Imagine you are in room of literati types in the early 2010s. These are smart, well-read, curious people. The books on their shelves are impressive, as are their movie collections. You notice classics, hits, and obscure artistic works on display. The conversation turns to favorite fictional characters and you bring up, say, Paulie Walnuts, Gus Fring, or Willow Rosenberg.
You’re met with quiet looks of confusion.
Ok, so these folks haven’t heard of any of these characters. You’re a bit disappointed, maybe even surprised that they hadn’t been participating in the Golden Age of Television. You try to recover and elicit a response by noting the hugely famous and influential shows you’re referencing.
“Wow! You haven’t seen The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I’m surprised. What TV shows do you like? Game of Thrones? Grey’s Anatomy?”
The hosts and guests all look at you blankly, almost embarrassed for you and reply, “I don’t watch TV.” Some one else says, “I’m not sure I’ve ever watched a show.” More than half of the room responds that way.
One dude looks up, eager. “I watch TV” he says. You brighten!
“I love football and the World Series of Poker.” He continues, “But I’m not into those talking shows.”
At such an interaction you would not only be a bit gobsmacked, you would be, I suspect, saddened.
This, broadly, has been my experience with narrative video games for the past few decades.
We are living through a Golden Age of storytelling, but most of the population is missing out on it. It isn’t the crisis of men not reading or that romantasy is dominating the charts. It’s not because people are illiterate or lazy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Many of people who read Difficult Important Novels and make sure they are optimizing their time are among the least likely to have access to these great stories.
It’s much simpler. The stories are being told in video games and most people don’t play video games. Many don’t even know how.
This means most people are missing out on a burgeoning new genre of literary fiction. The characters, themes, and storycraft are all literally inaccessible to a huge chunk of the people most likely to enjoy and appreciate them. This is, I think we can agree, not ideal.
Skeptics will, rightly, ask how Fortnite is anything like My Brilliant Friend or White Lotus. Point for the skeptics—it’s not! Not any more or less, however, than is a Premiere League Football game or a Taschen coffee table book. Video games, like TV and books, encompass a huge range of things. TV can be live sports broadcasts, infomercials, and reality TV along side prestige shows like White Lotus or Severance. Books can be dry monographs, reference guides, or pulpy page turners as well as literature like Piranesi or My Brilliant Friend.
In his interview with Tyler Cowen, Any Austin, video game analyst, was trying to help Tyler understand this very point:
“These competitive, large, long-lasting video games: Fortnite, VALORANT, Counter-Strike, whatever. We call them video games, and they absolutely are, but culturally, calling those video games and calling Zelda video games would be like grouping football in with theater.”
What Austin is getting at is that games are, in a sense, matrixed against other forms of entertainment. Games like those he cites are e-sports. They’re played competitively and what narrative exists is as robust as that around any sport. For e-sports, video games are, in effect, the field and stadium where the match is held. And just as the existence of ESPN doesn’t obviate the existence of HBO on TV, the same can be said of games.
Most games are like most TV shows and most movies. That’s not a bad thing! A ton of games are entertaining, fun, and delightful without being narratively complex. Every game in the Mario franchise meets this bar. Every fighting game, racing simulator, and nearly all massively-multiplayer online role-playing games are like this as well. No matter how great Tekken, Grand Turismo, and Destiny are, they are not literary. Tom Clancy games, like Tom Clancy books and movies, entertain and thrill without necessarily looking into the depths of our souls.
Some games, however, attain a level of nuance and complexity of story telling that deserve to be seen alongside our best films, shows, and novels. And yet unless you play games, you have almost no frame of reference for whether or not this is possibly valid. Almost everyone reading this has seen a movie, watched a season of a TV show, or read a book in the past year. The majority of people reading this haven’t played any games in the past year and most people, between 60 - 80%, haven’t played a non-mobile game (i.e. Candy Crush).
This creates a minor tragedy: You don’t know who Mordin Solus is.
This is sad in its own way, but, of course, there are many great fictional characters you may not yet know. For the vast majority of such characters, this is a solvable problem—just watch the movie or read the book. Or, at least, you learn of them through cultural diffusion. I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye, but I’ve got a sense of who Holden Caulfield is, why he matters, what he stands for. But, alas, poor Mordin, you may never know him well. You may simply never learn how.
Most great criticism and analysis of video games anchors on the medium. Are the game mechanics innovative, are the graphics beautiful, is the progression balanced? A story of some kind is often present, sure, but usually as ‘lore’ to be unpacked, as though the Silmarillion was the best part about The Lord of the Rings.
Story, of course, has never been essential to an amazing video game. We do not know or care why Pac-Man must eat dots and cherries and kill ghosts. We do not know, really, why Mario is responsible for Princess Peach, or why he is a plumber who can defeat Bowser. Doom Eternal, Forza, and Minecraft are quite fun without robust character arcs. All you know, all you need to know in some games, is that things are suddenly happening and you are in control.
These are not literary games. They are closer to chess or model trains or table top games. Ostensibly there is a frame of some kind (e.g. the pieces represent opposing armies). But the rules and the opponent are the point. It’s a test of skill and smarts. It’s also entertainment.
Literary games, however, focus on the depth and quality of the narrative. In particular, the inner life of the characters and deeper themes are given a place of pride among the other elements. Just as Moby-Dick is a great adventure story, Station Eleven a dangerous post-apocalypse, and Wolf Hall a courtesan drama, literary games are not pure philosophy. The craft is in how the story is told.
While the novel is the primary vessel for literary books, single-player role-playing games (RPGs) tend to be home to most literary games. There are, as always, exceptions: platformers like the Ori series, rogue-likes such as Hades, and first-person shooters like Half-Life or Bioshock can achieve literary qualities, but it’s rarer. Massively-multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, Diablo 4 and similar titles are technically RPGs, but their online presence makes them more akin to The Simpsons or Law & Order or maybe even The Office, where the comfort, fun repetition, and similarity keep people coming back for decades.
Single-player role-playing games tend to be ‘open-world’. The player drives the story forward at their own pace, choosing among plot or sub plots they’re most interested in. Often the player can build her own ‘team’, allowing the main characters of the story to be the player’s choice. As a result, these games like Balder’s Gate 3, Fallout 4, the Mass Effect series, and Disco Elysium can have hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of dialogue, many tens of thousands of which you the player may never hear. While occasionally these are exposition dumps explaining what the latest MacGuffin you need pursue is, most follow the ‘show don’t tell’ rule. You experience the narrative and nuances of this world, its problems, through not only your actions, but through the needs and wants of characters you meet, team up with, and/or battle.
Thus, there are two huge barriers to experiencing these characters. The first is the ability to play a video game–even moderately well. This can include dexterity, puzzle solving, or reaction time. Games are, well, games. They challenge the player. The second is time. Even a substantial show like Breaking Bad, with 62 episodes roughly about 50 minutes long is only 51 hours of story. Two episodes a night, most nights of the week, and you’re through it in a couple months.
But for most folks, even dedicated close watchers who treat TV like literature, TV is a passive endeavor. Think about how intimidating it is to read a hefty chunk of lit, say The Brothers Karamazov or Moby-Dick. One of those might take you around 20 hours of effort.
For experienced gamers, most literary games, such as Control, Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War take a minimum of 30 hours to complete the main story. Many literary games, particularly role-playing games like Mass Effect, Fallout 4, and Balder’s Gate 3 take 60 - 70 hours if you are just focused on the core story. With all of these, half the fun is just wandering around and talking to other characters, doing little side quests, and exploring the world. The ‘open world’ nature of the game allows you to experience huge chunks of the story, particularly sub-plots, in the order of your choosing. Often these will influence each other, leading you to naturally move among sub plots at your own speed. This can easily double the play time and often dramatically deepens the quality of the story.
Which brings us back to Mordin. Most stories take place within a single game. Even the colossal Balder’s Gate 3 is a stand alone game. But Mass Effect is a series of three games, a true trilogy, where the story compounds. Yes, you can play each game stand alone, but the games will look for your previous save files and your choices in the prior games will affect the current story. Yes, your decisions in Mass Effect have genuine consequences for the end of Mass Effect 3, just like the characters actions in the first books of Lord of the Rings or The Neapolitan Novels echo through the full series.
We learn about Mordin over the course of the three Mass Effect games. The player’s choices affect his arc. This, in and of itself is fascinating, because some players may never get to experience Mordin’s best arc because of compounding choices in their own play through.
When you meet Mordin he is a jerk—chauvinistic, aloof, and ruthless scientist. Over the course of almost a hundred hours of story, you and your compatriots help him come to understand he needn’t be this way. In what I believe is his best arc, Mordin’s story ends with him sacrificing himself to undo an atrocity committed by his species against another. He signs off with a line just as curt and arrogant as when we first meet him, yet with a depth of caring and heart that emerges only through what amounts to years of friendship and camaraderie. He is explaining why he must be the one to do it, even if it means his death:
“My project. My work. My cure. My responsibility…[Don’t be sorry]. I’m not. Had to be me… Someone else might have gotten it wrong.”
Mordin’s story is as important as that of Duncan Idaho, Starbuck (either of them), Magwich, or Irving B., but far less accessible. As a result, not only do fewer people get to experience it first hand, but the stories from games struggle to get into the popular consciousness. They are, in a sense, trapped. And that’s a shame.
For those of you who have thus far eschewed video games because you doubt their literary merit, I hope I’ve made the case that it’s as present (and rare) as it is in film, TV shows, and novels. If you’ve hesitated to dive in due to a fear of complexity or difficulty, I encourage you to treat gaming as you would reading a great text. Yes, it will take time. The Wire is famously unforgiving and the colossal literary doorstops of the 90s aren’t well known for their gripping plots or likable characters. But that’s not the point is it?
Video games have been left out of the Great Conversation too long. While it’ll take a bit of work on all our parts, it’s time to bring them into the fold.