The Literate Gamer

One of the things that excites me about video games is their capacity for storytelling. Games have the potential to provide for an immersive storytelling experience, one that is intelligent and profound. Many games succeed in fulfilling this potential to such an extent that they border on being great works of literature. Truly, games are poised to become the new great narrative medium and it's exciting to be here at the start of this literary revolution. Can you imagine being there for the creation of the play or the novel or the film? We're there now with the game.

Now I know many people, both those who keep an eye on the game industry and those who don't, will scoff at such an assertion. Games as literature? Games are toys, the thinking goes, with little redeeming social value. This is the snobbery that underlies much of the political debate about games. Those who object to video games do so largely I suspect because their exposure to games is limited to Pac-Man and Donkey Kong—or worse, Pong—back in the days of yore. They associate games with children and are therefore appalled that contemporary games deal with mature and sophisticated subject matter because they don't recognize that the children who grew up with games have, well, grown up. Just as works of children's literature are often bizarrely ghettoized as not being works of serious literature, so video games do not receive their due as serious art.

Games as literature? Yes. What is literature but a narrative that is composed in such a way as to illuminate human experience? If we buy into the Horatian school of thought, great works of literature are those that simultaneously teach and entertain. In the right hands, games can do these things just as well as books and films. There is no credible reason to reject games as literature. Doing so simply reveals a person's ignorance.

Granted, games are different from other works of literature by virtue of being interactive to a much greater extent than those other works. There is a great debate amongst game theorists over whether games are primarily narrative or simulational. I don't see why games need to be one or the other. Why can't they be both? A novel is a narrative that is representational. A play or movie is a narrative that is performative. No one questions the literary merit of these mediums. So why can't there be a narrative form that is simulational?

Part of the problem with viewing games as literature is the apparent lack of literary thought that has traditionally gone into them. Sure, there have been games that tell great stories but those stories seem almost to have been happy accidents. Rather than deliberately setting out to create narrative experiences in their games, designers seem to have lucked into finding narrative techniques. Now imagine the power of a game that is designed with narrative technique in mind, one that fuses narrative theory with game theory. It's not that far-fetched. Many classic works of literature were designed in ways that are remarkably similar to games.

Think about the typical structure of games. Games begin in crisis: monsters kidnap princesses, zombies besiege towns, terrorists steal WMDs. The hero sets out on a quest to save the princess, destroy the zombies or defeat the terrorists. He or she traverses many levels, fighting bosses along the way. Finally the hero triumphs and order is reestablished to the world. Now consider Homer's Odyssey. After Odysseus fails to return home from the Trojan War, Penelope is faced with the negative prospect of remarriage (crisis). Odysseus sets out on the sea to return home to Ithaca and prevent the loss of his kingdom (quest). He travels through many strange lands (levels) where he confronts and defeats figures like Polyphemus, Circe and Calypso (bosses). He makes it to Ithaca where he slaughters Penelope's suitors and regains his position as king (triumph). Is it any coincidence that classic works of literature like the Odyssey are structured like games? Far from it; both games and great literature deal with universal themes and archetypal ideas. Games are perfectly suited to producing great literature.

I don't point out the similarities between games and the Odyssey in order to suggest that the Odyssey should be made into a game (though I think it would be a very cool game and would like to get in on that action. Take note, game developers!). I point them out in order to show that narrative theory can be applied deliberately to game design in a way that is not artificial. We stand at the cusp of a literary revolution. It's going to happen whether we mean it to or not. Let's not squander our opportunity to consciously take part in it.