ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the video game informs adaptation studies, arguing that while video games can be analysed using methodologies employed to study other media, they also require new methods of analysis to explicate their interactive and ludic content. It also considers how and why the medium succeeds in adaptation, asking whether the interactivity of video game narratives extends to greater interactivity in adaptation across media, particularly within entertainment franchises. Video games are by no means limited to being adapted to and from film. There is a growing number of video games that are based on or adapted to the printed page. Two such games are The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, both adapted from graphic novels. While early video game adaptations were problematic, clumsy, and unsatisfying to consumers and unprofitable to producers, contemporary video game technologies mean that adaptations can simulate and engage a variety of media to create richly complex, intertextual forms of adaptation.
