness of the villains is an easy out, morally absolving us for our celebration of Valdez’s righteous atrocities. (Source: Edge)