Games and Literature

In my previous column (Games and Literacy, LJ 6/15/09), I talked about literacy, reading, and writing associated with the gaming hobby. In libraries, we also pride ourselves on being about literature, not just Dick and Jane or Clifford the Big Red Dog. Surely gaming and literature have no common ground, right?

Wrong. Gaming and literature are both about narrative and storytelling. J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy delivers a powerful literary narrative with ties borrowing from mythic sources. In the same way that writers like Tolkien adapted and expanded on earlier literatures to create new works for new audiences, game developers are building new legends from older material today.

For decades, fantasy role-playing games have drawn on the tropes of Tolkien's Middle-earth, and the Tolkien estate has licensed formal game adaptations, from Iron Crown Enterprises' long-gone Middle-Earth Role Playing (MERP) game to collectible card games to today's The Lord of the Rings Online (www.lotro.com). Such adaptations deliver fine stories in their own right.

For those purists who might decry my description of Tolkien's writings as literature, there's also the example of Dante, author of that masterpiece of world literature, The Divine Comedy. At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June, game developer Electronic Arts launched its opening event with a trailer for its forthcoming third-person action-adventure video game, Dante's Inferno.

Is it a slavish retelling? Hardly, in no small part because—be ready to flinch, you nitpickers—the player's avatar is Dante reenvisioned as a muscled and armored hero battling through the Nine Circles of Hell to face off against Lucifer himself in a love-driven quest to free Beatrice. Yet, should this game inspire just one person to discover the original poem or excite discussion in online forums, over water coolers, and perhaps even at library events, then who has grounds to complain that Dante wields Death's own scythe in service to this unique retelling?

That's what storytelling is all about, after all: exploring the human condition, events, and their impact—interaction among individuals. Books aimed at would-be writers repeatedly pound home the point that "plot is a verb." Verbs are action words, so why shouldn't an action-packed game deliver a thumping good story?

I've personally seen the influence game writing has had on the work of such popular authors as R.A. Salvatore and Michael A. Stackpole, both of whom I've worked with at game production companies over the years. Through the early game modules and scenarios that Salvatore and Stackpole wrote and the puzzles, problems, and scripts crafted into the computer games they worked on, they laid the groundwork for the New York Times best-selling writers and storytellers they are today.

These and other authors now write powerful novels unrelated to games, but even already established authors elect to write books set in game universes. I've heard such work criticized as little more than glorified fanfic, or "flipping hamburgers in someone else's universe," but that's unfair. Maybe game tie-ins aren't great literature. But certain of these authors invest every ounce of their creative fervor into the game they're writing—and it shows.

Case in point are Eric Nylund's Halo books and Christie Golden's World of WarCraft novels. Casual players of World of Warcraft may not know why Arthas is the Lich King, but they can read Golden's Arthas: The Rise of the Lich King and understand the road of good intentions gone deeply wrong, the path of the antihero. There is a lot of game-related reading out there, and some of it rises to aspirations of literature by any reasonable definition.

It may be hard to see the connection between a patron plugging away on Guitar Hero and the next Great American Novel, but remember that the gaming hobby doesn't exist in a vacuum. That patron might play Guitar Hero at the library, log in to play the massive online adventure game RuneScape (www.runescape.com) with his friends, and check out the Ashbringer manga to read under the covers—then sit down to create his own piece of fan fiction or draw some manga about his RuneScape character because, for him, the game world is alive and interesting. Forty years later, the skills he acquires today might find him writing the next Divine Comedy.