Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Christine Hartzler’

Shop Talk |

"A Physical Link into the World of the Fictional"

For the last several years, we’ve periodically explored the intersections between fiction and video games in these pixilated pages–they are, after all, both narrative art forms. Back in 2009, we published Christine Hartzler’s “Games Are Not About Monsters,” which was subsequently anthologized in Dzanc’s 2010 Best of the Web. In 2010, Mike Rudin argued that the Next Great American Novel just might be a video game (heresy!). And in 2011, Celeste Ng wondered, along with the Guardian, “Why aren’t more novelists weren’t writing vido games?” Most recently, James Pinto sat down in March for an interview with Tom Bissell, who […]


Essays |

Games Are Not About Monsters

Monster-killing does not have to be a hypersigil; it’s more basic than that. The organizing moral principles of a game world often boil down to something desperately obvious: black-and-white, good and evil. This isn’t bad in itself because a good game, like a good book, then takes the player into a more familiar ambiguity. Good and bad become less easily separated and less relevant the longer you travel. The trick is to create, in the gamer, a commitment to a point of view, whatever its morality…