Text, like music, has obviously been an integral part of video games for a long time. Games like ADVENTURE and COLOSSAL CAVE were entirely text-based - describing locations and situations and asking the player for text commands like go west and get lamp. These text-based adventure games live on in a still-thriving community of "interactive fiction" authors. That's not quite the same thing as taking an existing piece of text and somehow making it playable.

Like with music games, the advantages of making a playable-text game are twofold. One is that you provide a new way to interact with a piece of text, the other is that you can expose someone who already wants to play your game to some new text. Those two goals create a feedback loop of fun and exposure to new material. For instance, Silent Conversation lured me in with the promise of a playable version of H.P. Lovecraft's short-story The Nameless City as one of its levels. When I was done, I wanted to play some more, so I tried another level: the haiku There is an Old Pond by Matsuo Basou and then the poem XXII by William Carlos Williams. If it hadn't been for the game, I would  probably never have read them!

Silent Conversation was created by Gregory Weir. What it ads to the the experience of reading is the transformation of text into landscape. The main body of the text is ground you can walk on. Descriptions of impressive or dangerous situations are cliffs you must scale and bottomless pits you must leap over. Words describing the weather might float overhead, and powerful words actually try to attack you. The goal is to touch as many words as possible with your avatar, a capital letter "I". On his blog, Gregory talks about what the game is trying to accomplish.

“This game grew out of an idea that I had in childhood. I was a voracious reader, and occasionally, late at night, I would see the structure of the words on the page as something physical: the end of a paragraph was a fissure in a cliff edge, and each indentation was a handhold. I could visualize a little person running along the lines, exploring every crevice of the story. This is an attempt to realize that concept.”

 
Silent Conversation certainly isn't as exciting as a music game, or even a normal platform game. The "enemy" words don't do much other than send out a ghost-version of themselves that slowly floats towards you until you can touch it. The laid-back pace and encouragement to touch the words is necessary to let the player read the text.

This approach also works very well, in  The Nameless City level, because of the text chosen. The Nameless City is about a solitary person exploring a strange, lonely, and creepy ancient ruin, and the game turns the text into a landscape that  lets the player experience that ancient ruin. The same approach might not work for a technothriller, or detective story, though it's an interesting excercise to imagine what changes would be necessary to play those kinds of stories. A thriller would need to be much more fast-paced, with words acting as moving platforms, and possibly names of characters acting as enemies. A detective novel might make you search for some of the text via trickier exploration. A choose-your-own-adventure style story might even have actualy branching pathways...

In fact, that's what the game ERGON/LOGOS by Molle Industria does! Instead of constructing a game with platform-physics, the narrative of ERGON/LOGOS describes a generic platform-game. Instead of doing the action being described, the player must mouse-over the first word in one of several sentences when they reach a branching point. Each sentence provides a dramatic phrasing of some common gaming event, and most also offer some deconstruction or critique of the genre. For instance: "Collect the treasure, it makes me more fit for survival. Life is nothing but accumulation..." is the sentence associated with the action of grabbing coins or other collectable powerups.  The game moves quickly, making mis-steps common, just like in a real platformmer. The story in ERGON/LOGOS is certainly self-referential, but one could use a similar mechanic to create a playable branching narrative about anything. I could see this kind of game being used to add an exciting edge to a persuasive game about a touchy subject, in which forcing a player to make quick decisions and live with the consequences would be a valuable teaching tool.

Both Silent Conversation and ERGON/LOGOS use hand-crafted levels to make sure the gameplay fits the text. This is similar to how levels in Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero are produced, but Audiosurf is a game that automatically generates levels by analyzing music. This is also the approach to playable-text games taken by Alex Cho Snyder (author of dRive) with his experimental game prototype Words. Words is part of Alex's Active Sketch series of programming prototypes. Word provides you with a short-story, written by Alex called A Mythic Retelling of Where the Wild Things Are (With references to Ishmael, Genesis and various Haida myths). You control a little character who can walk on letters, just like in Silent Conversation. The difference is that the text is just a block of standard text, not formatted to evoke  the scenes described in the text. Words attempts to use the actual content of the words in its gameplay. You can press a key to "grab" a word, and then walk to another word and "drop" it. You get a point for each letter that the two words share. If the two words match exactly, you increase your score multiplier. Words isn't a finished game. If you fall off of the text, there's no reset button, and since the words reset when you move off screen, you can keep playing forever. I think the gameplay is interesting, but the reading it encourages is much more deconstructive than experiential. I found myself analzying the letters in each word, and reading far ahead to find a matching word, instead of actually reading the text for the story it was telling. I also found myself keeping within the first few paragraphs and never really jumping down to read the whole story. Thankfully, Alex has put the text online by itself as well. I guess that means that Words succeeded in exposing me to new text, just like Rock Band taught me that I actually kind of like Bon Jovi!

I think there's obviously a way to go before the game development scene gives us a breakout hit of a game that turns old text into new gameplay, but I also think that these three games each introduce elements that will have to exist in that game, if it ever gets made. Perhaps the other thing would be a really huge dictionary, (a la Scribblenauts) that can analyze words and automatically dictate properties and behaviours to them based on their meaning. In the mean time, these games can provide inspiration to educational game developers looking for new ways to turn content into gameplay.

Edited to Add a comment from Alex (aka axcho) since it seems our comment system is bugged:

"I definitely think there's a lot of potential in this area. I've got several game ideas that I think will do a much better job of automatically turning text into gameplay, which I would like to explore sometime in the future...

"I'm honored to be mentioned alongside Gregory Weir and Molle Industria, thanks. :)

Play Silent Conversation

Play ERGON/LOGOS

Play Words