Why, Jane Austen, of course.

App developer Feel Every Yummy presents Word Fighter, a head-to-head word puzzle game starring literary characters. The game looks like Street Fighter crossed with Boggle, and here’s the trailer, which can only be described as AWESOME:

Players can battle as Edgar (Allen Poe), Agatha (Christie), and yes, Jane (Austen). Forbes has the scoop:

When Gian Cruz and Kris Zabala, the founders and sole employees of up-and-coming app developer Feel Every Yummy, came up with the idea for Word Fighter last year, they originally planned it to look similar to Street Fighter, and created their own cast of tough-looking characters that paid homage to Capcom’s beloved arcade fighting series. However, they felt that for their new word game, a literary take might make more sense and have a broader appeal.

“We changed our art direction because the majority of the feedback we got was that the gameplay was quite solid, but the gritty Street Fighter-style of our early builds made the game feel like it catered to boys,” said Cruz [...] “For Jane in particular, I essentially wanted to make a bad-ass version of Princess Peach,” he added, citing the Super Mario Bros. character famous for being constantly kidnapped.

The game is slated for release later this year on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Given my chronic Words with Friends addiction, I may have to download this one as well…

• Not into Austen? Dip into our blog archives for video games based on The Great Gatsby, Waiting for Godot, City of Glass, and even Dante’s Inferno.
• Learn more about the serious links between video games, narrative, and fiction with these two essays here on Fiction Writers Review: “Games Are Not About Monsters” by Christine Hartzler, and “Writing the Great American Novel Videogame” by Michael Rudin.

So you’re hanging out with some writer-friends on a Saturday night.  Perhaps you’re gathered your salon sipping absinthe, or–let’s be realistic, here–snuggled up on hand-me-down sofas drinking Yellowtail and arguing about why people don’t read short stories.  (Uh, just me?)

Anyway, at some point you call a truce in the debate on whether “chick lit” is a useful term, or  you call a halt to the V.S. Naipaul-bashing.  How to occupy yourselves now? By playing a literary board game, of course.

In the New York Times, Dwight Gardner outlines something he calls “the paperback game“:

One player, the “picker” for this turn, selects a book from the pile and shows its cover around. Then he or she flips it over and reads aloud the often overwrought publisher-supplied copy on the back cover.

Hearing these descriptions read aloud is among the game’s distinct joys. [...] One reason it’s less fun to play with serious rather than genre novels is that their back covers tend to contain phrases like “sweeping meditation on mortality and loss” rather than “a need that only he could satisfy.”

The other players absorb these words, and then write on their slips of paper what they imagine to be a credible first sentence for [the] novel. Essentially, they need to come up with something good — or bad — enough to fool the other players into thinking that this might be the book’s actual first sentence. Players initial their slips of paper and place them upside down in a pile at the center of the table.

Meanwhile the picker — the person who read the back cover aloud — writes the book’s actual first sentence on another slip of paper. He or she collects all the slips, mixing the real first sentence with the fakes, and commences to read each one aloud. Each person votes on what he or she thinks is the real first sentence.

This is a variation on one of my favorite board games, Balderdash, which I sometimes have my creative writing students play. Many people know Balderdash as “the dictionary game,” but there’s an extended version, Beyond Balderdash, that asks players to come up with a plot summary based on a movie title, explain why a particular obscure person is “famous”, outline the “important” event that happened on a particular date in history, and more. It’s great practice in making up just the right details to be convincing.

Here are some more writerly games to play:

• Scrabble, Boggle, and Bananagrams: Great ways to stretch your vocabulary and remind you of words you haven’t used in a while.
• Two Truths and a Lie: No board, paper, or props needed for this one! One person is “it” and tells the group three statements about himself or herself. As you probably guessed, two are true and one is a lie. For example, the player might say, “In high school, I streaked during a pep rally. I am incredibl afraid of ducks. And I once met Mick Jagger in a men’s room, and he peed on my shoe.” The other players can then ask “it” questions, trying to guess which statement is a lie. “It,” of course, must try to come up with convincing details for the fake story.
• The “Temporary Matter” game: This isn’t so much a “game,” but we played this once during grad school and it made for a memorable night. We did what the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story do:
  

  “I remember during power failures at my grandmother’s house, we all had to say something,” Shoba continued. He could barely see her face, but from her tone he knew her eyes were narrowed, as if trying to focus on a distant object. It was a habit of hers.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. A little poem. A joke. A fact about the world. For some reason my relatives always wanted me to tell them the names of my friends in America. I don’t know why the information was so interesting to them. The last time I saw my aunt she asked after four girls I went to elementary school with in Tucson. I barely remember them now.” [...]

  “Let’s do that,” she said suddenly.

  “Do what?”

  “Say something to each other in the dark.”

  “Like what? I don’t know any jokes.”

  “No, no jokes.” She thought for a minute. “How about telling each other something we’ve never told before.”

Or, if none of these games appeal to you, check out the suggestions for literary board games at the Guardian, and make up your own.

What games do you play with your friends (writers or not)?

• Prefer a controller to dice? Learn more about literary video games in our blog archives, including those based on works of literature and those inspiring works of literature.
• Read Christine Hartzer’s essay “Video Games Are Not About Monsters” and Michael Rudin’s essay “Writing the Great American Novel Videogame” right here on FWR.
• It’s not a group game, but learn how playing The Sims might help your writing.

The next game to come out of Rockstar—who you probably know for Grand Theft Auto and might know for last year’s acclaimed Red Dead Redemption—will be L.A. Noire. True to its name, it’ll be a sort of detective adventure in a recreated 1940s L.A.

There’s been a lot of hype for the game, fueled by its publisher, premise, and some great features, like its hyper-realistic facial motion capture. Recently, Rockstar has been making a big transmedia push for this game. L.A. Noire became the first video game to be featured in the Tribeca Film Festival. The L.A. Times even partnered with the game to create a map of “Real Crimes of 1947 Los Angeles”.

And, most relevant to us fiction writers and celebrants of Short Story Month, last week Rockstar announced that they’ll be digitally releasing eight short stories inspired by the game between now and the May 17th release date of the game, before releasing the complete collection—again, digitally—on June 6th.

Story authors include Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, Jonathan Santlofer, Duane Swierczynski, and Andrew Vachss. I’m looking forward to reading the collection (you can check out the first few stories online here, with the rest being released over the next few days), and I hope this becomes a trend for other serious video game publishers.

NMA's depiction of Chris Brown on Good Morning America.

Perhaps you’ve seen the work of Next Media Animation, which animates recent news stories into (unintentionally?) hilarious Sims-style 3-D video clips. (Seriously. If you haven’t seen these before, check them out now. Go ahead. I’ll wait right here.)

Anyway, now this 3-D technology is being used for something educational. The New York Times reports that college literature classes are using 3-D animations to bring literature to life for students:

Prof. Katherine Rowe’s blue-haired avatar was flying across a grassy landscape to a virtual three-dimensional re-creation of the Globe Theater, where some students from her introductory Shakespeare class at Bryn Mawr College had already gathered online. Their assignment was to create characters on the Web site Theatron3 and use them to block scenes from the gory revenge tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” to see how setting can heighten the drama.

Lord of the Rings skins for The Sims 3

Lit-loving Sims fans have created skins (think of them as costumes for your character) based on their favorite books—like these Lord of the Rings–based skins or these based on the Twilight books.

"Elizabeth Bennet" skin for The Sims 3

One Sims player even admitted to using her Sims to reenact her favrite books:

I’ve spent hours creating new Sims families or recreating my favourite book/movie characters as Sims.

Honest ! I had my Jane Eyre Sim (married to my Edward Rochester Sim, of course), my Charlotte Brontë Sim (together with her sisters and most of my favourite authors), most of Jane Austen’s characters as Sims (ah… Captain Frederick Wentworth…), and that is only to speak about the Sims I mainly have played with.

And, conversely, some gamers are using the game to help them generate fiction of their own. The “Well Read Sims” group on LiveJournal is

a community for people who’ve created Sims stories of characters from books, movies, or any work of fiction. Photographs of Dolores Umbridge being hit by a satellite, Aragorn being electrocuted, the ghost of Christmas Past scaring the @%$# out of Scrooge, Jack Sparrow walking around starkers, Spock getting snogged by the mailman, the vampire Lestat scrounging a midnight snack (in the fridge, not that!), Buffy marrying Tarzan, Lady Macbeth having a catfight with Catwoman…

Members have posted links and excerpts to their own original fiction based on their Sims, including fanfiction like lost chapters of Harry Potter novels and literary mashups. There hasn’t been much happening there the past few years, but I bet there are more sites out there like this one…

Image credit: screengrab from greatgatsbygame.com

Why aren’t more novelists writing video games? That’s what the Guardian asked recently:

Part of the problem is clearly to do with priorities. As the game writer and former critic Rhianna Pratchett says in the film: “Story is often the last thing thought about and the first thing pulled apart.” So much effort goes into making spectacular worlds, tackling the technical logistics and ensuring the playing experience is enjoyable that decent plot and dialogue fall by the wayside.

Yet there are trickier issues involved. As a few people say in the film, gaming presents a unique challenge in terms of linear narrative. Or rather, the general lack of it. All the variant paths and possibilities relating to moving through a game offer plenty of potential for creativity – but thinking about wrapping it all together is so brain-ache-making and frequently needs such mathematical precision that it’s small wonder game writers are less able to concentrate on things such as dialogue. There’s also the continuing problem of working that dialogue properly into the game narrative. At the moment, even the most innovative and otherwise thoroughly entertaining games such as the Grand Theft Auto series rely on cut scenes that interrupt the action. Invariably, the dialogue is an annoyance getting in the way of the action rather than the thing that drives it.

True, there has been a smattering of videogames based on works of literature, including iPlay’s Great Gatsby game and an RPG based on Dante’s Inferno. And lately, there have been several more sightings of lit-based videogames, which delight me as a book nerd. This Waiting for Godot game, for example (which has since been tweaked due to a cease-and-desist letter—it’s now “Waiting for Grodoudou”), and there’s the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass for the PSP. And don’t even get me started on this awesome NES-style version of The Great Gatsby—in which you guide Nick from platform to platform, killing butlers with a flick of your hat. (Yes!!)

But here’s what all these games have in common: all were works of literature first, adapted to the console screen later. In some of them, the connection to the source literature is superficial at best—as is the narrative of the game itself.

I wonder if part of the problem is just that the gaming demographic and the writing demographic don’t have enough overlap. I know a few gamers who like to read, a a few writers who love video games—but they’re the same 3 people. (And I used to be one of them, back when I had more free time!)

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. We’ve talked about video games and narrative on FWR for a while now, starting way back in 2009 with Christine Hartzler’s essay “Games Are Not About Monsters”—which was subsequently published in Dzanc’s 2010 Best of the Web. More recently, our own Michael Rudin discussed “Writing the Great American Novel Videogame”. So: will literature and video games ever consummate their forbidden romance? Who out there would be up for writing a good video game?

Enter I-Play’s video game Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. According to the game description, you can “Find the hidden items on your list triggering character dialogue and progressing the story,” “Recreate Fitzgerald’s famous prose, assemble your own library and earn trophies to share with friends on Facebook,” and “Complete unique mini-games: test your memory, put yourself in the author’s seat, or solve portrait puzzles.”

Here’s a screenshot, complete with some landmarks from the novel:

Gatsby, credit: I-play

I-Play offers a free trial version of the game for download (Windows only). If you try it out, let us know what you think.

And if epic poetry—and fighting video games— are more your speed, there’s always this.

Below is an excerpt from “Writing the Great American Novel Video Game”; click here to read the whole essay.

For some time I was one of few standing firmly in both camps—writer and gamer, fiction-fiend and pixel-popper. But the innovative nature of Next-Gen gaming, with its leaps in technology and massive install-base, means games have developed new depth–and the future of gaming promises to look a lot more like literature than flight simulators. This is, in many ways, the rise of a new novel. Like its lexicographic predecessor, the pixilated form revels in moral ambiguity, character motivations, conflicts between free will and fate.

I share this story because the keyboard we writers know so intimately is no less different or shocking. Like my parents’ record player, it lives a double life, spellbound in passionate affairs with a video game community that dotes on it as affectionately as we authors ever have. For every keystroke a writer uses to describe character or establish scene, somewhere in cyberspace a gamer uses these same keys to navigate gunships and commandeer submarines. Hone your fast-twitch muscles, and that slender spacebar can control more than just space—a boxer’s jab, a racer’s gear-shift, a sniper’s scope.

My parents learned that day that record players exist in a parallel universe; what they thought was simply a musical utility—a tool—audiophiles and DJs have turned into a device by which musical art can be both created and consumed. Similarly, there are some 34 million PC gamers¹ who might say we writers haven’t a clue what the keyboard is capable of delivering. For them, the keyboard grants far more than access to entertainment. In this brave new virtual world, gamers have discovered—and are creating with each keystroke—an entirely new art form.

LEVEL ONE

INSTALLATION

The history of video games is told in generations. A big, weighty word for a thirty-year old industry, but fitting nonetheless—this is, after all, a marketplace that refreshes cyclically by purging its own technologies. Wholly and wholeheartedly, manufacturers abandon their video game console “families” for newer, shinier ones. Today, after three decades of hitting the Reboot button, the industry finds itself amidst a seventh generation that is doing just so. This seventh go is the period fanboys and journalists refer to as the Next Generation, the forward-looking term first coined in 2005 when Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console released. “Next-Gen” encapsulated the industry’s optimism for innovation—we were gunning it, leaving “Current-Generation” tech behind, a dusty box for little brother.

I joined Activision Blizzard on the heels of this hype, and spent the next three years as a Brand Manager as the company grew to become the largest and most profitable third-party publisher in the world. Like my former employer, the industry has refused to break stride. Since it began, Next-Gen has netted out prodigious advancements in graphical fidelity (the stuff that looks cool) and playability (the cool stuff you can control), but what makes Next-Gen worth writing about, and what makes Next-Next Gen worth dreaming about, is the recent leap forward in artistic achievement and experimentation.

For some time I felt alone in this view, one of few standing firmly in both camps—writer and gamer, fiction-fiend and pixel-popper—but Next-Gen has, with its leaps in technology and massive install-base, brought the water to the masses. You no longer need three years in Activision’s trenches to spot the trend: games have developed depth, and the future of gaming will look a lot more like literature than flight simulators. This is, in many ways, the rise of a new novel. Like its lexicographic predecessor, the pixilated form revels in moral ambiguity, character motivations, conflicts between free will and fate. Take, for example, Activision’s recent record-breaking release of the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In Seth Schier’s review for the New York Times— yep, a game review in the Times—he called the title “unflinching yet empathetic.” Describing the series, Schiesel writes:

With its shift to the Modern Warfare line two years ago Infinity Ward clearly wanted to deliver a present-day shooter experience that not only trotted out the latest, greatest technologies for killing efficiently, but that also prompted the player to consider the emotional and psychological consequences. In the first Modern Warfare that was demonstrated most clearly in a now-famous sequence in which the player, acting as the gunner on an airship high above a battleground, obliterated the ghostly infrared images of people displayed on a screen with detachment and precision. It was a subtly powerful moment, with a game imitating life imitating games.²

Reviews like Schiesel’s hint at what is evolving under the hood—a new generation of games as mature and complex as any art form available to audiences today. And such games capture the depth and scope of the human condition through the power of collaboration, rather than singular artistic vision. Even the term for the gaming audience—“install base”—reinforces the integration of participant and medium. For these individuals are not merely “connected to” or “invested in” their form: they are installed.

LEVEL TWO

THE NEW BAKERY

The renaissance and risk-taking that Next-Gen represents could just as easily describe gaming’s evolving audience as it does its technologies and stories. This is a worldwide install-base tiptoeing toward a future of “game imitating life imitating games.”² And as this tip-toe toward sophistication swells into a march millions-of-gamers deep, devotees to the book and letter can appreciate what directs its path: games and the players who love them aren’t locusts devouring time and attention from other art forms; rather, they are honeybees finding the nectar in narrative and then pollinating the desire for more of it, no matter the medium.

The only thing more exciting than the purity in this relentless hunt is the sheer number of hunters involved—the gaming audience is massive and still growing. Those spellbound keyboard-wielding PC gamers mentioned earlier compose the smallest slice of the gaming pie. Add console and handheld gamers and the medium comes to entertain 100 million people in America alone.¹ The video game industry already beats Hollywood in revenue annually. Gaming hasn’t carved a piece out of the entertainment pie—it’s built a whole new bakery.

As a writer, I was excited to learn the empire wasn’t built on a secret recipe so much as some very familiar ingredients. There are protagonists and antagonists, epilogues and prologues, first-person and third-person. But it’s the sum of these parts—the finished good—that gamers hold dear above all else, and which fans of literature can identify with most. Gamers, like readers, covet immersion. It is the Holy Grail. Gamers want something they can sit down and lose time in, consuming level after level until their eyes can take no more and the urge to know what happens next gives reluctant way to body clocks that have timed out.

But this is no longer an issue of curfew, of child’s play. According to the Electronic Software Association³, the average gamer is thirty-five years old and has on average played games for twelve years. These men and women (females compose forty percent of all gamers) outspend every other form of entertainment, not because they are drawn to great games but because they stay drawn by their complexity and artistry.

So, yes, at their core, games are stories, consumed with great fanfare but also built with the same tools and materials we authors stash in our own toolboxes. That said, a game’s construction is highly specialized. Though expenses vary, your average novel costs time and energy, a laptop, and equal parts espresso and sanity. A video game needs these things too, but to the tune of around twenty-five million dollars in technical support. Nevertheless, here is the most important distinction: a game, though at one point written, is not created by a writer. Games are brought to life by developers. In my three years in the industry, the term never ceased to give me pause, given the extended family developers share in the wide world of storytellers. Whereas authors, journalists, screenwriters and playwrights can hypothetically create a finished product on their own, at their own pace, developers must “develop” their games gradually, usually over a two-year cycle of incremental gains. Games evolve from ideas into prototypes into weekly game “builds,” each week’s build increasingly fleshed out from an art, sound, and design standpoint. In linear games, each game “level” contains an environment, plot points, and like the chapters of a novel, these levels come together to form a larger narrative.

In most cases, the team that creates all this ranges from twenty to 200 dedicated individuals. The art department conceptualizes the game’s style, characters, and environments. Designers take those building blocks and create a set of features that will govern the game’s mechanics—what will the action look like and how will it stay interesting for ten to twenty hours? Sound engineers construct effects and music scores to complete the experience. Producers are the glue, making sure everything happens in-sync, on-budget and on-time. Amongst all of this: one writer.

He is a lot of things, our cousin. He is on his own, for one. Few writers have entered this space. He is both an explorer, stewarding the march of Next-Gen down a worthy path, and a pilgrim, setting up camp for the rest of us. He is also a prospector, a new-millennium 49er. As viewed against the full scope of the storytelling pantheon, gaming is an infant—the industry is new money, less than a half-a-century old. It boasts an unscarred landscape, veins of rich ore lying undiscovered just below the surface. The opportunity may be best put by Guillermo Del Toro, director of Oscar-winner Pan’s Labrynth, who told Wired magazine:

“We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else…We could be doing so much more…In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.⁴

Forget the riches of revenue for a moment; right now, as you read this, gaming is rich in something far more valuable to us writers: gaming is rich with storytelling possibility. For all my insider knowledge of what the medium has done, and Del Toro’s optimism at what it might do, the idea that games might not have done it yet means that we, as storytellers, have reason to be a smidge jealous of our “developer” brethren and their install base. Their art is still maturing. Someone will soon make history. Gaming will evolve.

Independent game developers—stewards of the new and different, and usually on the cheap—are more aware of this than anyone. One of these developers, Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage, is credited by some as creating the first tear-jerker video game. In a recent New York Times Magazine article by Joshuah Bearman, he discusses the way in which video games will inevitably have to escape the influence of film to distinguish themselves, just as film had to do the same with its predecessor, the stage. “Eventually film figured out editing, camera movement—the tools that made movies movies,” he says. “Video games need to discover what’s special and different about their own medium to break out of their cultural ghetto.”⁵

Given the process and team dynamic described above, the question, then, is how does writing fit into the game industry’s creative process, and how will that relationship evolve as game development and the medium itself matures? Why should we care about the gaming recipe or, for that matter, whether or not it breaks out of its “cultural ghetto”? After all, if it does, what kind of art form will have escaped?

LEVEL THREE

SWEAT AND TREMBLE

Fair questions, for if members of the development team are drawing the game up, making it work, giving it sound, and constructing it from scratch, then what in the world does the writer really do? A game concept must be nurtured from something fun into something immersive, but how this is achieved through narrative is the writer’s responsibility. Though you may not pick up and play a game and immediately see the writer’s contribution, if you keep playing it, if you experience it beginning to end, those realizations become paramount. There is a script. A plot. Characters have dialogue. For gamers, winning the game is a formality, an expectation; beyond stepping into the boots of their favorite characters and watching these protagonists grow and evolve, they want to become experts on each character’s biography and relationships, each distant planet’s geography, the effects and counter effects of countless spells, weapons and artifacts. They game to experience. To understand. To learn.

The writer is busiest before the project has a team, conceptualizing all these details and developments so that when the artists and designers sit down to create, they are working not off ideas but a cohesive game, a narrative. Depth, rather than polish. Gaming is the ultimate show-over-tell medium. But for it to matter, for a gamer to remember it years later, and want to play it again, what’s shown must be rooted in a story worth telling.

But that’s just it, isn’t it? How can show-over-tell, a literary term, apply to a medium that shows-and-tells-everything? The act of reading and gaming are so fundamentally different that whereas they both require writers, any developer who hopes to raise gaming out of its “cultural ghetto” must first be tapped not into what the gaming audience experiences, but how—they need to get how games affect gamers emotionally. Literature has evolved; though today we read for different reasons than ever before, certain truths hold eternal: we read to understand characters different than ourselves, to experience other lives, to grow and learn through stepping into others’ shoes. Gamers play for these same reasons, but they also want to control characters different from themselves—to not only experience and see other lives, but guide them. Perhaps this is why winning is a formality, a diploma to hang in the garage. Winning comes after gamers have sweated and trembled, paused the game to compose themselves. Screamed and thrashed. As an audience, they are immersed on another level altogether. This level increasingly requires two things: new kinds of storytelling and new storytellers to bring it forth.

At Activision, I worked on award-winning titles and the opposite—games meant solely to entertain and fill rainy afternoons. The latter is what Rohrer referred to as the “cultural ghetto”; as in any other form, money still drives decision making and more often than not, game publishers will pick simpler premises to develop. This is not merely because they have proven audiences; they’re also more affordable to build out. Think Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, Clive Cussler, or any other writer whose work has become a franchise of predictability.

But the kind of game Rohrer dreams of exists. I’ve played and worked on both types of games, and as a writer, toiling in each tier taught me as much about what makes art as what makes entertainment. For an outsider trying to understand the difference, the problem is that games, no matter their purpose or depth, can often look equally breathtaking. Even for hardcore gamers, graphics can be the most effective common denominator in judging a title’s ability to immerse; and to that end, games, and the characters and environments therein, have become uncommonly pretty. Female characters like Lara Croft are so beautifully rendered that they’ve become bona fide sex symbols—transcending off the small screen and onto the big. We’ve gone from 16-bit graphics to environments where blades of grass sway against the breeze. On the surface, these graphical advances might mean that to a non-scrutinizing gamer, most titles are looking good, or looking “cool.” What the graphical advances really mean is that under the hood, the processing power has gone up—developers can do more, experiment more, risk more. It means that a game writer’s narrative can be enhanced by craft—details, objects, expressions and atmospherics can all augment storytelling. Mood is now a factor.

Distill this further and the opportunity for artistic achievement in the games space becomes that much more exciting. True, like its brother-in-law the beach-ready paperback, there will always be mindless video games; scoring touchdowns and zapping aliens provide the same cracker-barrel escapism as pulp detective novels and bodice-rippers. But if we observe the last few years’ most popular games, they illustrate a clear shift in consumer palate toward more complex narrative. And it’s this small batch of sophisticated stories that have evolved what used to be called a good game into Great Gaming, a difference in quality akin to the disparity between good reads and Great Literature. Today they might compose a narrow bandwidth amidst the hundreds available to consumers, but these are the games tasked with evolving, growing big and strong into Citizen Kanes that might one day provide gaming with a permanent path out from its casual and iterative “ghetto.” And as game consoles become more technically powerful and developers more savvy, impressive graphics and gameplay will continue to shed their role as competitive advantages, and instead storytelling will emerge as the critical instrument teams will use to differentiate their art. Narrative and art are becoming less a bright possibility for gaming’s future and more likely the only path to the top of its mountain.

Of course, the ascent never really seemed necessary until recently. Game stories have historically been raw, a means to an end, form-fitted to help players understand and uncover game features and content. Players didn’t care if Pac-Man had daddy issues—they wanted to gobble ghosts. Things have changed. Video game writing is now recognized and awarded by the Writers Guild of America. 2009’s five nominees come from five different genres, ranging from casual to action to role-playing. The establishment of the award and its broad view is in ways a reflection of the depth game-writing now encompasses. The ‘gobbling ghost’ has become a ghost itself. Though every game writer contributes to the game’s design document, dialogue and story, the exceptional ones are working hand in hand to see what else they can do to build unprecedented immersion. These are the artists, creating games that are art. They suspend disbelief with their storytelling. Juxtapose vivid new worlds against meticulously researched historical fact. They are increasingly intimate, driven by characters that compel. They probe morality relentlessly. Like any great work of art, they challenge their audience, destabilize it, and demand collaboration.

LEVEL FOUR

AVOID THE RAILS

In Pac-Man, our hero’s quest is simple: clear the screen while avoiding certain ghosts and gobbling others. By today’s development standards, it’s an archaic design. Whereas an author might give her character a fork in the road and pick one for the reader, game writers now work in concert with designers to challenge gamers by giving characters countless forks. In short, complete rein over a character’s destiny. So that in this new future, Pac-Man can jump off your screen, gobble any ghost he wants, maybe even stop for a beer and some Thai before outsourcing his contract to another Pac-Assassin.

Today’s gamers demand depth through choice, and today’s great games challenge their audience not only through the minutiae of mini-quests but with mini-bouts of moral plight. Clint Hocking, a Creative Director at Ubisoft, the world’s fourth largest game company, refers to the successful experimentation in the “indie” development circuit as games that “have used what is innate to games—their interactivity—to make a statement about the human condition.”⁵

Though in no way a perfect example, I personally worked on one title that attempted to extract this effect through a popular proxy: your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was built so that the player would not only have the tools to defeat enemies, but to mold temperament. Righteous or antihero, staying a “friendly” neighborhood Spider-Man was solely the player’s choice. We did this because the novelty of simply swinging around town as Spider-Man had worn off. Immersion had to evolve beyond wearing the costume. So with every intention of challenging our audience, we redefined Spider-Man as ambiguous, left it up to the gamer to return verdict on Spidey—in turn, returning verdict on the gamer himself. A variety of reasons kept us from only scratching the surface, as in true “open world” games, choices have consequences beyond whether a city cheers or fears a Red or Black-Suited Spider-Man, or who in turn becomes Spidey’s ally or villain.

[View another trailer for "Spider-Man: Web of Shadows" here.]

Character creation and development arguably hits its apex in the franchise Fable, where the entire game is based on the decisions a player makes, as the character will evolve into whatever he or she desires. The appeal lies in the immersion this provides—this is self-invention fused with complex consequences. Imagine a Choose Your Own Adventure book where in addition to affecting the character’s path, your choices affect the book’s page color, the book’s fonts, the book-jacket’s imagery. Complete control comes when every decision matters, when destiny is rewritten with each one. For games like these, an ambitious writer can spend weeks and months brainstorming “quests” and paths for his audience. The payoff? A gamer can spend years replaying them, experimenting with different causal relationships, observing change, learning. The idea that game stories may be less profound than short stories because they boast more outcomes is beside the point—this is a new art form, and just as film and television learned to inspire their audiences, video game writers are learning their medium is one that can embrace its replayability to reinvent how gaming narrative can challenge its audience.

[View a TV commercial for Fable 2 here.]

But what about games that challenge more than their audience? A great work of art can destabilize far more than its following—it can infect the periphery. Whether destabilizing our senses of right and wrong or simply what’s proper, the capability of games to shake things up by literally providing the audience with the shaker makes it one of the most powerful art forms in history. When an art form is banned over violated codes of “…excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence, and anything dealing with the occult,”⁶ we need to ask ourselves if this censorship is truly protecting our citizens, or whether we simply haven’t recognized the artistry in the work. Yes, many games cash in on the liquid gold of blood, the silver of silicon’ed heroines, but can we honestly say that today’s morally-challenging video games do little more than erode our morals? What if, instead, some are breaking down boundaries of thought and expression? Just by sitting on the receiving end of politicians’ ire and parental fear, video games are joining a fraternity, walking a well-worn path: after all, the violated codes listed above refer not to a particular game, but were cited by a Canadian library in 1982 as grounds for banning The Catcher in the Rye.⁷

I’ve seen the value of destabilization first-hand, watching as the developers of Call of Duty invested in it devotedly, dividends returning the favor promptly, elevating their property from risk-taker to headline-stealer to chart-topper. Call of Duty is by classification a first-person shooter, a typically linear experience that creates immersion through action intensity and tactical combat decisions. Publishers can differentiate their shooters with different weapons, time periods and villains, but some of the best games in recent history have leaned on writing to differentiate with risky and unique narrative devices. While at Activision I had the great fortune of working on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a title that inspired contempt for its fictional villains by placing the player into the shoes of a kidnapped politician in the very first scene of the game. Though the player can control the camera, he can control little else, forced to watch as he is driven through a war-ravaged Middle Eastern city to the center of a town hall where camcorder and wooden post await. The player watches as he is stood up, strung in, and executed—out of commission before he can affect a single thing. Later in the game, players crash-land after a nuclear bomb goes off. Although able to walk, there is no escaping the radiation that blankets a devastated playground the player finds himself in. There is nothing he can do—he falls to the ground and dies in what was one of the most overpowering moments in any game to date. Call of Duty was the first commercially successful shooter to kill off the protagonist, and though the game is unprecedented on all levels—gameplay, polish, sound design—it was this kind of risk that endeared the title to its audience. They were neither coddled nor shoved from level to level. Rather, they were immersed, invested, and thus affected. It was this level of artistic ambition that took Call of Duty from wildly popular with gamers to wildly popular period, the best selling shooter of all time.

Then came the sequel, and Call of Duty grew from a best-selling shooter to the best-selling form of entertainment of all time, earning $310 million on its first-day in stores in North America and the United Kingdom alone.⁸ It has gone on to shatter every record. The success can be attributed to a perfect storm of sorts, but one undeniable component was the storm of controversy Modern Warfare 2 brewed by extending the moral boundaries it drew in the first game to an entirely new order of magnitude for the sequel. Now came the slaughter of civilians. Though the gamer is allowed to skip a scene prefaced as potentially offensive, if he continues, it is wholly up to him to follow orders that demand he murders an airport full of innocent civilians. The narrative warns the gamer that accepting the mission will “cost a piece of yourself,” and the explosion of news and headlines following Modern Warfare 2’s release clearly indicate that it broke not just sales records, but social and societal boundaries. Whether one finds the game’s airport mission reprehensible or not, the ethical dilemmas it embraced represent a massive step-forward for gaming. Through narratives that “cost” gamers pieces of themselves, titles like Modern Warfare 2 have begun destabilizing not only their audience but every audience, using moral complexities in ways this new art form will only echo and grow upon.

[You can also view this video here at GameTrailers.com]

In the aforementioned level, gamers were given a variety of options: they could cry foul and return the game in a huff; they could skip the level in question altogether; they could continue conservatively, allowing computer-controlled members of the team to shoot civilians instead; or they could lock and load, mow down every digital innocent. No matter their selection, the five million individuals who bought Modern Warfare 2 on its opening day were engaged in a way that makes video games so uniquely powerful as an art form: they were given a choice in the first place.

The collaboration between game and gamer is intrinsic to what a game is, who a gamer can be—without a gamer’s input, the game’s narrative will stall and fail. Some might say that the entire point of literature is for a reader to experience an individual point of view, a unique and singular vision of the world. But certainly the best novels and stories make demands on its readership. In fact, readers have plenty to do. They must piece language with pieces of themselves; they must imagine and make connections; they must think forward and back. In his ode to craft, On Writing, Stephen King whittled down an author’s main job to three categories: narration, description, and dialogue.⁹ From there, it is dependent upon the reader to weave our words with their imagination, to work, build, and create life. The greatest novels I’ve read are the ones that demanded the most from me—as the stories became more fully mine, they became richer, more meaningful. Similarly, the worst novels I’ve read have demanded the least—these were the slideshows, pages of prose sliding past my eyes but never penetrating their glassy gaze.

The collaboration that games demand follows suit. The worst-reviewed games are often “on rails,” a game-critic’s term for linearity which is a nice way of saying the title was too simple, demanded too little, and was therefore a bore. On the other hand, the best-reviewed games demand investment from their audience; unlike collaboration between reader and author, gamers are not imagining settings and time periods so much as exploring them. Yet both these actions require deciding what details matter and what don’t, acting on those decisions and then living with those consequences.

And herein lies collaboration’s pay-off: gamers and readers feel their stories more profoundly, the art resonates, rings true. Of course, the roads to emotional pay-off in reading and gaming are one-way streets heading in different directions, something developers are aware of and increasingly experimenting with. Whereas in words we feel with protagonists as the action unfolds, in games we feel by unfolding the action ourselves, unfurling the carpet and then walking it.

BioShock, 2007’s Video Game Awards’ Game of the Year, placed the gamer in an underworld utopia ravaged by its own citizens, individuals who in their attempts to perfect life with genetic enhancement poisoned themselves and their world. In the game, players come upon a choice: heal a possessed little girl or harvest her. Though she may assist you later, you need her power to survive now. Throughout the adventure, gamers picked life or death for countless individuals in a narrative device that stretched the moral fibers of what most players had come to expect from their games. Taking it further, the developers programmed “Achievements” for gamers who stayed true to their code of ethics—rewards lay in wait for those who remained consistent to their heal versus harvest policies. BioShock was revered because it gave gamers free will. Bioshock will be remembered because that free will came with a price. To keep the story moving along, gamers had to collaborate, make decisions and live with them; but while decision-making was nothing new, the accompanying emotional ramifications certainly were. The pride, the shame. The realization that one felt neither. As games continue to challenge, it is their inherent ability to collaborate that will make them increasingly complex. A gamer’s “work” is a cornerstone to what makes his game art—it is the promise of enrichment in return for engagement, a way to break “off the rails” and take himself to places he has never been.

[This trailer can also be viewed at Gametrailers.com here.]

LEVEL FIVE

INDEBTEDNESS, CONNECTEDNESS

If you still can’t see the artistry inherent in video games; if you don’t see the magic in a record player the way my parents did, all I ask is this: hang on. The game industry will adapt. In order to satisfy the fractured and particular tastes of its audience, publishers are creating new genres, game types, and brand extensions with dizzying disregard for how many games players can actually afford to buy. Your local GameStop retailer may still organize its shelves by platform—Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii—but one day soon it may be forced to drill down not just by audience—All Ages, Teen, Mature—or game type—Action, Shooter, Strategy—but also story type: Sci-Fi, Horror, Mystery, History, Sport. With a compartmentalized marketplace, fans will flock to the stories they love most. They already seek out their favorite developers; who is to say they won’t begin looking within them, for their favorite writers?

It could also be the other way around. Just as Steven Spielberg has begun producing games, maybe an established novelist will adopt this new creative domain as well, helping migrate a readership by offering his or her next narrative in the form of a game. Guillermo can’t do it alone; the Citizen Kane of games may well come from one of you, or your students. But it is coming. After all, until quite recently, many people thought the only place graphic novels belonged were in the basements and bedrooms of teenage boys—the same environment most critics have relegated video games, coincidentally. Yet with the emergence of work like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, to name just two, graphic novels have found a place on the shelf with literature. And even a Pulitzer nod, in the case of Spiegelman.

The narrative devices in Fable, Call of Duty, and BioShock introduce far more than perspective and pace into a story—they inject emotion. And whereas the game designers and art department and sound engineers take away a writer’s need to describe and establish scene, they cannot create the most important differentiating factor outside of fresh content and innovative gameplay: storytelling with consequences. Immersion that resonates and moves a player the way great literature resonates and moves a reader. As a form, writers interested in video games can be empowered in ways their peers have never known. If they can operate within timelines and technical limitations, if they can share the process with a large cross-functional team of equally dedicated individuals, they will be at the forefront of an entirely new storytelling medium—the first art form to empower its audience through direct action and consequence.

In her 2007 Harper’s essay “Literary Entrails,” Cynthia Ozick distilled a letter of James Wood’s to get to the core of why Gustave Flaubert might have fathered the modern novel. For Ozick and Wood, Flaubert’s rank at the top has less to do with his personally evolving literature than how generation to generation of the written word reflects the evolution he set forth. For Ozick, “The key is indebtedness. The key is connectedness.”¹⁰

Video games are as indebted and connected to literature as television and film once were. The pixel and the page are linked, now and forever, and as gaming continues to build a stage to one day stand tall upon, we, as fiction writers, would be wise to stand in solidarity with our fellow artists. If the key is indebtedness, connectedness, we may soon see literature tap into the video game install-base, as indebted and connected to gaming as games are today. Because video game popularity is transitive. It is popularity in story and narrative, something challenging, destabilizing and collaborative. Because it is popularity in art. This new frontier in creativity may come to mean new audiences for every form, hordes of fiction-fiends and pixel-poppers seeking what one camp provides and the other cannot, what both provide without fail. Games aren’t toys, but we would be wise to play them. The hope for Great American Art can be sourced to the hunger of a Great American Audience.

For both camps, millions await.

photo credit: Dominic

Extras

• Interested in what video games’ 8th generation will look like? Watch this video on Project Natal for a glimpse at what the “Next-Next Gen” mentioned earlier might provide us.
• Though not discussed here, video games’ portability is a major reason for their relevance. Today’s Game Boy descendents – the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP – accompany their owners everywhere, and play movies, music and even surf the web. But what happens when they start competing with the Kindle?
• Hard to say so early on, but a new game called Heavy Rain is doing its best Citizen Kane impression. With the developer’s CEO calling his game a “journey,” and claiming gamers will experience its story “in a physical sense, changing it, twisting it, discovering it, making it unique, making it yours…” we should probably check back in on its success in the marketplace and with audiences. Learn more here.
• Still hungry? Eat your heart out with an aggregate of top gaming news at this site.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As this article was being published, the Writer’s Guild of America announced its 2009 nominations for best video game writing. As discussed above, the “destabilizing” narrative behind Modern Warfare 2 was officially recognized by the WGA for its outstanding storytelling, earning one of the five nominee nods. The final game the author worked on at Activision, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, also received a nomination.

Sources

1: Interpret’s New Media Measure. 4th Quarter 2008.
2. “Choices in Infiltrating a Terrorist Cell” by Seth Schiesel, New York Times, November 1, 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/arts/television/12call.html>
3: ESA <http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp>
4: “Q&A: Hobbit Director Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Film” by Scott Brown, Wired, May 22, 2009 <http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/17-06/mf_deltoro?currentPage=1 >
5: “Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?” by Joshuah Bearman, New York Times Magazine, November 13, 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magazine/15videogames-t.html>
6: “Banned Books” by M.J. Stephey, Time, September 29, 2008
<http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1842832_1842838_1845068,00.html>
7: “Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” by American Library Association <http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics/reasonsbanned/index.cfm>
8: “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 destroys records in first day sales rampage, pulls in $310M” by Robert Johnson, NYDailyNews.com, November 13, 2009 <http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/11/13/2009-11-13_video_game_blitz.html>
9: On Writing by Stephen King, Pocket Books, 2000
10: “Literary entrails: The boys in the alley, the disappearing readers, and the novel’s ghostly twin” by Cynthia Ozick, Harper’s, April 2007 <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/04/0081479>

In a role-play game, or RPG, gameplay consists largely of traveling and fighting battles. Traveling, like the “free and easy wandering” of the Chang tzu, isn’t as easy as one might think—surviving monster attacks is usually the order of the day. Even so, traveling is one of my favorite things about RPGs because an RPG is a lengthy journey in a (hopefully) immersive world. My favorite game, Shadow of the Colossus, is difficult to place in a single game genre, but it’s more RPG than anything else. You wander an expansive landscape, soaking up the aesthetic splendor, gathering information, and eventually, finding and fighting colossal monsters. Monster-killing is central to the game, and yet this game is no more about monster-killing than gardening is about slaughtering aphids or Ender’s Game is about killing Buggers.

What sets Shadow of the Colossus apart from other RPGs is its successful elevation of monster-killing to near-spiritual levels. Monster-killing becomes, like Shiva’s austerities in the mountain cave, complex and meaningful. Most games require frequent monster fights as you travel, which creates a constant low level of anxiety. Shadow of the Colossus compresses this anxiety into 16 terrifying and epic boss battles. All monster-killing is inextricably linked to a game’s quest, which gives that violence a feeling of greater purpose. A quest is a concept to which we, almost because of the archaic resonance of the word alone, attribute the capacity for meaning. So the tasks that make up a quest, such as monster-killing as you travel, can start to share in that aura of significance as you play. This is powerful in Shadow of the Colossus but also present in games jam-packed with minor monsters.

Shadow of the Colossus

I’ve probably killed thousands of beasts. I’ll spend 100 hours completing a game primarily consisting of monster fights. I’ll do this, and if a game is good, I’m as clean as a whistle at the end, not drenched in psychic gore or remorse. Monster-killing is a practical reality of most games; it’s best not to worry about or relish it too much. With monster-killing, as with practicing yoga postures, it helps to remember what it’s all for. It’s part of a quest for something meaningful, but monster-killing also relates to what, in RPGs, is often the main in-game activity: developing your character. Typically, higher levels of important characteristics, skills, etc. will accrue to your character as you complete battles. Your character (you) becomes a more multi-faceted, capable, and efficient being. Let’s call this self-cultivation via monster-killing. In my experience, games that lack self-cultivation feel a bit one-dimensional; I recently played Ms. Pac-Man (the super-speed kind, of course) and felt once again the frustration of playing a character that does not evolve.

So, monster-killing has to mean more than survival and more than self-cultivation and more than entertainment. For a game story to have legs, monsters must be able to be seen as signifying something, and killing them must also signify something. 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, in fact, the longer you travel. It’s sad when a game uses ambiguity itself to create interest, shifting the ground beneath our feet so frequently that we become bored and don’t even care when the true enemy is revealed to be our best friend. The trick is to create, in the gamer, a commitment to a point of view, whatever its morality—dramatic plot twists are never quite as devastating as they’re meant to be (unless the gamer or reader just hasn’t paid attention, which I admit can happen—my failure to anticipate the ending of Ender’s Game is a good example). No, I’d go for creating a creeping sense of doom, a teetering feeling, a worry—that’s how to get people. Never is this more elegantly done than in Shadow of the Colossus. The narrative is only ever suggested, but the gamer is completely committed to the events, even as your understanding of what is really going on gradually shifts and grows.

2. Choices.

In Shadow of the Colossus, you play a man alone in the Cursed Lands. Only a hint of context is given, no explanation for his arrival there with a dead woman in his arms. The man is essentially nameless, since we don’t learn it until the end. There are decrepit buildings throughout the Cursed Lands, clearly built by people now absent. The present occupants of the area are mostly lizards, turtles, fish, birds, and 16 Colossi, monsters that remain dormant until the man tracks them down and starts a fight. Each fight is absurd, terrifying in scale, a pesky fly of a man against a lumbering animated tower or a giant armored horse, until a glowing glyph is located somewhere on the Colossus and a sword thrust into it. Ribbons of black stream out of the monster and into the man after each kill. They seem to replace the light in the man, and his skin takes on ever-darkening tattoos that suggest, as they do on the Colossi, that something’s in there. What does all this mean? No official explanation has been made, but here’s one idea: he doesn’t realize it at first, but he doesn’t hesitate once he does realize—he’s sacrificing himself to bring his girl back to life. He’s trading his soul bit by bit for monster souls. The monster souls are actually smaller pieces of one larger entity, which, fully reunited in the man’s body at the end, ousts his soul.

So perhaps Shadow of the Colossus is, ultimately, a game about becoming a monster and setting evil free. All along, the man has been taking orders from a voice that emanates from a god-mouth in the roof of a crumbling temple filled with 16 Colossi idols. It could be humiliating to be such a toady, to be used so, but if it is, then we’re all a little pathetic, a bit tragic for our refusal to admit that we always serve something. In the end, the man appears to have agreed to trade his soul for his girl’s. She opens her eyes as he is finally subsumed. The interesting question is, At what point did the man agree to the trade? Did he just think all he had to do was take down a few monsters and he’d get his girl back? Did he know that he was reconstituting a force that would destroy him? You never get the sense that the man is gleeful or macho or even confident as he battles the Colossi; this is no God of War. If he isn’t informed about the particulars of his task, at the very least I think his sobriety suggests that he knows something serious is at hand.

Overall, Shadow of the Colossus is a remarkably neutral game, and I enjoy the freedom to speculate about the story and the man’s state of mind. In Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, C.D. Wright calls poetry a way of respecting the white space. That’s exactly how I love poetry and how I love Shadow of the Colossus. I feel invited to participate in forming the meaning of this game. The game has room for my experience of it. Perhaps this is why the prospect of a film version of Shadow of the Colossus terrifies me. I dread being told with such emphatic finality what the game is “really” about. There is another writer who has already said what I mean here: in Weight, Jeanette Winterson calls herself a writer “who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities.” The white space is where things are not explained and the reader or gamer is allowed in.

Honestly, most games do a poor job of respecting the white space. RPGs often give you either a distinctly “good” or “evil” character to play. In some RPGs, however, such as Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls and Fable 2, you can cultivate yourself in either direction. Americans, it turns out, prefer to play good characters. I toyed with murder in both games and had no stomach for it. (I guess that makes me an exemplary American.) That killing in video games can become objectionable could be either a feature of the high realism of many of today’s games or the possibility that we are now living in some kind of meta world, where everything is cleaner and less tangible than ever before and mostly originates in our minds. This is like living in a story. Today’s tenet is that killing is bad even in games. This is because we live in our heads so much, everything we do and value sometimes seems more abstract than ever before. We do not live in a real world anymore and war is too real for our refined palates. Our moral context therefore lets us object to play killing. At least, this is one way of seeing it. I find it interesting that at some points in time, it appears that a taste or talent for killing did not automatically disqualify a person from society. Knights did the dirty work to protect the more refined aspects of civilization, as embodied by the Ladies. This is the story, anyway. But Knights weren’t considered bad if they had to kill a beast or a beastly person—the Knights’ work was in service of the good and there was no moral quandary. But I think these stories live on and grab us today not because of their historical or literary merits but because we are fascinated by permitted murdering. Playing video games, then, becomes an exorcism of sorts—or a Tantric practice of excess meant to cure the obsession.

3. Hunting and not hunting.

Monster-killing is different, though. It’s funny how you can know yourself to be mostly, if not just ethnically, a pacifist—being raised by Mennonite-raised parents—and you then find yourself hunting. It’s digital hunting, but hunting nonetheless. There isn’t any blood, but there are grunts and sighs and other intriguing sound effects (praises to the sound engineers) as the beasts give up the ghosts and whatever treasure they carry. I’d argue that the realism of many games is what makes it so easy for observing non-gamers to connect real-world violence with game-violence and skip right over the critical thinking part. Was this a problem in the era of Jungle Pit and Space Invaders? No, I don’t recall anyone suggesting I not shoot at the alien-piloted ships encroaching on my personal space. (Now that was true exigency! That was do or die.) But just because I have to fight several vicious floating fish, mutated dinosaurs, and some Berserkers as I cross a desert in Final Fantasy 12 doesn’t mean I’m a killer. Someone once asked me, “Don’t you feel bad killing all those beautiful creatures?” It’s my pleasure to inform you that not only do I not feel bad, I enjoy it. I’m getting paid and collecting mad loot.

Yet, monster killing isn’t what any game or story is about. For me, Halo 3 is not so much about hacking through an endless onslaught of aliens and Flood; it’s almost entirely about the novelty, fun, and challenge of playing with a partner (I find the enemies’ comments hilarious, too—something about their tone). Shadow of the Colossus is not so much about finding and fighting large beasts. While I did spend most of the game feeling terrified, I’ve got some sweet memories, too. The Cursed Lands are vast and still. A small breeze blows. Sun light is dappled under the trees, brilliant over the oceans, and it turns the crumbling stone shrines and plazas a soft platinum. A melancholy music plays during battles; otherwise, it’s mostly environmental sounds: water, wind, Agro’s hooves on the ground. I can hear these now. But what stays with me the most is the image of the woman’s body lying in the temple, diffusing the sun with her white dress, the doves shifting around her, the man and his horse simply watching. A few feet from an aisle of menacing Colossus idols, the tender scene becomes sublime. Without the weight of words, it speaks of the frailty of the living, the uncertainty of our tasks, and the ache of love. It is mythic. It moves me.

4. The Path and the Glimpse.

But even in a gorgeous world, monsters are not just a distraction from these emotional treats. They are not just for killing either. Monsters could be the Path itself, the path to the end of suffering, a path worth walking on, that gives sense of direction and purpose to life. A holy man tries to walk toward God, away from the world. Other holy men try to help others find the path. Sometimes I wonder if I think by completing tasks I’ll be enlightened. Sometimes I look at the end of my various efforts for a face shining behind the veil and I wonder if I’m conflating worship and task-completion. I’m knocking and knocking at the door, completing side-quests, collecting Nirnroots, rolling a katamari out of fireflies… Who waits on the other side of these doors? Does he even want what I am bringing to him? Is it even good?

I know a physicist who would chuckle at my dilemma. This man goes from A to B. Granted, his B is fusion energy, a true “creative sort” kind of vision, and the path between his A and B is far from dull. The important thing for him is to get there. Going from A to B—having a clear question and methodically answering it—in the rest of life oftentimes is dull. There is no room for wondering or wandering and asking what about C? When I think about what it is that makes playing RPGs interesting to me, it’s not the A to B. That, in fact, is what makes them boring. There are no real stakes involved. If there were real stakes, a real possibility of closing an Oblivion gate and preserving humanity to flail poignantly another day, I might value basic A to B a bit more. I might reject my own formulation of monster-fighting as self-cultivation and call it critical training. But I prefer to live and play in worlds where self-cultivation, the cultivation of life, and the search for something divine are respected options. Consider: in our world, gardeners are usually respected and admired. They may cultivate the most arcane or common of life forms. They may grow things in apparent disarray or in the strictest regiments. In truth, they spend more time spreading silica to lacerate slugs’ soft bodies, unleashing plagues of ladybugs upon the aphids, and drowning Japanese beetles in jars of soapy water than anyone ever knows. But no one would diminish gardeners’ work as mere beetle-killing.

Ask why not and someone might say, “Because gardens are beautiful.” Ah, beauty. The ultimate excuse and the ultimate end goal. The trump card. Beauty is God. Sometimes people will use God as a trump card, but that’s just too obvious. God is unknowable. God is barely perceivable. Beauty is often attributed to God. What people who invoke either are really trying to do, I suspect, is indicate that something beyond us has been Glimpsed.

Can monster-killing cause a Glimpse? Perhaps. The figure of the Death-seeker is a warrior who does his warrior duty, but more than anything hopes to be killed himself one day, never is, battles on, and inadvertently becomes a better warrior, better than everyone else, his skills ascend beyond known levels, and to those who worship that sort of skill he gives the Glimpse. They call his killing beautiful, they call it God-given. For him, monster-killing was to be his path out of here, but like some kind of bitter Bodhisattva, his field of compassion is the field of blood and blade. The Death-seeker is like Arjuna. He does not want to fight, but God says Fighting is Your Duty, it is your duty to fight because that action keeps the world in balance. The hero Beowulf also has a duty to fight. The poem Beowulf is not about battling horrendous monsters—it’s about keeping the world going, about following a code of behavior upon which life depends and derives its structure, its meaning, and its perpetuity. Without a hero to keep monsters away from the good people, all would be chaos and death. Power protects the people, and, as in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, “Behavior that’s admired/is the path to power among people everywhere.”

5. The qualities of a monster.

Which brings me to Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, and the question of what a monster really is. Like the monsters of Beowulf, the Buggers are known to be remorseless, inhuman outsiders with whom humans cannot communicate. When you can’t communicate with something, the obvious course is to fight it, right? So humans and Buggers fight. The book is the story of Ender, a super-sensitive, super-intelligent child trained from age six to lead Earth’s armies against the Buggers. Throughout the entire book, Ender is kept busy trying to survive against a wide range of more immediate threats to his survival—his violent brother, his unforgiving training program, his loneliness and isolation, his terror about becoming a monster himself. Always a new enemy for poor Ender. He is kept so busy trying keep his head on straight that he never has a minute to question the assumption driving everything—that the Buggers are monsters—and the first time I read the book I was so tangled in Ender’s daily life that the story’s denouement practically gutted me. To learn that the child-genius battle commander Ender has been tricked into wiping out the bugger race, and to witness his grief and remorse as he learns the truth about the Buggers—it was just too much. Turns out the Buggers were, more or less, everything a monster should be—hideous, aggressive, and incomprehensible—except an actual threat to humanity. From the beginning, Ender’s reward for protecting humanity from the Buggers would be freedom from terror, as well as honor and glory, but in the end, in return for killing the Buggers, Ender is not free and is not honored. Ender is used, as the man in Shadow of the Colossus is, by a powerful and detail-withholding force.

Withholding details—in other words, failing to communicate well—is a sign of a monster. Those who use the child Ender are monstrous in their treatment of him, whatever their motivation. The Dormin, as the disembodied power in Shadow of the Colossus calls itself, speaks cryptically in a strange language; even without form, a more disturbing monster I’ve seldom encountered. I wish game designers would remember that giving monsters casual speech sort of neuters them. A monster is not for chitchat. A boss monster bloviating on its plans to kill you is comedic, not scary. Better to make the bosses unforthcoming, otherworldly, and alien. Especially since so many games promote the value of self-cultivation. In the game, your goal is to cultivate yourself into the ultimate of what you are (human, elf, whatever), the fullest expression of your potential, and why shouldn’t this include communication skills? Sometimes it does: the Speechcraft skill in Oblivion perfectly fills this need. The more pleasantly and effectively you can communicate with townspeople, the higher your Speechcraft level. Among the many typical skills your character must develop, including weapon and armor skills, fighting skills, strength, endurance, magic, etc., Speechcraft is what truly separates you from thugs and monsters.

Self-cultivation is the process of becoming good at things. It is also the process of becoming “good” in the game’s moral universe. All of us like being good, or at least knowing how to be bad. But let’s put that aside. There are some terribly beautiful games out there, and they really aren’t about good and bad, self-cultivation, or monster-killing. They offer a way to transcend necessity and ambition: deep appreciation, which is deep observation, a meditative state. A game can be played like this—Shadow of the Colossus allows it, but few others do, in my experience. I admit I indulge myself in this way of playing. I look for it. A game so perfectly rendered and self-contained, that requires so little compromise from my imagination—maybe it’s just me, but just being in this kind of game world is itself the desired outcome. It’s the good result, as the surgeons say. It’s the end of yoga practice, as the yogis say, when you don’t have to practice anymore because you have achieved enlightenment and now you can just lounge in the temple garden and leave the monster-killing to the noobs.

6. Postscript.

That, in part, is what monsters are for. Of course, monsters mostly just want to kill you. So there’s great risk. But isn’t there always? With great risk we are born. With great risk we love. With great risk we read books, listen to music, and play video games. It would seem that we cannot help but run around naked everywhere with our hearts hanging out. And then there are those monsters we fling ourselves against over and over until we get better, know more, can put our legs behind our head, or die. We need game monsters, since sometimes life’s monsters are just too arbitrary, too, well, monstrous; it matters to be able to accomplish something, even if only in a game. That could be why we invent our gods, couldn’t it? So we can suffer a little less.

About the Author

Christine Hartzler reads boatloads of fiction but writes poems and essays. The essays are mostly about video games and have appeared in Ninth Letter and the Cream City Review. Christine’s poetry has appeared in Mudlark, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Touchstone, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Christine received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. These days Christine is working on a collection of poems called PLUTO, and more essays. She writes and edits ESL books for Oxford University Press, and she is learning a lot about nuclear fusion as the communications director at a startup in Seattle. Christine has a blog at www.snowandsigil.blogspot.com; it’s mostly photos.