Adaptation Vol. 3, No. 2, pp.

179–192
doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apq010
Advance Access publication 2 August 2010

Adaptation and New Media

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MICHAEL RYAN MOORE*

Abstract  This paper examines the relationship between the study of adaptation and the study
of new media. In particular, it approaches new media through media historian Gitelman’s frame-
work of protocols—the interrelated technological and social norms that support technology use.
Looking across several new media theorists, I suggest that the protocols of new media
encourage us to rethink adaptation in technological terms. Using video games as a case study,
I argue that adaptation suggests not only the preservation of narratives, themes, and rhythms
but also a keen recognition of technical constraints and social practices, both within the original
medium and its adaptive counterpart. Moreover, because the protocols of these systems are
socially constructed, it is up to us to determine both what and how these representations signify.
Viewing adaptation from a protocols framework encourages both audiences and producers to
recognize the consequences of media use.

Keywords  protocols, video games, interactivity, participation, digital.

On November 10, 2009, the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) was
released to the highest sales revenue in the industry’s history. In five days, the game
earned over $550 million, surpassing the previous five-day sales record set by the
printed version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and more than doubling the
opening weekend box office for The Dark Knight. On the first day alone, over 2.2 million
players logged over 5.2 million hours playing the game on Xbox Live—to say nothing
of the countless others who purchased and played the game on the competing Play­
station 3 platform (Takahashi).
As one of those 2.2 million, I spent a good portion of November 10th playing
through the single player ‘campaign’ of MW2. Over the course of this campaign, a
group of terrorists frames an undercover American agent for the massacre of hundreds
of Russian civilians. Throwing diplomacy to the wind, Russia seeks vengeance by
invading the continental United States. Playing the role of Private James Ramirez, an
active-duty US Army Ranger, my job was to defend the strip malls of suburban Virginia
and the remnants of our nation’s capital from the invading army, eventually storming
through a bombed-out White House to send the ‘all clear’ signal to a fleet of oncoming
US fighter jets ordered to level the city.
As some readers may have noticed, this Cold War alternative history bears a striking
resemblance to John Milius’ 1984 film Red Dawn. In Red Dawn, Swayze and Sheen,
along with a handful of other all-American teens band together, forming a guerilla

*Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. E-mail: [email protected]

© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press.

All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] 179
180  MICHAEL RYAN MOORE

army to fight against a surprise Russian invasion of American soil. Although the details
of these film and game invasions differ, the similarities are hard to overlook. Within
MW2, the Russian invasion level is aptly named ‘Wolverines!’—the same name as

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Swayze and Sheen’s guerilla army in Red Dawn. Moreover, in a deliberate allusion to the
film, the ‘Wolverines!’ level features skies filled with falling paratroopers and Russian
‘Hind’ helicopters, mimicking the invasion scenes of the movie. As if this were not
enough, upon completing ‘Wolverines!’ on the hardest difficulty setting, the game
rewards players with an Achievement aptly titled ‘Red Dawn’.
This sequence in MW2 is one example of the many ways in which new media delve
into adaptation. The ‘Wolverines!’ level is more than a collection of references or cit­
ations of the 1980s film Red Dawn. Rather, to use Hutcheon’s words, the game serves
as ‘an openly acknowledged and extended reworking’ of the source text (16). The
‘Wolverines!’ level is both a translation and transmediation of its filmic predecessor.1
But beyond the Call of Duty franchise, and beyond video games more generally, this
coupling of translation and transmediation recurs throughout new media. Looking
across a handful of new media theorists, in this essay, I suggest that new media practices
encourage us to rethink adaptation in technological terms. In particular, approaching
new media in terms of media historian Gitelman’s framework of protocols, I argue that the
technological and social norms of new media use support new theories of adaptation—
ones that recognize the challenge not only of adapting things like genres, plots, charac-
ters, themes, audiences, and ideologies but also of recreating one media within the
social and technological affordances of another. Sticking with pixilated heroes and
digital warfare, I consider this technological interchange primarily through the case study
of video games, examining how the protocols of interactive digital worlds complicate and
broaden traditional definitions of adaptation.

TRANSLATING TERMS
Roughly defined, new media signal a shift from analogue to digital communication.2
Within the popular press, this shift is synonymous with both the personal computer in
particular and the Internet more generally (‘New Media’). Broadly, these ‘new’ media
would include CD-ROMs, DVDs, Photoshop, YouTube, MP3 files, blogs, wikis, and a
host of other contemporary communication technologies, while remaining distinct
from ‘old’ media like analogue text, photography, television, and cinema. Yet, this
digital/analogue distinction is only part of the story. Authors in The New Media Reader
suggest several overlapping perspectives that media historians use to describe new
media. New media refer simultaneously to the digital distribution of data across
computer networks, parallel developments in post-WWII art and computer science
algorithms, to the role of software in data representation and to the aesthetics of bur-
geoning communication technologies that build on the bedrock of prior ‘screen’ media
like television and film (Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 13–16).
Together, this combination of artefacts and their associated norms are what media
historian Gitelman refers to as protocols. The protocols of media refer to ‘a vast clutter
of normative rules and default conditions’ of media use. The protocols of e-mail, for
instance, refer to the technical industry standards that allow one-to-one Internet com-
munication, as well as ‘the QWERTY keyboards on which e-mail gets “typed” and the
 Adaptation and New Media  181

shared sense people have of what the e-mail genre is’ [italics added] (Gitelman 8). Protocols are
important because they suggest that media limit audience engagement while simul­
taneously responding to audience agency. Through protocols, Gitelman reminds us that

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media use is ‘neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary’ (Butler 187).
Consider, for instance, the ways in which recording technologies like TiVo and
distribution technologies like Hulu have transformed prime-time television for many
audiences. Prior to these technologies, television consumption was often ritualized in
both time and space. Networks broadcasted specific shows at specific times, and audi-
ences were expected to fit themselves into the network’s scheduling. But, while these
original protocols lasted for decades—‘possess[ing] extraordinary inertia’—they have
since given way (Gitelman 8). New technologies like digital video recording and
streaming Web video have altered many of the norms of media use. Rather than con-
forming to the network’s timetable, audiences can timeshift, playing back media when
and where they choose. Over time, both the technology and the normative rules asso-
ciated with media use change (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 40–47). While protocols are
relatively stable, they are also negotiable. Protocols reflect changes within the larger
networks that support media; as groups of media producers and consumers alter their
behaviour, norms gradually follow suit.
The relative novelty of new media places this negotiation front and centre. Precisely
because new media are new, societies struggle to find appropriate protocols. As Gitelman
writes, new media are ‘less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded
sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such’ (6). As Marshall McLuhan
famously noted when it comes to technology we often march backwards into the future.
We make sense of novelty through the lens of history—we try to define new technolo­
gies in terms of older more familiar ones. This is a tricky business. A mythical and
monolithic ‘society’ rarely agrees on the value and proper use of technology (Bijker,
Hughes, and Pinch 40–41). Instead, groups struggle to circumscribe media use in their
own interests. The choice of which history we use to define contemporary media are
necessarily political. Far from being static, protocols represent ongoing points of
contestation.

PERSPECTIVES ON PROTOCOLS
To get a handle on the nascent protocols of new media, it will help to cast a wide net.
In this section, I survey several attempts to distinguish the social practices of new media,
with the assumption that most readers are not familiar with work done in this field. In
particular, I look at three media theorists who approach new media from distinct
research backgrounds: Manovich works as both a media historian and artist, tracing
the history of new media throughout the twentieth century, while simultaneously
producing his own new media films and software. Benkler, on the other hand, approaches
new media in economic terms, looking at the effect of digital computing and infor­
mation networks on production and consumption. Finally, Jenkins suggests that new
media represent a greater movement towards media convergence, a world in which
media content flows seamlessly across devices, taking different forms in different con-
texts, and ultimately promoting greater participation. Using these three theorists as our
foundation, we can begin to see how adaptation might inform new media practices.
182  MICHAEL RYAN MOORE

For Manovich, the digitization of new media ultimately leads to a media landscape
tailored to individual tastes. In their barest digital form, new media exist as data, as
pure ‘numerical representation’ (27). We can reduce each Photoshop picture and You-

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Tube video to a series of ones and zeros. This simple fact gives new media some of its
most interesting characteristics. As numerical representation, new media are easily
duplicated and changed. In Manovich’s words, new media become both modular and
variable. Modularity describes the extent to which individual components of a system
can be separated and later repurposed. Modularity allows us to easily copy and paste
an image from e-mail to our desktops to a Word document or a Web page (Manovich
30–31). Modularity allows us to easily move content across different forms. Moreover,
because new media exist as code, we can not only transfer them but also transform
them. New media are highly variable. We can change code, edit pixels, splice MP3 files.
All things digital are mutable.
Manovich argues that this modularity and malleability of new media promote pro-
tocols of personalization. Unlike old media, which situate themselves in the logic of
‘industrial mass society’, of a world in which ‘everyone was supposed to enjoy the same
goods’, new media situate themselves in a post-industrial society, a world ‘which values
individuality over conformity’ (Manovich 41). Because new media are modular, audi-
ences expect to control the way in which media comes to them. Rather than waiting for
a network broadcast, audiences can stream Web content onto their TVs, PCs, and iPods,
consuming content at their convenience. Furthermore, because new media are
variable, audiences expect media altered to their tastes. Instead of relying on ‘media
factories [like] the Hollywood studio’, media producers increasingly turn to a boutique
model, producing specific media for specific audiences (Manovich 41).
This personalization is made possible by the economics of new media. As Benkler
describes, our economy is increasingly becoming ‘an economy centered on information . . .
and cultural production’ (3). Historically, this new media economy stems from the
simultaneous development of personal computing, of ‘a communications environment
built on cheap processors’, and on the development of a networked infrastructure for
those processors, namely the Web. Together, these networked information communica-
tion devices lower many of the traditional costs of producing, distributing, and con-
suming media (Benkler 3). Software like Photoshop and iMovie opens media production
to increasingly large audiences, while Web platforms like blogs, wikis, and RSS feeders
allow individuals to cheaply distribute these cultural products to wider and wider
audiences. Consequently, as more ‘information and cultural production’ enters the
network—as more and more media become digital—individuals gain access to a larger
pool of raw materials from which to produce new cultural goods. In Benkler’s words,
‘the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously coopera-
tive, produces .  .  . a new and rich information environment’ (4, 5). Media beget
media.
Following this argument, Jenkins suggests that new media encourages new forms of
participation. Long before ‘interactive’ media became commonplace, Jenkins argued
that audiences always participated with media. Even within the era of industrial mass
society, Jenkins suggests that audiences rarely passively consumed media. Instead, audi-
ences actively engaged with their favourite films and television shows by creating their
 Adaptation and New Media  183

own critical interpretations and deliberate reworkings in the form of fan communities,
fanfiction, and fanzines (   Jenkins, Convergence Culture 256–57). Consequently, for Jenkins,
the shift from old to new media is a matter of degree. New media lower the barriers to

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entry required for these types of participation. Precisely because we live in Benkler’s
world of ‘cheap processors’, participation becomes commonplace. Starting a blog or
uploading family photos to Flickr requires little more than the clichéd click of a button.
While the protocols outlined by these theorists are quite broad, they offer an initial
insight into how new media inflect our understanding of adaptation. In her book,
A Theory of Adaptation, Hutcheon describes adaptation as ‘thematic and narrative per­
sistence [combined] with material change’ (4). Initially, new media facilitates both this
persistence and change by nature of numerical representation. Because new media
exist as code, persistence is (metaphorically) as simple as copy-and-paste. When, for
instance, fans adapt their favourite shows into YouTube recreations, software like
iMovie makes copying the original footage trivial. In Benkler’s terms, new media pro-
vide us with an increasingly large ‘information environment’, a creative commons of
source texts from which to adapt.
Furthermore, the personalization of new media also facilitates media producers’ and
consumers’ turn to the familiar. Because new media are modular and because content
can travel to any number of black boxes (or screens), media consumers have unprece-
dented control over their consumption. Leveraging this power, audiences increasingly
demand media suited to their tastes. Rather than investing in uncertainty, in new intel-
lectual properties without a proven audience, media producers can rely on this handful
of past successes. Adaptations allow media producers to meet consumers’ dual
demands for personalized and novel media.
However, it is the third set of new media protocols, those of participation, that frus-
trate conventional theories of adaptation. As Jenkins and many others have noted, the
line between media production and media consumption has always been blurred; fan
communities continually engage with and rework the media that speak to them. New
media exponentially furthers this existing practice. In Benkler’s words, ‘whenever
someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings . . . wants to make
something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network connection, he or
she can do so’ (6). Within the new media environment, adaptation becomes a strategy
of participation. Rather than develop wholly new works, audiences take ownership
over existing media, adapting the stories, shows, and films that they most identify with
( Jenkins, Convergence Culture 169–71). In these adaptations, however, the reproduction of
plot, characters, and themes is coupled with an awareness of technological constraints.
In the next section, I will look at how adaptations across media often forgo thematic and
narrative persistence in lieu of protocols. Within the realm of video games, this them­
atic fidelity is complicated by game play itself, by the affordances and limitations of
interactive digital media.

SIMULATION/ADAPTATION
Over the past decade, video games have become one of the most familiar ways for au-
diences to engage with new media. According to a 2009 NPD study, nearly 64% of
Americans reported playing video games in the past six months, outnumbering the
184  MICHAEL RYAN MOORE

53% who reported purchasing movie tickets during the same time frame (Whitney).
Moreover, despite popular stereotypes, Nielsen reports show that within the United
States, the largest percentage of computer video game players are not teenage boys, but

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rather women in the 25- to 54-year-old age bracket. In fact, while men in the same 25-
to 54-year-old age bracket represent the second largest group of players, teenage male
players are outnumbered still by women aged 55 years and older (Rice). Although these
older generations are invariably drawn to different content than younger players,
surveys like the Nielsen report suggest that gaming is becoming an increasingly
intergenerational affair.
Complementing this demographic reach, video games also incorporate a wide range
of familiar new media protocols. Like all things new media, video games are numer­
ically represented as computer code. Consequently, like MP3 files and News Corp.’s
web content, video games are readily accessible, replicable, and modifiable. Game
hardware can be emulated, recreated in computer software, while games can be modi-
fied and altered by players, both legally and illegally. Moreover, like the music industry,
the video game industry has conflicting responses to this new media environment.
While some companies combat game piracy through digital rights management tech-
nologies that limit software installations and disc copying, other game studios offer
game ‘modding’ software, providing players with the tools to modify game code at will.
Moreover, these games have become emblematic of Jenkins’ model of media conver-
gence. Not only do game makers disseminate the same game software across multiple
hardware platforms but also game franchises become one brigade in a multimedia
army. Feature films become video game spin-offs, both of which are advertised by fast
food restaurants and toy companies with countless product tie-ins.
This alliance between games and film, in particular, places adaptation front-and-
centre within new media. One of the most visible models of adaptation in recent years
has been the growing trend of feature films translated into licensed video games. As one
journalist describes it,
There’s a new phenomenon emerging in the high-stakes world of big-budget filmmaking.
If you could sneak your way onto the closely guarded set of Spider-Man 3 or the upcoming
big-screen version of Iron Man, you’d be surprised to find the film crews working alongside
a group of people whom you would have never seen a few years ago, They’re video game
artists, taking photographs, recording the proportions and textures of sets, and working
closely with production designers and the visual effects team to make sure their game upholds
the same production values as the film. They’ve become an almost permanent fixture on the
moviemaking scene. (McEachern, ‘Game Films’)

From Transformers to The Godfather, Pirates of the Caribbean to Blade Runner, on a long enough
timeline, nearly all of our commercially and critically acclaimed films find themselves
re-imagined as virtual worlds. Often there is a delightful recursion to the whole process,
as game designers model their video games on blockbuster films that were themselves
adapted from famous novels or comic book series. Rather than playing a generic King
Kong game, players are subject to Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie
(McEachern, ‘Aping Film’). Although decidedly rarer, video games can also inspire filmic
adaptations. When a particular game earns hefty revenues and recognition, Hollywood
 Adaptation and New Media  185

executives seem unable to keep their distance. In 2008, for example, Mark Wahlberg
starred in the theatrical adaptation of Remedy Entertainment’s award winning game
Max Payne, while Peter Jackson’s involvement with the doomed adaptation of the Halo

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video game franchise ultimately led to the development of the critically acclaimed
District 9 (Kelly). These contemporary game-to-film adaptations reflect a long history of
often dubious Hollywood depictions of popular games, from Bob Hoskins and John
Leguizamo as the famed Mario and Luigi, to the box office failure of Final Fantasy: Spirits
Within.
Today, the relationship between film and game studios is rarely a one-way street.
Because video game production takes significantly longer than film production, game
companies often work on film adaptations long before actors stand in front of a camera.
During the production of King Kong, Peter Jackson’s first model of the title ape did not
come from Weta Digital, his in-house effects studio, but rather from Ubisoft, the pro-
duction company charged with designing the King Kong game (McEachern, ‘Aping
Film’). Similarly, George Lucas’s game company, LucasArts, shares both software and
square-footage with Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic. Both the film effects team and
the game production company work in a shared building on Lucas’ Presidio campus,
using the Zeno Development Environment for both special effects and game models
(McEachern, ‘Game Films’). Along with these shared assets, however, video games and
film also share a visual grammar. With the shift from two to three dimensions, the video
game industry suddenly faced the problem of perspective. Unlike filmmakers, who
carefully construct each shot and scene, game makers struggle to balance directorial
control with player interaction. How do you program a virtual camera, one with no
physical limitations, in such a way that players feel both diegetic immersion and
situated immersion, both in the story and in control of their avatar? (Taylor). While
undoubtedly tethered to these filmic roots, the visual grammar of video games is slowly
becoming recognized as a distinct form. Reviews of Zack Snyder’s 300, for example,
repeatedly (and often derisively) describe the film as if it were a video game masquerading
as a motion picture. As Slate magazine’s Dana Stevens writes, ‘300 will be talked about
as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies
and video games’ (Stevens). While much of this comparison speaks to Snyder’s use of
stylized violence and rapid shifts between slow- and fast-motion photography, it is
important to note that many of the film’s video game signifiers have to do with gamer
stereotypes: a hyper-masculine story, devoid of plot, targeted at a young, male audi-
ence, based on a graphic novel targeted to a similarly (mis)defined subculture of young
antisocial men.
Significantly, just as film adaptations struggle to escape the specter of the novel, game
adaptations struggle to cast off the reign of Hollywood films. Within the film world,
video games are often dismissed as purely derivative works, secondary productions
beholden to their theatrical source texts. Even when game and film development is
intertwined, as with Jackson’s King Kong, critics often assume Hollywood ‘can inject the
gaming medium with the same revitalizing energy and innovative vision’ that their
directors bring to the screen (McEachern, ‘Aping Film’). Part of this dismissal reflects
the popular conception of games as a technological toy, undeniably out of place in
productive society ( Jenkins, ‘Games, the New Lively Art’). However, equally responsible
186  MICHAEL RYAN MOORE

are the economics of Hollywood production. Within the studio system, games play
second fiddle to films; licensed film-based games provide movie fans with yet another
opportunity to buy into the film franchise. Few games demonstrate this corporate

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strategy better than 1982’s E.T. for the Atari 2600. Recently rated ‘the worst game of
all time’ by PC World, Warner Communications greenlighted production of the E.T.
game following the enormous box office success of the E.T. film (Townsend). To maxi-
mize holiday sales, Warner gave the game’s developer less than two months to complete
the project. Banking on the overlap between film and game audiences, Warner went on
to print over 4 million copies of the game. Tragically, the game’s rushed production
cycle led E.T. to both critical and commercial failure, leading Warner to dispose of over
half its inventory in a New Mexico landfill (Townsend).
While E.T. represents one of the more memorable blunders in film-to-game adapt­
ations, it is by no means unique in its reception. Although film fans often applaud
video game adaptations of their favourite franchises, game players view film-to-game
adaptations with a fair amount of scepticism (Fritz). In the words of one blogger,
‘movies have always been a questionable source for video game adaptations, partly
because they have plots and stories . . . partly because people in movies don’t jump
around . . . or pick up power-ups very often’ (‘The Problem With Licensed Games’).
Quite simply, playing a game is different than watching a film. Writing about this
difference, Linda Hutcheon compares films and games in terms of their shared
‘three-act structure’. Although both games and films follow a familiar formula—
establishing conflict, playing out conflict, and finally resolving conflict—video
games prioritize the second stage. Video games are very much about playing out nar-
rative conflict (Hutcheon 13).3
When film-to-game adaptations overlook the importance of this interactivity—of
the protocols of video games—they resign themselves to failure. Despite Peter Jackson’s
cache in the film world, Peter Jackson’s King Kong video game is best known for being
an easy source of ‘Achievement Points’, a scoring system that rewards players for
accomplishing specific tasks within a game (Gerstmann). Kong’s linear play and lack of
difficulty both seem to emerge from Jackson’s conflation of playing and watching. For
Jackson, ‘gamemaking is similar to filmmaking [because] you are focusing on the story’
(McEachern, ‘Aping Film’). From Jackson’s point of view, the three-part narrative struc-
ture is universal. However, without ‘a series of interesting choices’, to quote Sid Meier,
a narrative is never a game. Agency and interactivity are fundamental to game play.
Freed from a filmic fascination, the world of video game adaptations becomes quite
broad. Like the film industry, the game industry has found an ally in the world of comic
books and graphic novels. Familiar Marvel and DC Comics characters provide the
source material for numerous video game adaptations, from 1992’s X-Men: The Arcade
Game to 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum. Less frequently, game production companies also
find inspiration in classical prose. Perhaps the most visible of these prose-to-game
adaptations are the works of game designer American McGee. Both American McGee’s
Alice (2000) and American McGee’s Grimm (2008) transplant the work of Lewis Carroll and
the Brothers Grimm into the digital realm. These games are what Andrew character-
izes as ‘borrowing’ adaptations—‘employ[ing] . .  . the material, idea, or form of an
earlier, generally successful text’ (98). Both games borrow the setting, characters, and
 Adaptation and New Media  187

narrative of Alice in Wonderland and the Grimm fairy tales, while simultaneously opening
these worlds to player choice. American McGee’s Alice not only offers a reimagining of the
well-known tale but also invites players to place themselves within it.

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This invitation to participate within game adaptations becomes more complex when
we look at video games premised on other deliberately interactive source material.
Building on George Lucas’s film franchises, for instance, the games LEGO Indiana Jones
and LEGO Star Wars re-envision their famous film counterparts within a colourful world
of LEGO bricks and figurines. Players take on the role of Indy or Luke in LEGO form,
as they and their ‘LEGO pals whip [their] way through all of the best action sequences’
of the movies (Kosak). Building on both the film and toy franchises, these games
become complex adaptations; prior to these games, LEGO has had a long history of
adapting Lucas’s Star Wars franchise into children’s toys. Within the game, these LEGO
adaptations are themselves adapted into digital form, both as interactive avatars and as
characters in cut-scenes adapted from the narrative of the films themselves. How do we
make sense of these multiple remediations? Turning back to Andrew, we can distin-
guish between borrowing and intersecting models of adaptation. While a borrowing
adaptation borrows material to create a variation on a theme, intersecting adaptations
strive to be more faithful. Intersecting adaptations attempt to accurately recreate one
medium within the constraints of another. For instance, an intersecting adaptation of a
novel into a film ‘is the novel as seen by cinema’ (Andrew 99). One can imagine how
LEGO Indiana Jones and LEGO Star Wars might fit this schema—the LEGO games faith-
fully translating children’s real-world play with LEGO toys into the best possible digital
analogue—LEGO as seen by video games. However, the LEGO games never commit
themselves to this model. The ‘LEGO’ in LEGO Star Wars bears little resemblance to
physical LEGO play. Instead, like American McGee’s Alice and Grimm, the LEGO
games use LEGO as a cultural touchstone—building on familiarity and ‘fertility [rather
than] fidelity’ (Andrew 99). In adopting this borrowing model, rather than an inter­
secting model of adaptation, these games challenge what it means to ‘play’ with LEGO.
As Andrew writes, ‘The audience is expected to enjoy basking in a certain pre-
established presence and to call up new or especially powerful aspects of a cherished work’ (98).
Just as films adapted from novels ask audiences to call up new and powerful aspects the
original text, games adapted from toys can encourage us to call up new understandings
in our relationship to play.
Strangely, this rethinking of play rarely extends to the digital realm. While games like
LEGO Star Wars adapt real-life play practices, few video games adapt other pre-existing
video games. Instead, a combination of strict copyrights and modular software code
allows video game companies to produce sequels and ‘ports’. Porting refers to the prac-
tice of reprogramming a video game for a new hardware platform. A port of X-Men:
The Arcade Game, for instance, would involve rewriting the original game code so that
players could play the game on machines other than the original arcade cabinet. While
ports are deliberate recreations of a source video game text, they do not quite fit tradi-
tional definitions of adaptation. A reworking of the original game is precisely what
ports avoid. A ‘good’ port is an invisible one; players forget that they are playing a
different version of the original game. In other words, a port is an act of pure
technological adaptation. Here, the affordances, or protocols, of the hardware become
188  MICHAEL RYAN MOORE

as important (if not more important) than narrative, theme, or tone. The Nintendo Wii,
for instance, incorporates physical movement along with the standard button presses
common to most video game consoles. By taking advantage of these new inputs, ports

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can blur the line between pure imitation and Andrew’s intersecting adaptation. When
companies port a game from a console without motion control to a console like the Wii,
they ‘attend to the specificity of the original within the specificity of [the new console]’
(Andrew 100). As intersecting adaptations, these ports represent the original game, as
seen by the protocols of new hardware. Like the LEGO games, these technological
adaptations force players to reconsider both their digital and physical play. The original
look and feel of the game is maintained, but the actual game play mechanics provide
players with a new experience, a new translation of the source text.
The majority of true game-to-game adaptations are made by modders, tech savvy
players who modify a game’s code to modify game play itself. Modding can be as simple
as changing a few textures—for instance, a character’s appearance—or as complex as
rebuilding a new game on pre-existing foundations. For example, the The Elder Scrolls IV:
Oblivion is a game set in a fictional medieval kingdom, where players can wear suits of
armour, ride horses, equip bows and arrows, and cast magic spells. The majority of
Oblivion mods update the appearance of these character trappings. Mods replace the
game’s code for depicting animals and faces and weapons, updating them with more
aesthetically appealing or more historically accurate versions. While highly popular, these
‘skin’ mods pale in comparison to the large-scale modding of games like Half-Life 2. While
the original plot of Half-Life 2 follows a physicist-turned action-hero who battles an alien
army, modders have used the game’s physics and graphics engines to build completely
new games—to adapt not only characters and plot but also game play. For example, the
DinoInstinct mod of Half-Life 2 replaces the original game’s guns and aliens with a tropical
world of palm trees, waterfalls, and player controlled dinosaurs. Similarly, the Perfect Dark:
Source mod recreates the highly acclaimed Nintendo 64 game Perfect Dark within Half-Life
2’s ‘Source’ engine. Mods like these transform the original game experience, as modders
literally and figuratively play with software conventions and game play mechanics.
For the most part, these mods are explicitly condoned by video game publishers.
Game makers recognize that their business relies on the protocols of new media—that
games are malleable and easily modifiable. As a result, many PC games come packaged
with consumer-modding tools. As one company puts it, ‘we understand that a primary
motivation in hacking/modding is to bring something “fresh” or “new” to the game.
That is why the PC platform has a full suite of Mapping/Modding tools, along with
plenty of documentation to go along with it’ (Chalk). This institutionalized support
serves a dual purpose: first, when companies condone modding, they directly address
those customers who demand media personalization; modding tools allow players to
create at will. Secondly, when companies offer their own modding tools, they practice
preventative-medicine, protecting themselves from the dangers of illicit software tam-
pering. Game modding is unavoidable. Like all things digital, it is only a matter of time
before tech savvy players find ways to alter video game code. By institutionalizing mod-
ding tools, game companies provide a safe environment for experimentation, one that
shelters the game from potentially damaging alterations—for example, software ‘bugs’,
viruses, and computer crashes.
 Adaptation and New Media  189

Setting safeguards aside for the moment, we can interrogate this first relationship
between modding and personalization through the lens of adaptation. Games like
Perfect Dark: Source represent a small, but active community producing fan-made game-to-

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game adaptations. Unlike an official port, Perfect Dark: Source serves as a recreation based
on fan appreciation, on ‘a common passion for one of the best First Person Shooters
ever created’ (Perfect Dark: Source). While this recreation demands a certain fidelity, it is
not an example of Andrew’s intersecting adaptations. Instead, these fan-made games
balance fidelity with first-hand game play experience. These adaptations do not hope
to become facsimiles, but rather, expressions of fans’ desires—realizations of what the
original game could have been. In this sense, fan production is neither borrowing nor
intersecting, but rather transforming. These transforming adaptations strive for ‘fidelity to
the spirit, to the . . . tone, values, imagery, and rhythm’ of the source material (Andrew
100). Reading this definition through Gitelman’s framework, protocols abound. How
does the system of film, with its protocols of shots, scenes, celluloid, and digital film,
and so on, recreate the attitudes and rhythm of printed text? Reframed in terms of
game-to-game mods, how can we transform a game from one genre to another, while
retaining some experiential continuity? For instance, the since-abandoned Final Fantasy
mod for Half-Life 2, re-imagines the popular role-playing franchise Final Fantasy within
the alien genre of first-person brawlers. Whereas the original Final Fantasy games allow
players to control an entire team of characters, carefully choosing actions from a menu
of options, the modded version of the game puts players in the shoes of one particular
character, swinging her sword or casting spells in real-time, from a first-person per­
spective camera.
While video game production companies rarely delve into these fan-fuelled adap­
tations, they nonetheless struggle to translate adapted works into their own medium.
Over the past five years, the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series have dutifully created dig-
ital doppelgangers of best-selling musical acts—the pinnacle of this trend coming with
the recent release of The Beatles: Rock Band. Using the Beatles celebrity career as a source
text, the game allows players to feel the ‘comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy
of surprise’ as they strum along on their plastic replicas of John Lennon’s Rickenbacker
guitar, belting familiar lyrics into a USB-microphone (Hutcheon 4). In the words of
New York Times writer Seth Schiesel, the game is ‘nothing less than a cultural watershed . . .
reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of
another’ (Schiesel). For Schiesel, this digital adaptation of the Beatles breathes life into
history, keeping the band from becoming a ‘museum piece’ by allowing younger gener-
ations to relive their parents’ formative cultural experiences. For other critics, however,
The Beatles: Rock Band is highly problematic. In the words of game designer Bogost, ‘The
Beatles: Rock Band represents the apotheosis of boomer nostalgia. It is memory created
from scratch by their children, as if to affirm, “Yes Mom, The Beatles really are the
pinnacle of music and culture, just like you always suspected”’ (Bogost). For Bogost,
there is something disingenuous about celebrating the game as either an intersecting or
transforming adaptation. Far from capturing the spirit of The Beatles or authentically
remediating The Beatles within video games, Bogost sees the game as little more than
cultural pandering, a false adaptation meant to encourage vicarious nostalgia in an
older generation.
190  MICHAEL RYAN MOORE

Regardless of one’s opinion on The Beatles: Rock Band, the game embodies video game
production companies’ ongoing effort to adapt historical events into contingent game-
play experiences. Contingency is a fundamental protocol of digital play. Video games

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depend on contingent outcomes—ones in which neither success nor failure is guaran-
teed and ones which embrace the idiosyncrasies of player choice. Yet while agency and
contingency are essential to games, they can become problematic when games and
history overlap. In April of 2009, Konami announced their intent to publish Atomic
Games’ Six Days in Fallujah, a video game adaptation of the real-life 2004 military en-
gagement in the Iraqi city (Brophy-Warren). Tasked with designing a game based on
such sensitive source material, Atomic Games strove for realism. The design team
worked with dozens of soldiers involved in the actual battle, including Marine sergeant
Eddie Garcia who received a Purple Heart for his service in the city. In the words of
studio president Peter Tamte, ‘We replicate a specific and accurate timeline—we mean
six days literally’ (Brophy-Warren). However, despite the attention paid to authenticity,
the prospect of a digital retelling of a literal war quickly spurred public outrage. As one
Iraq War veteran put it, ‘It’s much too soon to start making video games about a war
that’s still going on, and an extremely flippant response to one of the most important
events in modern history’. Another critic suggested that ‘considering the enormous loss
of life in the Iraq War, glorifying it in a video game demonstrates very poor judgement
and bad taste’ (‘Outrage Over Konami’s “Six Days in Fallujah”’). Interestingly, this
public outrage seems tied to the immediacy of the Iraq War. Similar recreations of past
wars garner little attention; for instance, World War II games have become a hugely
successful genre, to the point of market saturation. Nonetheless, within a month of
their initial announcement, Konami chose to drop Six Days in Fallujah from their pub-
lishing lineup (Thorsen).
While the prospect of distasteful adaptations is by no means unique to video games
and new media, there is a distinct difference between the responses to Six Days in Fallujah
and films like Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008). Although both depict military
action in Iraq during 2004 (albeit fictionalized in Bigelow’s account) ‘there are things
you just can’t do with passive media’ (Brophy-Warren). As Hutcheon argues, the protocols
of video games prioritize player choice. It is this contingency that complicates intersect-
ing adaptations of historical events within the medium of video games. What does
history look like ‘as seen by’ video games? What does the battle of Falujah look like
from the perspective of a player making her own choices while sitting on a couch
watching an HDTV screen? Because contingency is crucial to game play, critics cannot
satisfy themselves by policing the work of a single director or producer; in other words,
the contingency of video games allows each individual player to become a potentially
problematic adaptor. When historical events are seen through the eyes of video games,
history itself becomes contingent—not only open to scholarly debate and interpret­
ation, but open to each individual player’s whim.

CONCLUSIONS
Andrew writes, ‘The study of adaptation is logically tantamount to the study of cinema
as a whole’ (103). As we look at cinema’s role in adapting novels, plays, and films, we
cannot help but look at cinema as a signifying system, at the way cinema ‘sees’ the
 Adaptation and New Media  191

world. I would expand this argument to say the study of adaptation is necessarily the
study of media itself—of the protocols that support both the adapted medium and the
medium to which a work is being adapted. Looking specifically at video games, we find

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that adaptations emphasize protocols as much, if not more, than thematic and narra-
tive elements. Film-to-game adaptations suggest that despite their similar three-act
structure, games are always defined by game play, by player choice. Simply translating
characters and themes from one medium to the next is not enough; video game players
criticize licensed games whose narrative fidelity supersedes engaging game play. Simi-
larly, adaptations like LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones suggest that narrative
works in concert with social practice. The pleasure of Lego Star Wars is not only the
familiarity of the Star Wars franchise but also the game’s invitation for players to
reimagine physical, real-world play within the protocols of a digital world. Finally, look-
ing at games based on historical figures and real-world events, a protocols-based
approach highlights the subversive role of player participation in adaptation. Because
video games are both modular and variable, each player creates her own adaptation as
she plays through the game; individual agency supplants textual fidelity. Together,
games like these suggest we rethink adaptation in light of new media. Whereas tradi-
tional theories of adaptation rely on the preservation of plot, characters, and themes,
new media protocols stress our own role in constructing media use, and therefore, in
constructing a landscape for novel adaptation.

NOTES
1
 It is worth mentioning that MW2 is rife with adaptations. In one level, players breach a well-guarded
prison shower, eerily reminiscent of a famous scene from 1996s The Rock, which coincidentally, like MW2,
was also scored by Hans Zimmer.
2
 While many new media authors (including ones I discuss at great length below) distance themselves from
the umbrella term ‘digital’, I choose to adopt it for the same reasons they reject it. Because new media are
constantly evolving (because there is always newer media), non-specialists can often be forced out of a dis-
cussion by overly technical language. Although the breadth of the term ‘digital’ stymies specificity, this
same breadth provides accessibility to a wider audience.
3
 The ongoing debate in game studies between Narratology and Ludology is beyond the scope of this pa-
per. However, the author recommends Janet Murray’s 2005 DiGRA keynote speech, ‘The Last Word on
Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies’.

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