Update 28 January
- Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You
10.5 hours playtime
27 of 27 achievements
Book-Game Challenge for January 2019
Successful conclusion of my first game-book monthly challenge of the year!
To briefly recap, I chose to play and read this month:
| Game | Book |
|---|---|
| Orwell: Keeping An Eye On You | 1984 by George Orwell |
So I decided right off the bat that I would not be doing straight up reviews of either the book or the game. Honestly, thousands of reviews are readily available online and probably by reviewers far more qualified and eloquent than myself. I simply have nothing new to offer in that regard.
Instead, though, I figured my wrap-up post would be focused on how the two forms of media portrayed the same ideas and how they meshed for me personally as a consumer. Did they add a new dimension to my understanding of the theme? Did they manage to enhance or detract from the core idea with their differing incarnations? Most importantly and the underlying purpose here: was the whole thing worthwhile?
Now just as a quick overview of both products for any reader who is not aware of their basic premise, courtesy of Wikipedia:
1984 is a dystopian novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949. The novel is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda.
Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You is a series of episodic simulation video games by German indie developer Osmotic Studios in which the player assumes the role of a state operative and monitors surveillance sources to find national security threats. It is named after George Orwell, the author of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, references to which can be found in the game.
That out of the way, I wound up reading the book first before I played the game and that was the right call to make as it turned out. I got a lot more from the game as I was able to pick up the copious amounts of references it has to 1984 in particular - from borrowing character names to prominently displaying Orwellian quotes and gratuitous use of phrases from the novel, such as “unperson,” meeting in “the place where there is no darkness” and “2 + 2 = 5.” Really, the game pretty much beats you over the head with it and you’d be hard pressed to miss the obvious inspiration here.
However I would not say that the game was actually set in Orwell’s world in particular but rather drew heavily from that literary base and then modernized it in ways that Orwell, having published 1984 in the 1940s, simply could not anticipate. The single most glaring difference to me was that Orwell’s Oceania still relied on only physical forms of information exchange - letters, books, newspapers - all of which could be completely destroyed and erased as the Party wished it. If history needed to be changed, then all old editions of newspapers were simply vaporized and new editions created and distributed. Sort of a controlled Library of Alexandria catastrophe playing out over and over again.
You simply cannot wipe out data at whim in our cloud-based technological era; at least, not without pulling some kind of Walking Dead-esque mass extinction event. As the saying goes, the internet never forgets. One could argue that totalitarian governments such as North Korea have accomplished this, and while they have had obvious success with isolating their wider population, they remain unable to annihilate movements like the ‘Flashdrives for Freedom’ which smuggles outside media and movies into the country. Once those files are uploaded to someone’s laptop, the number of copies that can be replicated are innumerable and it becomes a wonky whack-a-mole operation to stem the black market tide.
The setting of Orwell’s book places the populace as already living under a totalitarian government, one that knows it will continue to thrive because it has already ‘won.’ The populace is largely docile and convinced that this is the only way of life; anything else is quite inconceivable. The rebellion by the character Winston was because he was one of the older generations who remembered an earlier way of life. Once those like him have passed on, and society is completely changed as free thought is curtailed through rewriting history and changing human language, there will be no more questions or uprisings. It is a waiting game. Or rather a planned social evolution by the government.
In the game, we’re witnessing a transitioning government. Surveillance has already been sold as a safety measure and approved by a somewhat fearful population heavily influenced by media, but individuals are still able to speak openly about their concerns and even hold peaceful protests. As an investigator, you use mock-ups of various social media profiles and private emails to piece together the threats to the Nation’s security and often must weed through quite a bit of open dissension to find the good bits of information to collect. There is never an option to simply delete the mock Facebook accounts of the characters, even if they are counterculture - apparently the characters still have some rights and you have to justify your legal actions, at least to a certain extent.
The most important question: was this worthwhile?
Yes. I thoroughly enjoyed both the book and the game and this pairing was spot-on as far as theme. Both forms of media raised questions for me and constantly had me comparing the fictional situations to scenarios in our real world, which is always a personal hallmark to me of mindful entertainment. I wouldn’t hesitate to encourage anyone interested in either or both products to pick them up sometime. Luckily, they’re both inexpensive to boot!
Enough posting for me. Will be back in a few days to announce my February match. Have fun, assassins!
I really like your book-game challenge idea. I would love to do it but I’m not sure I will be able to figure out enough pairings. I just played Orwell and I totally should have read 1984 before playing. I’m ashamed to say I never have. I did read the ABC Murders and Robinson Crusoe before playing the point and click games last year. I also read and learned about the Romantic poets (more than) a few years ago in college and played Asphyxia this year, which was pretty funny (and even appropriate) to see them portrayed as teenage girls. I am probably going to start another spreadsheet now to try to keep track of book-game pairings.
I enjoyed your write up. Something that struck me about Orwell was the selective process of gathering information as well as the possibility to rip the context from it. I wondered if either of those were themes of the novel?
I encourage you to give it a try! When I started I really only had a handful of definite pairs I knew I could do, and they were no-brainers like Tolkien/Lord of the Rings. The challenge of building a book-game list has become a hobby in itself, because although you can just search up articles like this one for easy jumping points, there’s no real category for this out there. A whole lot of it is just researching, asking well-read friends and other online groups.
I’ve now got a decent to-do list and another future list going that has ideas but I’m missing either the book or the game right now… so I’d find it fascinating if more people were reading+playing because there is such a variety out there. I’m only one person searching it out with my own biases and preferences at play. I had no idea at all about Asphyxia/Poets and that Robinson Crusoe was a game (have that book on my shelf.) :)
As far as Orwell, I think the matter of how much evidence the Party/Nation needed to take action against their citizens differed. In the novel, people could be arrested and ‘unpersoned’ for not having the appropriate expression on their face, so I think the need for building a case against someone was not quite as great. The main character, Winston, took great care in all of his criminal activities to avoid all detection, because in that world the slightest deviation in your daily schedule would trigger an arrest by the Thought Police. In Orwell the game, you’ll notice a whole lot of protesting, profanity-laden ranting on social media, and open distrust of the government by the characters and they seem to be allowed that dissension while you build the case against them (however wildly out of context you might decide to build it.) There’s no instant arrests for Harrison saying “f— the government!” for example, you have to prove he’s done something actually criminal first.
Actually I don’t recommend the Robinson Crusoe game unless you already have it. It’s a pretty poorly made HOG. The only thing that got me any enjoyment was the fact that I had just read the book.
That seems to go along with what you wrote about Orwell differing by being set in a transition phase.
Ah okay, thanks for the warning lol
Some kind of crafting and survival game (ideally with an island setting like the Lost in Blue DS series) would be good for Robinson Crusoe. I played a lot of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag a while ago, and it might even go okay with that. I’m thinking of reading Treasure Island before I pick that game up again. There is also A General History of the Pyrates, which I learned about from the game that want to at least read some of.
Historical games are particularly good for this, because there is also tons of non-fiction to draw from.
Thanks for the suggestions! I think maybe Stranded Deep sounds close - but I’ll keep my eyes open for a good one.
Treasure Island was one of my favorite books as a kid. Definitely do that :)
Neat idea. Thanks for the write-up. You should sent it to the Orwell devs. They’ll probably ignore it and you, but they might get a kick out of it.
Thanks for reading! I hadn’t thought about sending my comparison to the devs, I guess because I’m not a blogger or influencer or anything. I’ll look them up though!
The best case is when the person isn’t trying to gain anything…not new “followers” or “hits” or “internet cred”….just sharing something interesting with an entity that might care. Good luck! :D
Awesome idea for your game write-ups! It’s been a long time since I’ve read 1984, and your summary was a good refresher – I’d forgotten that there’s no digital information in the novel – just televisions. It is a little disconcerting how much closer we actually are to an Orwellian universe than back when I read the novel (mid-1990’s, I think). Usually I just remember the weird language constructs in the book, and think – “okay, at least we’re not there yet; good!” But I don’t think Orwell anticipated emoji… :D
Looking forward to seeing additional book/game pairings! :)
Appreciate the comments! And yeah, no one in past decades could have foreseen emojis and the other online shorthand we use nowadays. I do wonder what Orwell himself would have thought about our current era; he was truly ahead of his time.