All at One Point: Italo Calvino, high-brow literature and games
Italo Calvino’s fairy-tale imagery and quirkiness seem like an infinite pool of ideas. And yet, Feral Cat Den’s Genesis Noir is only the second game to be inspired by Calvino’s inventive storytelling.
Looking at Genesis Noir‘s inspirations, we can‘t help but notice Italo Calvino‘s name on the list. Despite being one of the first true postmodern authors, famous for his puzzle-like narrative structure and fairy-tale imagery, it’s not particularly gobsmacking there are only that many games influenced by his prose.
Having written so many fictional short stories and entire novels to fill one’s entire bookshelf, Calvino might be every sci-fi writer’s writer. When it comes to inspiring games, though, Jonathan Blow, the celebrated game developer, came up with what might be the most fitting explanation of why Calvino’s work is not the first place game developers seeking inspiration go to:
“If you’ll try and copy the structure of “Invisible Cities” [to your game],” one of the author’s most popular works, “you’re just going to destroy yourself.”
Mind that this was said by the guy who was called ‘the Thomas Pynchon of gaming’ by the Guardian — another acclaimed, reclusive postmodernist whose name is not existent anywhere besides his own pages (and that one Paul Thomas Anderson film). Same developer whose debut, critically acclaimed title Braid was possibly the first video game that managed to translate Calvino‘s mind-bending ways of narrating a story onto the screen and make sense.
Hearing how Blow playfully (but somewhat correctly) assumes that “if the internet existed back then, people wouldn’t had the attention span to read something like Invisible Cities,” before an entire live audience, it’s no surprise, then, why Jonathan is the only game developer who’s name comes up when searching for the “video games inspired by Italo Calvino.”
At least, that was the case before Genesis Noir creative lead Evan Anthony decided to base his next project on Calvino’s more easily digestible Cosmicomics, a collection of twelve philosophical, pseudo-scientific short stories released more than half a century ago.
Reading them — from the opening “The Distance of the Moon”, a story about a love triangle among people who used to jump between the Earth and the Moon, which unsurprisingly is also full of cottage cheese; to “The Form of Space” in which unnamed narrator is falling through space in trajectory parallel to that of a beautiful woman, or one about a intergalactic game of marbles back before the universe had formed much more than particles (“Games Without End”) — it starts to make sense why the non-linear structure of Cosmicomics made for the right fit for Feral Cat Den’s Genesis Noir which plays on the same infinite mysteries of the universe. Surely, there’s a lot of dot-connecting going on in both tales.
While Blow might be the first indie developer able to decode complex, postmodern narratives and bring them to our screens without lowering their highbrowness, Genesis Noir is the latest testament to the riches of Italo Calvino‘s prose which many believe to be ahead of its time.
Possible contender for “inspired by Calvino” sticker, you ask? Our chips are on “Six Memos for the Next Millennium.” But don’t get too excited, though: seeing that we get one “Calvino-inspired” adventure per decade, we might just be waiting for another ten years.
This is the full version of this piece which originally appeared in New Game+ debut (demo) issue. You can read it here (it’s free!).
