Anne of Green Cables

Adaptations are a fraught area of interactive fiction. How close do you stay to the original? Do you introduce choices by allowing people to select from previously existing scenes, or do you vary between the 'canon' story and your own selections?

This is a cyberpunk adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. It takes selected events from the book and replaces references to farm and country life to references to web connectivity, corporations, devices, and hacking.

In structure, it has long pages of text, usually with a 'next' button at the button, with larger choices happening a few times per chapter. The text per choice is much larger than is usual for Twine or Choicescript; for me, it was reminiscent of Chooseyourstory games, which often have the same 'several pages followed by a weighty choice' format.

I read Anne of Green Gables and watched shows about it a bit as a kid, but at the time I thought it was meant for even younger kids than me, so I didn't pay it much attention.

So, with vague memories of Anne of Green Gables, I read this interactive fiction game. At several points I thought, "How close is this to the original?" and looked up the Project Gutenberg copy. Reading through passages of it was a real delight. It's clear why this book has endured so long; the characterization and dialogue writing are exceptional, a generational talent. For my personal tastes, my favorite writer for voice and style has been Arthur Conan Doyle, but Anne of Green Gables compares very well with that. Other authors can have some mediocre 'local' writing that is supported by great global plot structure, but these two are great at the line by line writing.

This became a problem while playing the game, because while Brett is actually a good author (you should check out his other games!) I began comparing all of his additions directly to the real story, and they suffered by comparison. It's like having the star player of your local college play against MJ, or being tasked with adding a flying saucer and aliens to Van Gogh's Starry Night.

One example is when Anne meets Diana. In both versions, she declares that the two of them should be bosom friends and should declare their affection to each other by swearing an oath (all this after having exchanged less than five sentences with each other).

In this version, Anne says:
"We ought to make this vow over running water. I assume under the ground here are some water pipes. That'll do."

In the original, Anne says:
“We must join hands—so,” said Anne gravely. “It ought to be over running water. We’ll just imagine this path is running water."

The first one is amusing; taking a serious vow requirement and just halfway-ignoring it. The second is extremely amusing to me: Anne has just met this brand-new girl, instantly declared herself best friends, concocted a very elaborate oath, and then instantly says it's okay to ignore reality by using their imagination. This connects to the overall theme of a lot of the book, of Anne living in a realm of imagination and fantasy, being brought down to earth by Marilla. So this scene fulfills one useful narrative role in the game, but many roles in the book.

Similarly, other great passages from their book lose their weight in this world. Anne's flights of fancy in the original contrast with her mundane world; in this version, she's surrounded by the bizarre and fanciful at all times, with endless amounts of entertainment. In the original, Matthew's fate is a solemn capstone on the whole book, something that immediately and inescapably focuses Anne's life on reality. In this version, it's a somber event that is then succeeded by the 'true' finale, which is perhaps the most fanciful event of the story and teaches a different moral, that Anne does have agency against tragic events in life, that trying hard enough can overcome any obstacle, and that living in her fanciful realm is the true path.

When reading the directly adapted parts, I preferred looking up the original and reading that. When reading the newly-minted parts, I enjoyed learning more about the world and trying out the mechanics.

With all of this said, I still think this is one of the better adaptations of pre-existing text I've seen. All adaptations run into the issues I've mentioned; I wrote a Sherlock Holmes game with text from Arthur Conan Doyle, and I had the same issue of my own text contrasting poorly with Doyle's, and struggling to balance linearity/faithfulness with branching/new material. I think that Anne of Green Cables succeeds better than my own game, or than Graham Nelson's The Tempest. But its greatest effect on me was making me want to read through the whole book (or listen to audiobook; it seems like it would be great in that format).

I think I read Anne of Green Gables a really long time ago, like when I was really young, when my parents were trying to get my younger self to develop an appreciation for reading books. That said, I remember the plot and the characters very vaguely at best.

Anyway, this game take the public domain story and reimagines it in a futuristic setting. You know, with fancy machines, vtubers and VR. Things you'd be hard pressed to find in 19th century Canada. I can't say how true this story is to the original, but I can offer my thoughts.

The game is largely linear with mostly two choice options. You'll have to read through a lot of text each time in between each choice. While the prose is solid, it also feels pretty heavy at times, with plenty of text to get through before you finally have a choice.

From what I can tell, many choices do not change the game significantly, and there is even one pair of choices where you are expected to pick one choice. If you pick the other, the game flat out tells you that Anne does not have the character to do that, then brings you to the 'correct' choice instead.

The writing is strong and the futuristic elements are woven into the story in an interesting manner. Still, with the lack of choices, this is a better game for people who prefer heavy reading over more interactivity.

There is also an interesting puzzle at the end, but you might have difficulty with it if you had been playing on a mobile screen all along. Still, it's skippable. I sped through the game on my laptop later just to try it.

Deciding on a rating was tough. I was constantly going back and forth between three and four stars. This is a game which I didn't personally enjoy but still felt was good. Anyway, four stars.

The mash-up is a big part of contemporary culture, from X-meets-Y high-concept movies to pop music, where samples and guest verses rule the charts, but it’s notable that, save for the burst of popularity enjoyed by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies some 15 years ago, the literary mash-up doesn’t tend to be especially commercially successful – and yet, it still gets written, Jeeves meets Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes meets the Great War, Star Wars meets Shakespeare, and so on. My suspicion is that part of the explanation is that for an author in a gamesome mood, it’s an exciting challenge to just answer the basic question “can this be made to work?” Getting into the guts of genre and prose style and suturing together two disparate approaches so that the seams don’t show appeals to the Dr. Frankensteinian hubris that lurks within most writers.

On this score, I think Anne of Green Cables can be adjudged a success – with the notable caveat that I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables all the way through. Still, I’m familiar with the basics of the plot and writing style – my wife is a major fan of the books, so I’ve absorbed a lot second-hand – and I skimmed the original as I was playing the game, so I think I’m not totally speaking without foundation when I say that its ventriloquism of L.M. Montgomery in a cyberpunk range comes off.

In the early going, this is because it mostly sticks to a line-by-line retelling of the original, just with the odd bit of sci-fi jargon thrown in: an “intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade ” becomes and “intricate, forgotten bulk of undersea cables in its earlier course, sporadically garlanded with dark fiber splitters and routers,” for example. Sure, the latter excerpt misses some of what’s great in the former – “dark secrets of pool and cascade” is a banger – but the rhythm and sense mostly come through. As the game progresses, though, it gains confidence, and risks more departures from the text. Rather than a simple orphan, in this telling Anne is the ward of a megacorp swallowed up by a hostile acquisition; she’s hired out on a gig contract to the Cuthbert siblings, and while the anachronistic sexism of the original is maintained – they’re disappointed she’s not a boy – she’s got a knack for hacking that lets her work wonders with their glitchy farm equipment.

Notably, while pretty much every incident save the climax is drawn from the book, the amount of recontextualizing varies: some see a near-complete translation of genre tropes, like when a younger sibling laid down by croup is instead rendered insensate by a computer virus. But the infamous raspberry-cordial episode, where Anne accidentally gets a friend drunk, comes through almost entirely intact. This is a good choice because it means that the game isn’t forced to strain for cyberpunk analogues for every little thing, and that the original’s pastoral vibe isn’t totally swallowed up. And the places where the two work in concert are really fun, like the nosy gossip-hound of a neighbor who’s now a vlogger and influencer:

"If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a J-Pop idoru bot Mrs Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually piping /dev/null for a solid five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but as her Bayesian agents suggested, Mrs Rachel was almost forced to suppose it."

Again, it’s clear the best lines are Montgomery’s – this bit, where Anne relates how she and her friends have been writing melodramatic VR-stories, earned me a guffaw (the punch-line is verbatim from Green Gables):

"We made vids of the best ones and sent them to Diana’s aunt Josephine. She messaged back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died."

But some of the prose that’s wholly new to the game, as far as I can tell, is very very good as well, with Anne’s monologue upon the death of her almost-stepfather particularly affecting:

”I haven’t been alone one minute since it happened—and I want to be. I want to be quite silent and quiet and try to realize it. I know a Matthew who wasn’t dead, and I need to bring that man over the threshold.”

So all told, despite some bumps I think that author-teasing question of “can I?” can be answered with a yes – but for a reader, there’s also the question of “should you?” to be addressed. The point of a mash-up isn’t just to show off virtuosity, after all, but to illuminate something heretofore-unnoticed about the two things being juxtaposed. And here’s where I think Anne of Green Cables begins to struggle. The dour social comment of cyberpunk doesn’t sit all that easily next to a rural Canadian idyll, so what’s the thematic connection the game’s trying to draw?

I think it’s largely meant to be the figure of Anne herself, whose charisma, optimism, and willpower can push through country small-mindedness and megacorp amorality alike. It’s an inspiring idea – especially, let’s acknowledge, in our depressing political circumstances – but it’s one the game hints at rather than fully elucidates. A big issue that blunts the parallel is that most of the plot requires the cyberpunk world to be a reasonably cozy one; while there is one clear bad-guy corp, the other one just seems bumbling, and while the game’s vague about what kind of tech-assisted farming the AvonLea community performs, the environment and people are generally depicted as wholesome. When, at the eleventh hour, a more traditional techbro bad guy sweeps onstage, accompanied by NFT-memes and ChatGPT jokes, the effect is jarring, but worse, the threat he represents also feels like it comes out of nowhere. Anne isn’t showing up how to rebel against a near-overwhelming foe, but simply to dispatch a comic-opera buffoon.

That is, instead of a cyberpunk story featuring Anne Shirley – which I think would be thematically powerful, but much less fun to write and read – what we’ve got here is a romantic bildungsroman with a sci-fi gloss, which is more fun but less coherent. This weighting of the elements extends to the interactive pieces of the game – there are some decision points, but mostly they feel like they don’t lead to much branching and often perceptively offer a choice to either stick to the book-Anne, or do something different, and unsurprisingly book-Anne is more fun. Even combined with an endgame minigame that I still haven’t wrapped my head around, the game-y elements of Anne of Green Cables don’t feel like the major draw.

The major draw, of course, is just Anne herself, and to return to where I started, the success of the game is that she’s as appealing, and inhabiting a world just as inviting, as in the original novel. If the game doesn’t throw a whole new light on an acknowledged classic, that’s entirely forgivable, and if the risk of trying to do so would be weighing Anne down with grimdarkery, a la the Netflix adaptation from a couple year ago that my wife still complains about, it’s even easier to pardon. Having gotten to the end of Anne of Green Cables, I find myself eager to finally read Anne of Green Gables once the Comp ends – and it’s hard to think of a better tribute to the game’s success than that.