I’m writing this blog post because cool people in our Discord are adapting Captain’s Gambit into a Dungeons & Dragons one-shot. Upon reading about it, my own reaction surprised me: I found myself specifically excited to see which parts of CG lore would be modified away from my original intent. I wanted to see different interpretations of the same characters.
Of all the various reactions I could have had, that feeling struck hardest, and it took a moment to realize why. But writing this now, a few things clicked together - not just why I felt excited to see changes, but also why adaptation is so cool in the first place.
Adaptation is Tough
This is far from the first time I pondered the topic of adaptation during the dev process for this game. It’s actually one of the first questions that sprung up, and it locked me in a mental arm wrestle ever since. Since each captain was inspired by a different Shakespeare character, each one presented a question regarding how to adapt them while keeping them recognizable.
When you have to translate characters from four hundred years ago into an unknown galaxy in an unknown future - and do it using mostly card-game mechanics and one character portrait - your first priority is to determine what the core of each character actually is.
Some characters were easy, like Romeo. He’s an impulsive but genuine smooth-talking romantic. And he’s inextricably, self-destructively tied to Juliet. Done.
I’m not saying that Romeo is shallow, but I am saying that his goals and obstacles are so universally understandable in English-speaking cultures, you could toss a lover boy into any story and people will immediately draw the Romeo comparison.
Some characters were much harder, though, like Imogen. In Cymbeline, Imogen is surrounded by a lot of awful people who unnecessarily mess with her life while she sleeps. Imogen spends most of her time avoiding a series of undeserved hostile approaches until a series of lucky odds fall into her favour.
Okay, fine. But now we have to adapt Imogen to CG. What parts of her story constitute her actual core? And what’s just unwanted debris from the sociopolitical context of the 1600s?
Well, before we can resolve the question of Imogen’s core, there’s a bigger question to ask now, too: Who cares what the core of a character is, anyway? Actually, why adapt characters at all? Why not build new ones?
The more I uncover the answer, the more it feels like my life subtly changes for the better. But to get at that answer, we have ask an even broader question first.
What is the point of fiction at all?
Ah, but that’s still not broad enough! Why assume there is even “the” point to fiction? Let’s zoom out even further and make even fewer assumptions.
How might fiction improve my life?
This is much better, at the cost of turning this blog into a self-reflection from the perspective of AC Atienza. It’s up to you to read my reflections and adapt them to your own experience. You’ll have to see if you’ll draw the same conclusions or not. But as you’ll soon see, such extra steps are not a bug - they’re a feature.
Table of Contents
You’re far from reality, and that’s okay
Why fiction is useful
Interpret for yourself
Adaptation is fun
I was recommended to type this warning: if you’re uncomfortable with existential things, this is just a warning that beyond this point are some questions about how we interface with reality.
You’re far from reality, and that’s okay
Okay, so the question right now is how fiction can help us relate to the real world. That’s a valid question. But a satisfying answer requires asking what you think the real world is, and why you think you know the “real” world at all.
Foremost, let’s question the assumption that you ever directly perceive reality “as it is”, or even that there’s anything out there to be objectively perceived.
Technically, everything you know about existence starts entirely from sensory input. And if you know anyone who wears glasses, or anyone who can’t tell the difference between a G note and a C note, you’ll know that such senses are imperfect already.
But it’s not just that - we’re not even interfacing with the world through direct sensory data. Our actual engagement of the world comes through our interpretation of those senses, which interferes with our perception way more than something like losing vision.
Furthermore, all of your interpretations are shaped by the vocabulary you know. Labels help you define things as “good”, “bad”, “safe”, “unsafe”. Language makes you perceive that one group of people may be different from another, or it might help you articulate to yourself how you may best find fulfilment in life. And that language is always flawed in some way or another.
To summarize: what we know about reality is a combination of our senses, our perceptions of those senses, and our memories of our past perceptions of our past senses. All of these experiences combine to create a mental model of the universe, in which we simulate potential sensory experiences or positionalities using a series of internal laws.
Whether it’s a physical object like an apple, or something ephemeral and abstract like somebody’s emotions, or the power dynamics in a social group, you don’t directly “know” anything. You just perceive and think and use little mental constructions to build up rules for how things probably function. Your models are enough to get by, but you’ll never know it all.
Why fiction is useful
Luckily you’re not alone in this unknowing - reality is a big mystery to everyone. All of us must swap hints and uncover what’s “out there”, together. That’s conversation! When you talk to people, you share information to try and poke at the nature of reality. Even when people are trolling or joking, you’re at least being reminded of your own fallibility.
You actually engage with your own inability to grasp reality on a daily basis. For example: let’s say you see a flower while on a hike. It could either be a delectable tea… or a deadly poison. Your senses, and even your reasoning, might be inadequate to determine the “reality” of this flower and its effect on your body.
To know the course of action, you could maybe do some research - but you don’t have to. In situations like these, you may find yourself simply remembering an old fable and choosing to walk away - practicing the principle of erring on the side of caution.
Even if the fable you had read was about something like magical animals in a forest, who came across a similar problem with a similar flower, you don’t need to be a magical animal to relate. Your brain is familiar with the task of matching up real-life sensory data to your inner mental model of the world. It knows how to abstract individual anecdotal events to general statements about your reality.
In other words, when you get information - fictional or not - your brain calculates what elements are plausible, given the contextual parameters of the story. Then, for all matches, your brain files away those plausibilities for later use.
Interpret for yourself
The key is this: what you need isn’t perfect information, because otherwise that fable couldn’t teach you anything. And actually, you would have trouble learning anything at all if that was the case, because you’d have to read a specific guide for every possible scenario in your life.
Indeed, what matters isn’t the precision of information that you get, but rather your ability to adequately adapt whatever data you do receive into your mental model of the world. It’s your ability to abstract and solidify experiences as necessary that helps you build thick and multilayered cables of association.
In order to learn, you have to be really good at slotting new info into your current understanding of things. You need to know how to make connections and draw similarities, and figure out which parts matter for your place in the world.
The act of drawing similarities and making comparisons is generally why people study literature at all. Critical analysis helps you understand how and why the techniques employed by people like William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood or Kurt Vonnegut improve our mental models. We can employ critical analysis to question how Hollow Knight, Bastion and Journey help us become wiser about the world around us.
For example, Hollow Knight taught me mindfulness.
Adaptation is Fun
Well then!
Let’s head back to our original questions and answer them with our new perspectives:
How might fiction improve my life?
Just like how life experience makes you stronger, fiction allows you to fill in “gaps” of life experience that you otherwise wouldn’t have. Fiction lets you experience situations with elements of internal plausibility and consistency, that you can then abstract into lessons and heuristics for everyday life.
Such lessons can range from “be cautious” to “this is what bravery looks like” to “try understanding people better” to “this might happen if you take a risk in this type of situation”.
How do you determine the core of a character?
The core of a character is whatever interpretation provides the most benefit or insight to your current life situation - whether it represents an archetype of person that you may interact with someday, or whether it represents something abstract like the concept of self-control or a greater social structure like communal anarchy. Or maybe it just represents yourself.
Why not make a new character?
Because none of us have the full keys to reality, adapting an existing character lets you add your point of view to an existing conversation around a particular core archetype. Rather than making a new statement, you deepen the perspectives around whatever personality type, organizational structure or abstract concept that character represents.
You might even ascribe new representations to that character, which can make for an interesting analysis regarding how certain symbologies might simultaneously exist within one person.
Ultimately, adaptation grants a second perspective on the same entity. It generates invaluable knowledge by letting you collaborate on hypothetical, plausible scenarios together - even if such scenarios are couched in otherwise wild settings.
Captain’s gambit is rife with rumors
The conclusion of these thoughts is that I think certain questions in Captain’s Gambit will never have a “definitive” unbreakable answer. Some things will always be framed as rumors or stories, or at least as information from a potentially-biased narrator. Each question may have multiple stories that confirm, tweak or even deny the events that unfold.
Just like how adaptation can provide more depth into a character by engaging with their core systems in a new context, introducing multiplicity can provide more room for interpretation and a stronger understanding of certain topics thanks to having multiple perspectives.
So while nobody ever needs permission to bring their own interpretations to a world, I’d like to specifically celebrate and encourage taking a personal approach to how anyone represents a character in Captain’s Gambit. After all, each of these characters were just interpretations of Shakespeare in the first place, fused with all the formative sci-fi in our lives.
Adaptation is more than just copying and pasting a character from one setting to another - it’s also a critical engagement of what the core of a character or story is in the first place, and it’s a unique way to understand how we can learn new things from all of those stories we’ve heard before.
I look forward to seeing yours!