Video Games: The Books of the Future?

Next up: Voltaire's Candide by Take-Two Interactive

I just finished reading a rather interesting piece in the UK’s Telegraph by Tim Martin, who is part of a growing minority of culture critics who are slowly realizing that video games are becoming a legitimate artistic medium. He begins by discussing Dante’s Inferno, which has been turned from a classic piece of literature into an upcoming release from EA.

Made by the developers of last year’s outer-space zombie shooter Dead Space, the game recasts Dante as a muscle-bound anti-hero, carving his way through the Nine Circles with a scythe and a cross to liberate his girlfriend from Lucifer.

As he lies around, “punishing” or “absolving” the damned souls surrounding him, the disembodied voice of Virgil provides instructive quotations from the poem. The creators have even promised to recreate the topography of the Inferno, an uncannily good fit for the levels of a computer game. In short, it sounds like amazingly good fun.

Dante’s Inferno may not herald a new era in literary gaming, but connoisseurs of story could do worse than watch the area for developments. A recent survey of American teenagers revealed that 97 per cent of the consumers of the future now play video games.

That’s quite a statistic right there. A whopping 97% of teenagers today play video games, and yes, it can be said that many will give up the habit upon reaching adulthood, but there are certainly those of us who have not, and will not. This means that the future of entertainment is moving toward interactivity and active participation rather than simply reading or watching something as a mere observer.

Martin goes on to point out other instances where literature and gaming have crossed:

A vague interest in literary form has hovered for some time at the edges of contemporary gaming. Fans of H P Lovecraft jumped at the appearance a few years ago of a game based on his story The Call of Cthulhu, in which the player guided a detective through a town of boggling fish-men while trying to keep him from going insane. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, released in 2007, owed considerably more to the Strugatsky brothers’ seminal Roadside Picnic than it did to the Tarkovsky film it was supposedly based on. And Bioshock, an adventure set in a decaying art-deco city beneath the sea, won rapturous praise for its dramatisation of the more sinister aspects of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

The take away here is that video games cannot only be echoes of great works of literature, but if properly done can be great works literature themselves. Writers and game developers have been slow to make friends with each other, but as it begins to happen we see more and more well written games that are better than the movies and novels they’re adapted into. Mass Effect was certainly better written (and frankly better acted) than the new Star Wars trilogy, and Bioshock was definitely more haunting than the either the Halloween and Friday the 13th remakes. We are moving into a new era of entertainment, and the sooner we all realize it, the better.

[via Telegraph]