Non-game influences evident in games

[YoshiEgg25]

Everything in Earthbound.

[lisalover1]

Everything is symbolic and referential in Xenosaga, despite if it has actual significance or not.

Xenosaga is also loosely based on the philosophical writings of Nietzsche.

...Viewed through a backward-facing telescope with a greasy lens and with a whole lot more giant robots and layzorz. Standard eastern extrapolation of western philosophy. [But, to be fair, the inverse is likely also true, in another form.]

[GSZX1337]

Some off the top of my head:

Game-Title Influence
Half-Life: Alien(s) - the HeadCrabs are inspired by the FaceHugger. Thankfully, Valve left out the face raping.
War/Star-Craft: WarHammer Fantasy/40K. Pretty obvious.
Dead-Space: The Thing - The Necromorphs are inspired byremind me of The Thing.

[J T]

I was just reading Jane Jensen's (famous for the Gabriel Knight series) blog about her influences for her new game Gray Matter. She wrote the following:


"People often want to know where I get my ideas. Why I have chosen, at different times, to write about King Ludwig of Bavaria, the Torah code, the apocalypse and Rennes-le-Chateau. I don’t know where my fascination in ‘weird stuff’ comes from, or why certain subjects hook me. Perhaps a neurologist could pinpoint an overgrown ‘lurid’ receptor on an MRI of my brain. But for whatever reason, I find myself piqued by the strange and the gothic. And if I’m piqued, the subject runs the risk of ending up in a story or two. Here are some of the things that inspired Gray Matter:

“The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat” by Oliver Sacks, MD
This is a collection of clinical tales, accounts of patients who have developed strange beliefs or perceptions due to tumors, strokes, injuries or imbalances of the brain. One patient thinks he is tilted like the Tower of Pisa, an 89-year-old woman becomes a giggling flirt, a man sees rivers and parasols in a photo of the desert, a pair of mentally disabled twins can calculate the day of the week for any named date, a woman who has had a stroke cannot see – or even ‘hear someone reference’ – anything that appears to her left.
What these stories have in common is the absolutely conviction each patient has in his or her version of reality. And who are we to say they aren’t the ones who have it right?

“Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind” by V.S. Ramachandran, MD
Dr Ramachandran, professor and director of The Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, recounts his own cases with neurology patients. Like Sacks’s book, this book is full of mental anomalies that make you go ‘hmmm’. There’s a fascinating discussion of the phenomenon of phantom limbs – people who have lost limbs being troubled by itching or pain in the non-existent body part. Dr. Ramachandran develops an interesting technique to allow these patients to ‘touch’ the phantom limb and get relief.
Like Dr. Sacks, Dr Ramachandran works with patients whose brain has gone awry and, in the process, has discovered clues about how the mind works and how and why we perceive as we do. Both of these books, and their authors, were inspiration for Dr. David Styles and his work with in neurology (that is, well, before the accident).

“The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” by Dean Radin, PHD
This book is one of the most comprehensive, and most rational, discussions of psychic research I’ve seen. It covers a gamut of tests run over the years such as trying to guess the image on the face of a card or trying to force a number on a random number generator. The positive results of most of these tests fall within a scientific margin of error. But by looking at the results as a whole, a much stronger case is made that something beyond chance is going on. There’s a section on field consciousness which shows what happens to a random number generator when millions of minds are simultaneously focused at once on the same thing — the Oscars or Super Bowl. Now that is bizarre!

In addition to the books in my library, there are experiences of my own that have also offered breadcrumbs along the trail to Gray Matter. As a child I once had a very strong fever. I rose from the couch where I was lying sick, went upstairs in my sister’s house, and tore up the pillows and bedding on her bed in a rage at feeling so terrible. I returned downstairs and apologized tearfully to my sister, fearing punishment. She followed me upstairs so that I could show I could show her what I had done, and to my astonishment the bedding, and pillows, had not been touched. I had hallucinated the act, but it had been as real as anything I’ve ever done.

My brother is a PHD in Social Work and he did clinical work in the South for many years. He has a plethora of stories from this time, but my favorite is that of a man whose ‘self’ had dislocated from his physical body. He ‘saw’ with the eyes of his spiritual body, which had shifted out of his physical body and moved 6 inches to the left, as if his head were sitting on his shoulder. When he went to pick something up, for example, or shake hands, he had to mentally correct for the difference in where he perceived his ‘hand’ to be and where his physical hand was actually located. My brother believed that the man was filled with so much self-hatred that he couldn’t bear to be in his own body. Through counseling, they slowly ‘coaxed’ his spiritual self back into alignment with his physical form.

What does a story like that tell us? Do we have a ‘spiritual body’ or ‘energy body’ which is capable of detaching from our physical self? And, if so, is this the true seat of our vision and not our eyes? Or was the entire thing a delusion? Did the man believe the delusion so strongly that he ‘translated’ where objects would be in space to fit his belief that he was shifted to the left? Most psychiatrists would undoubtedly believe the later to be the case. But I’m a fiction writer, and I can be allowed the indulgence of imagining the more interesting scenario.
And Dr David Styles… well David Styles is, himself, one of the walking wounded. He is both doctor and patient. And if his peers will not forgive him the indulgence of imagining the impossible, I will. I hope you will, too."