Games and Literature
- rebeccaphillips-iad
- Nov 15, 2014
- 2 min read
Once known for being crude and violent, some video games now feature sophisticated storylines and characters. Some players see a new literary tradition arising.
Clementine is a girl who is trying to survive a zombie apocalypse in a video game series based on the comic book and television franchise The Walking Dead… Clementine resembles great figures from literature - she looms large in people's imagination… many other fans find her even more compelling than a character in a work of fiction, because players of the game are responsible for her survival.
… players are forced to confront tough moral choices.
"When I hear my students talk about it, they use 'I' in the first person, but they're only playing that character," Abbott said. "I've never heard students talk about a story that way."
The relationship between literature and video games is close, and many developers have adapted works of literature into games. In 2010, for example, the studio Visceral Games adapted The Divine Comedy into a game called Dante's Inferno.
But increasingly companies are adapting stories originally written for video games into novels, comics and movies. The Assassin's Creed (2007) and Halo (2001) franchises have been turned into novels and films.
While storytelling in video games isn't new, advancements in technology provide new ways of presenting a narrative.
Irrational Games' Ken Levine is the developer behind the BioShock franchise, a series of first-person shooter games. He said he aimed to make his games less about killing people and more about character development.
"This is a medium that truly immerses players into a world," Levine said. "When a movie or book shows you a world, you follow their lead."
With video games, he explained, you can make a character turn left - and experience moments of discovery that do not exist in novels.
"It's important to think about the way people speak," said Murray. "The things they say in between their words and their mannerisms - that's something that translates well in games."
"Video games are like those oral epic traditions because that moment of performance is much more prominent," said Roger Travis, an associate professor of classics at University of Connecticut.
"[Games] can truly do something that no other storytelling can do - they put us in a situation where we're simultaneously the audience and the playwright," said Abbott.
"They sink their tentacles into you like all great literature and film does."
December 2013
By Lynsea Garrison
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