The Place of Games in Fiction

[Javy]

Hey gang,

So I was doing some spring cleaning yesterday and discovered a folder with an old fiction piece. It amounts to 12 page joke at John Romero’s expense, and it’s not particularly good. But I started thinking about the place of video games within fiction—and I’m talking more than literary here, movies and the like—and why it’s so difficult to find a good piece of fiction that uses gaming in a realistic manner that meaningfully compliments whatever story is being told.

To my knowledge, and please correct me if I’m wrong here, most fictional pieces that make use of games do it in extravagant, “Egads! Behold the technology” ways (The Wizard, Tron) that don’t ever demonstrate the emotional impact that games can have in a realistic setting.  The only notable exception that springs to mind is the Shadow of the Colossus scene in the Adam Sandler/Don Cheadle flick Reign Over Me. No power gloves, no light cycles, just some bonding between these two characters with a game that underscores the tragedy that one of them has endured.

And I’m not knocking Tron, really (I will remain mum on the subject of The Wizard, though). I’m just curious why it’s so damn hard to find well done scenes/stories like that. Is it specifically a writing-related difficulty (e.g., how am I going to convey the experience that this person has with this game and make it universal and entertaining?) or something else?

[Zoya]

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars does an extraordinary job of describing video game play in a really evocative way. He captures both how mundane it is as an activity and aso how resonant it can be in terms of our personal narratives. I strongly recommend. Do give yourself a bit of breathing space around the book though. It reduced me to hysterical tears for a good few hours.

[Austin Grossman]

Oh dear, I'm afraid I must de-lurk and shameless-self-promo at the same time. This issue is pretty close to me, as a longtime game designer/writer and a novelist, and I've been dissatisfied with it for a long time.

I agree about The Fault in Our Stars - other signal examples would be Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark and maybe some sections of Microserfs. Personally I was disappointed by Ready Player One, which seemed to be a novel about nostalgia and fandom rather than the real nature and possibility of the medium.

The self-promo part. Two years ago - having written a first novel (Soon I Will Be Invincible), I set out to fix this exact issue - I would write what I hoped would be the Great American Video Game Novel! Based on my experiences as a game developer plus my own fevered imaginings. The novel is set at a game dev studio, and I grapple pretty hard with getting the details and emotional freight of gaming right, and game development. Cribbing a lot from first-person game journalism, I have to say.

Anyway the result is called YOU: a novel - the title of course referencing the "you" of gaming prose - "you are in a maze of twisty passages" and so forth - the prose slides between 1st- and 2nd-person as I grapple with the task of getting gaming right. It's coming out April 16th from Little Brown & Co. (I'll have excerpts on-line soon if you're curious. Or if you email me at co...@panix.com - I can refer you to the publicist and (hopefully) get an advance copy sent out.)

[Javy]

Haha, funny story, Austin: I was actually thinking of your book when I was mulling over the topic. I didn't remember the name or that you were the author, though (sorry!), so I left out any mention here. I had read about it a while back in a Kotaku article, so I'm glad you're lurking in the group and you popped in to answer/shamelessly promote your work.

And thanks to both of you for The Fault in Our Stars recommendation. My girlfriend has raved about it, and I think we have it, so I'll be checking out as soon as I finish digging through this Murakami novel.

I think it's an interesting point that you raise about RPO being about nostalgia and fandom. I haven't read the book, but it makes sense since so much of gaming culture does seem to revolve around nostalgia about games from the 16-bit era and less about the connection that a game can have with its player. I think we have to take off the nostalgia goggles to see what games are truly capable of in that sense.

[Nathan Altice]

I share Austin's sentiments about Ready Player One. Incessant name dropping wrapped around a bog standard ugly duckling love story. It's entertaining, but not great.

On the positive side, I'd recommend Lucky Wander Boy. It's about ten years old now and I rarely hear people talk about it. A wonderful bit of fiction centered around game playing.

[Austin Grossman]

I can't believe I forgot Lucky Wander Boy! With it's weird tailing off into mystery. I definitely affirm. Written by a guy who later co-created the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones.

[Alan Williamson]

I wrote a short story for a compilation Lana Polansky is putting together (that was last August) and I believe it's going to be released some time soon. All of the fiction is based on the concept of video game behaviours bleeding into the real world... that's pretty much all the information I have.

I remember a book by Terry Pratchett called Only You Can Save Mankind: read it as a child and I loved it!

- Alan

[Amanda Lange]

Well, there is Ender's Game. Which is about a video game, at least in the second half. I know I read and loved it as a teenager, like many teenage geeks do, before I was aware of all the issues surrounding Orson Scott Card etc.

[Line Hollis]

I gotta recommend Lucky Wander Boy too, just because it was the main thing that inspired me to start writing about experimental games. I love that book.

[Maddy Myers]

I wrote a story for Lana Polansky's collection, too! I really hope she has time to edit and publish all of the stories we wrote, but she told me she's pretty busy with other projects right now... us games writers, always taking on too many projects at one time. :)

It seemed like it was gonna be pretty cool, though. I hope she finds the time to put it together. And also edits my story. Because, I'll admit it, my story needs help.

[hancock michael]

I wonder if I'd have liked RPO more if it HAD been about 16-bit nostalgia; most of the games featured went about as far as the mid-80s arcade games. That period seems to get a lot of mining--Frogger in Seinfeld, the what if segment on Futurama, etc. I expect we'll see a shift toward what nostalgia gets remembered in the next few years as younger writers come in (if we're not seeing it already).

  There are, of course, a lot of books set within videogame worlds, but those aren't really about gaming, per se. And I think sci-fi stories featuring games are often more about creating an interesting 3-D environment than about saying anything regarding what it's like to play a game. For example, I liked Ted Williams' Otherland, but past the initial stages, it was more about a group of people lost in strange virtual vistas than people gaming.

Yahtze Croshaw's book Mogworld felt a bit like it was trying to hard for my tastes--always the kiss of death for a book aiming at humor--but it did have a really nice sentiment concerning the dignity of NPCs in MMOs, of all things. And one of my favorite game-based books was a YA book, Vivian Vande Velde's Heir Apparent. The plot was that a girl is playing through a VR fantasy adventure game, and, basically, she keeps dying, and has to start the whole thing over from scratch.  It really captured the frustration of having to play the same part of a game over and over, but in a way that reading about it wasn't excruciating.

I don't think it's inherently impossible to write good fiction about games, but so much of what makes up player experience is composed of things that don't fit our traditional narrative arcs--playing the same thing over and over again, recalibrating strategies, coasting through easy parts. Part of the difficulty is crafting a story around how we experience media in general. In a way, it would be like writing a book about reading a book--difficult, but not impossible (see: Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night A Traveller). That's just the single player experience, though. Competitive co-op gaming would probably be easier to write about, because it maps well onto existing story models for sport competitions.

[Zach]

REAMDE actually described a unique and compelling MMO based on feudalism and alternate economies. Unfortunately the second half of the book turned into a "kill the terrorist" romp and it was otherwise a Neal Stephenson novel. 

Daemon by Daniel Suarez was another interesting one that relied on electronically crowdsourced "games" to do interesting stuff. Fair warning, it establishs how evil the bad guy is with a completely unnecessary and drawn out rape scene, so. 

Ready Player One fell short for me because ultimately the game didn't sound like it could actually exist. There was some really groanworthy stuff in there, like "“A Masamune?” he asked, staring at the blade in wonder. I nodded. “Yes. And it’s a plus-five Vorpal Blade, too.”" UGH. 

[John Brindle]

Let's not forget Halting State by Charles Stross - a near-future police procedural slash hacker mystery about a bank robbery inside a WoW-style MMO. (your book sounds interesting, Austin!)

I would imagine that part of it is simply the fact that videogames haven't meant much to the generation of authors who are currently at that prime book-bearing age of 40-60. Part of this is presumably just age and cultural relevance. Part of it is maybe down to a sciences/humanities divide. Another part if it is doubtless to do with prestige. For example, Martin Amis once wrote a strategy guide for popular arcade videogames, but the man is so arse-clenchingly obsessed with being a legitimate and proper writer that he doesn't like to talk about it anymore.

The following piece of Polonian advice pretty much encapsulates his whole arcade ethos: “PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.” I’m no expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a critical limb here and suggest that this might be the sole instance of the use of the mock-heroic tone in a video game player’s guide.

 I imagine all this will change. We still have self-posessed luddites like Jonathan Franzen, who disdains the use of the internet and computers as much as possible, but then there's also Tom Bissell's Extra Lives (not authors of equal public stature, I concede). And as videogames become ever more a mundane part of everyone's lives, I imagine they will make their way into fiction more comprehensively and less exciteably.