Literature & Video Games

In the popular press, literature and video games are frequently positioned as antagonists in the battle for time. As an example, Slate journalist Michael Thompson in his 2012 article “Dark Night (After Night After Night) of the Soul” poses the question “Is a 100-hour video game ever worthwhile?” His response is a common “You could read War and Peace, for instance, then follow it up with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a few starter courses in a new language." Further, the often-cited 2004 National Endowment for the Arts’ Reading at Risk report places video games among other forms of electronic media as “competing” with literature. Students are playing video games, the argument goes, instead of reading great works of literature. But what both of these sources (and countless others) fail to consider is that video games and literature are components of complex 21st-century media ecologies. Over the past sixty years, video games and literature have not been antagonistic, but instead have been involved in a reciprocal relationship of influence.

In the fall of 2012, seventeen undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin studied the convergence of literature and video games. Rather than viewing video games and literature as contenders for precious time, the students examined the ways literature and video games connect with and shape one another. This eBook is the product of that exploration.

This book is seventeen chapters of close reading and critical writing. Each author chose a video game and literature pair, with a few authors opting for more numerous literary sources. Some chapters question the notion of games as art. Others examine whether one medium succeeds at narrative better than the other. Still others explore the affordances and constraints of these expressive mediums. While all take a unique position, what ties them all together is an attention to the ways users interface with these forms of human and machine expression.