ORWELL’S ANIMAL FARM
They say timing is everything – and it’s hard to think of a more relevant moment for a videogame based on Animal Farm to surface. Then again, it’s difficult to imagine George Orwell’s satirical classic will ever go out of style, its scathing study of inequality, power and control seemingly not enough to dissuade humanity from its unbroken streak of punching itself in the face. Nerial, however, has high hopes that a videogame – in which you manage a farm-society whose success or failure pivots on the inequities of its social strata and corruptibility of its leaders – might help the message to sink in.
Adapting Orwell’s classic has been a decades-old ambition for creative director Imre Jele, who witnessed communism at first hand growing up in Hungary. “My family was active on the ‘wrong’ side of politics, by the definition of the regime,” Jele says. “Animal Farm was read to me with Winnie The Pooh and The Little Prince. It took years for me to find that we as an industry are ready to make it, and there’s an audience ready to take it.” An incredibly optimistic view on both counts, given Ubisoft’s (recently updated) track record for handling political issues with all the grace of a baby deer with guns attached to its feet while simultaneously swearing blind it doesn’t know what politics is, and much of the mainstream gaming audience’s aversion to being presented with real-world issues in games.
Still, Jele hopes the part narrative, part strategy sim will find an open-minded crowd. Players must balance the farm’s resources while creating alliances with characters. Choosing to side with the Stalin-inspired Napoleon or Trotsky-like Snowball is the key to managing situations and keeping the animals happy, meaning neither letting things slide into dictatorship nor revolution. “The farm is a perfect storytelling mechanism,” Jele says. “You need to grow things and process them, build a windmill and all these mechanics – but they also tell the story. What happens when an animal gets tired or ill? In most games it’s just a resource counter, we liked humanising those numbers. We want to provide a classic adventure game, but reflecting things on the farm, so certain numbers trigger certain storylines and vice versa.”
It’s a hell of an undertaking, and one that could potentially end up with a very clumsy result. Weaving player choice, for instance, into a story designed to end up at one particular outcome is a risky endeavour – should there really be a way to win Animal Farm? It seems counter to Orwell’s original intent. But there’s reason to be hopeful: Nerial is the developer behind excellent monarchical RPG Reigns, and Failbetter Games creative director Emily Short will lend her interactive fiction writing talents to Orwell’s Animal Farm too. She’s determined to remain faithful to the original intention of the text, while adapting it in such a way that ensures tonal verisimilitude.
Nerial insists, however, that certain changes are inevitable. “When you read a book you’re already adding your own biases, and when you adapt something it’s very difficult to avoid,” Jele says. “We tried to keep to what’s in the story, and only extend meaningfully when it made sense, asking ourselves: what would Orwell do?” Exploring what George Orwell, videogame writer, might have done meant extrapolating brief ideas. “The book uses such simple language and implies a lot of things,” Jele explains. “Our job was to extend on it. In the story, it’s merely referenced that the pigs used birds to spy on neighbouring farms. But if you think about the attitude of the pigs and the governments Orwell was trying to portray, they’re going to spy on their own animals too. Extend this idea, and it becomes a reflection on mass surveillance in modern regimes.
“A good story can elevate you from sympathy to empathy, and Animal Farm does that,” Jele continues. “Maybe if more people, after playing the game, choose to take part in the political discourse, and have a better view of what’s happening behind the scenes, while recognising patterns of misuse of language and power around them,” Jele says, “that’s as noble an objective as any creative project can get.”
There’s a worrying suggestion there, of some games being more equal than others
– but with the intentions justified, and some sharp minds behind this, perhaps the timing really is right.
Q“We as an industry are ready to make it, and there’s an audience ready to take it”