Video Games & the Novel - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Video Games & the Novel

Eric Hayot

In the last sixty years, the video game industry has grown from quite literally nothing
to a behemoth larger than the film or television industries. This enormous change in
the shape of cultural production has failed to make much of an impact on the study
of culture more generally, partly because video games seem so much less culturally
important than novels. No one has ever imagined the Great American Video Game.
But video games have more in common with novels than you might think, and vice
versa. Anyone trying to understand the combination of neoliberal individualism
and righteous murderousness that characterizes our world today will do well to pay
them some attention.

T he scholarly study of video games dates back to the late 1990s, when the

field’s first major journal, Game Studies, was founded, and the first major
work was published in the field. Perhaps typical for any new academic en-
deavor, the field justified itself partly via claims of video games’ radical difference
from other forms of culture. Unlike novels, films, or television, games, we were
told, were interactive, not passive and linear; they were oriented toward kines-
thetic pleasures (jumping, running, flashing lights), not intellectual or emotion-
al ones. Games were about simulating activities, not just imitating them. Infatti,
games were so different from novels, films, or drama that anyone seeking to sim-
ply slot them into that longer aesthetic history would be effectively attempting to
“colonize” a new medium, to strip an exciting and unique cultural form of all of
its novelty and interest.

The argument for the uniqueness of video games worked best if one emphasized
certain types of games, games like Super Mario Bros. or Tetris, which highlighted pre-
cisely the kinesthetic and interactive structures that early game scholars identified
as the crucial distinguishing elements of the genre, and deemphasized the kinds of
games, also quite popular, that involved adventure or story. And indeed if one con-
siders games like Super Mario, which draw so clearly from a longer tradition of kin-
esthetic and antagonistic play (what one sees in a game of jacks or pin the tail on the
donkey), then the game enthusiasts had point. Video games are not like novels and
films, partly because they do not simply represent their story-worlds, but rather in-
vite their users to shape them in action. Understanding games while relying solely
on existing theories of the novel would be to make a significant category mistake.

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And yet. Plenty of video games involve stories, enough that attempting to think
about what games do or are, culturally speaking, without any sense of how story-
telling works would be a pretty odd thing to do. Games, after all, did not just emerge
sui generis from the cultural landscape, from a set of technological and social con-
ditions that had nothing to do with anything that came before. The people who
made the first video games had, after all, grown up in a cultural environment fully
shaped by the existence of the novel, indeed had grown up in a world in which the
novel had been a dominant cultural form. And they had grown up in a world full
of television, film, and theater, a world about which one can honestly say that–in
the United States of the 1960s–practically no one alive had not ever seen a film,
watched a play, or read a novel. At some broader level, all the storytelling media,
games included, borrow from a set of tropes, cultural patterns, and forms of pro-
duction, distribution, and consumption that extend backwards to the very begin-
nings of human culture. All of which is to say: video games are not novels, but they
certainly share with novels a relation to a much longer history of narrative.

T o separate video games fully from the novel (to deny, even, that games are

a narrative medium at all) is to make a difference of degree into a differ-
ence of kind. Even in the case of user interaction–which may well be the
most distinctive formal feature of the video game genre–we would do well to no-
tice areas of overlap, areas in which thinking more expansively will give us a less
chopped-up picture of the work of culture. Consider, for instance, that interac-
tive fiction and poetry emerge, historically, at almost the same time as do the very
first video games: Spacewar! (1961–1962), an early precursor of Asteroids, appears
the same year as Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, which invited
readers to make up one of a trillion sonnets by mixing and matching ten options
for each of the poem’s fourteen lines. Two years later, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch
invited readers to bounce around the pages of the novel rather than read them
straight through. And in 1969, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates was published as a
bundle of bound chapters in a box, the middle twenty-five of which could be read
in any order you liked. That same year, Ralph Baer programmed Pong into an ear-
ly version of the video game console called the Brown Box. Aesthetic interaction
era, let’s just say it, more generally in the air in the 1960s and 1970s. Insofar as
there is something to be said about the relation between games and the novel, Esso
will have to take place in a larger cultural context in which both genres reacted to
and were shaped by a set of common forces.

And this is true not just for the 1960s, but for any larger sense of the relation
between interaction and storytelling. Think of folk stories or popular theater–
like Punch and Judy shows–in which shouting at the stage is not only accepted
but encouraged, or Shakespearean asides, O, at the limit, of the implied addressee
of so much lyric poetry, in which the line between story-world and audience be-

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150 (1) Winter 2021Eric Hayot

comes, at times, blurry indeed. Interaction was a story-mode for centuries, if not
millennia, before the arrival of the microprocessor. Whatever video games are do-
ing with interaction, they are doing in a context that emerges from a long history
of interactions actual and represented, in a world in which the capacity to act, O
to interact (or the inability to do so), has in fact constituted a major concern of all
aesthetic making, from the most popular to the most highbrow.

What this means is that any understanding of video games that does not in-
clude the novel–or that treats them as a radically new form of culture untouched
by the vast histories of storytelling and play that precede it–will necessarily be
incomplete. But the reverse is also true, since both games and novels 1) partici-
pate in the larger cultural context of which I have been writing, but also 2) because
the novel today is unquestionably being shaped by the cultural presence of video
games, just as it has been shaped by the history of television and film. We can talk
easily about the transfer of the cinematic gaze to fiction; we can recognize clearly
enough the ways in which certain novels are written in order to become movies.
Can we see the same, or say the same, for video games?

Undoubtedly, yes. In the early days of video games, the structures of influence
go almost entirely in one direction. This movement from the culture-at-large to
the nascent form is a law of aesthetic novelty: early films copy novels and plays,
for instance, and the early novel draws on the structures and patterns of romance
and the picaresque, before each medium finds its “own” form. But as time passes,
the traffic in culture flows both ways.

Consider, for instance, the near-simultaneous appearance of the most impor-
tant early text-based adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, developed by Will
Crowther for the PDP-1 mainframe computer between 1975 E 1977, and the
“choose your own adventure” genre of children’s fiction, the first of which, Sugar-
cane Island, was written by Edward Packard in 1969. Published in 1976 in a series
initially called Adventures of You, Sugarcane Island became in 1979 part of Bantam
Books’ Choose Your Own Adventure line, which sold more than 250 million books
between 1979 E 1998. Today, the genre has been remediated once again, as a
board game, which sells at your local Target. (If you are eager to find a highbrow
predecessor for this kind of second-person storytelling in the novel, look no fur-
ther than Michel Butor’s 1957 La modification). Something similarly remediative
has happened to the Tom Clancy franchise, which began as a series of single-
authored books before ending up as an empire that includes films, television se-
ries, ghost-written airport novels, and some forty or fifty different video games.
We see similar transference effects in the vast number of rethinkings and remak-
ings of Tolkien and his fantasy world, most directly in the games and films based
directly on Lord of the Rings and, more generally, in the tens of thousands of novels,
games, films, and television shows that take the dwarves and elves, swords and
dragons of Tolkien’s invention and make them the basis for new stories.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesVideo Games & the Novel

Recent years have seen the rise of an entire subgenre of fantasy fiction known
as LitRPG, in which the basic mechanics of tabletop role-playing games like Dun-
geoni & Dragons (1974), these days almost entirely remediated through their vid-
eo game versions, return to novelistic fiction, which then organizes its narratives
around the scaling of levels and abilities, the acquisition of weapons and charac-
teristics, and so on, that define those game modes. The most successful instances
of the LitRPG genre, like Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2012), have topped the
New York Times bestsellers list and been made into major Hollywood movies. Ma
the vast majority of them–thousands and thousands–exist as digital-only ob-
jects sold via Amazon’s direct publishing platforms.

Scholars have with few exceptions ignored this vast creative output, che è
of dubious literary value in the usual sense. And indeed, anyone trying to under-
stand “the novel” today can probably afford to ignore the actual texts in question.
But it would be foolish, I think, not to recognize the ways in which the field of the
novel has been altered by online publishing platforms, and by the kinds of fiction
they sell, which tend to be–unlike highbrow fiction–intensely generic and seri-
al. Their success suggests something important about the current appetite for the
consumption of culture, namely its new, or seemingly new, emphasis on binging:
binge-reading, binge-watching, binge-playing, what amounts to a desire for the
total absorption into a storytelling universe, from one perspective, or a radically
frenzied and consumerist fall into a fully capitalist aesthetic, a kind of storytelling
shopaholism, from another.

Whatever the novel is today, Poi, it is that by virtue of its location within a
more general system of narrative media, one that has been profoundly influenced
by both the mechanical (interactive) structures that video games afford, e da
the story-worlds that video games have helped to make so culturally prominent.
Understanding that system is not a matter of grasping any single instance of in-
fluence or interference, but rather of seeing the patterns and structures of the sys-
tem as a whole, and of recognizing that even those parts of the system that seem
to have withheld themselves from it–here I am thinking specifically of the high-
brow or literary novel, with all of its rejections of the popular narrative genres and
modes–nonetheless operate with, and only make sense within, the very media
system that they are so often invested in resisting.

If that is so, Poi, rather than begin with the question about what makes vid-
eo games different from novels, we might do well to ask what makes them sim-
ilar. I have already given you some answers: games, like novels, belong to a sys-
tem of intertextuality and remediation that characterizes all media environments,
not only the ones of the twentieth century and beyond; games, like novels, belong
to a longer history of storytelling from which they emerge, themes and narrative
strategies already in hand; and games appear at a historical moment when audi-
ence interaction in a number of other art forms–including fiction, yes, but also,

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150 (1) Winter 2021Eric Hayot

Ovviamente, drama!–constitutes a major source of aesthetic interest. All this sug-
gests not so much that we need to “apply” what we learn from video games to our
understanding of the novel, or the reverse, but rather that we ought to think them
together, to see how aspects of each illuminate a larger cultural picture in which
both participate.

T o say the obvious and very simple thing first: the rise of interactive aes-

thetic activity in the twentieth century responds to a far longer unit of hu-
man concern than anything local to that period. Choosing as a theme pre-
dates both the novel and the video game. Abraham hearing the angel, Antigone
before Creon, the miller’s daughter and Rumpelstiltskin: each of these scenes tes-
tifies to the narrative potency of the moment of choosing, and to its vast impor-
tance to the very idea of human life as it confronts the face of power and the pos-
sibility of its own impotence. The arrival of video games as a new cultural form in
the last sixty years must therefore be understood as an event inside this larger con-
testo, one of whose other major events is, Ovviamente, the novel, which has been the-
matizing choice for as long as it has been in existence. (Think of Defoe’s Crusoe,
who shows us choosing in its most triumphant, individualistic mode; or of Anna
Karenina; or of that great refuser-to-choose, Melville’s Bartleby.)

What remains, Poi, is to think of the specific meanings that the various cul-
tural modes–here the novel and the video game–codify in their general repre-
sentation of choosing, and to ask what these codifications tell us about the cul-
tures that produce them. In a famous example of this kind of reading, Erich Auer-
bach, in Mimesis, points out that the Arthurian knight Calogrenant, in one version
of his tale, turns “right” into a forest while on a journey. But Calogrenant does
not really turn right, Auerbach says. He makes the “right” turn, whether or not
there was a right turn in that forest on that day, whether in fact there was a for-
est at all, makes no difference. What looks like a choice in the story is in fact the
mechanism of rightness, of justice, making there be turns where turning is need-
ed. In this sense, all turns in the Arthurian romance, even the wrong turns, are the
“right” ones, since the decision-making process that drives them stems not from
the individual choice made in the present of the narrative, but rather in the fact
that the major characters–the knight, the monster–are the kind of person they are:
questo è, the kind of person who turns right at the right time, or who tricks others
into making the wrong (but therefore also right) turn.

One might contrast this with the agonies of choice we see in the modern novel
to begin to grasp some difference this newer genre makes. For the modern novel
means for its readers, Credo, to grasp its protagonists’ choices–again, think of
Anna Karenina, or of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, choosing to get the flowers her-
self–as decisions that could just as well not have been made, as decisions made
within a framework that is fundamentally rational, even if it is also constrained.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesVideo Games & the Novel

Infatti, the tension between constraint and freedom–the cultural mores that
make Emma Bovary or Anna an adulteress, the ones that turn Lucien de Rubempré
toward his amoral triumph–constitutes one of the major plot points of modern
fiction. This secular, rational orientation toward the possibility of choice-making
explains both why the real alternatives to characters’ final choices must be made
so vivid as possibilities in the text–Crusoe’s success on the island depends, COME
a matter of narrative interest, entirely on the idea that he might at any moment
fail in his endeavor–and why, also, the collapse of the possibility of meaningful
choice so often appears, in the modern novel, as a matter of madness (Gilman’s
Yellow Wallpaper), trauma (Faulkner), or bureaucracy (Kafka).

Against this more general backdrop, we encounter something fairly remark-
able about the video game as a cultural genre, something that may help us under-
stand the larger cultural forces that are shaping the contemporary interaction aes-
thetic, and also why the video game industry has gone from literally nothing, sixty
years ago, to an economic force larger than either the television or film industries
today. It is this: that players of games must be able to win. Any obstacle faced by
their protagonist, any blockage in forward progress, whether its agent is the envi-
ronment or a villain, must be able to be overcome through the player’s effort. IL
game does not end until all such obstacles are overcome. As with genre fiction, Esso
is the final overcoming of the final obstacle that closes off the story and frames the
happy ending of the diegesis. This is, finally, as true for phone games like Candy
Crush (even if there will always be another level to play) as it is for narratively elab-
orate, multimillion-dollar titles only playable on personal computers or game
consoles.

The ideological implications of this winning constraint offer gamers a funda-
mentally libertarian worldview. In a world in which everyone has the same chance
at complete success, and access to absolutely the same computational and diegetic
resources, any failure can only be the result of an individual lack, of “user error.”
The moral outcomes of the vast majority of video game universes thus express–
and allow players to practice and play with–a version of personal equality that
exists nowhere in real life. Video games have a very hard time representing power-
less people, or imagining a world in which such people suffer, through no fault of
their own, the effects of structural or social violence. As with most modern fanta-
sy fiction, powerlessness in video games exists only as a prelude to its transforma-
tion into diegetic omnipotence, weakness only as a prelude to strength.

This predilection for the happy ending makes games little different from the
vast majority of the modes of genre fiction from which they most frequently draw:
namely, science fiction and fantasy. There, the trials suffered by novelistic heroes
exist–speaking here of their narrative function–mainly to extend the time of the
story, since without them there would be quite literally nothing to tell. (Imagine:
“In a town there was born a child. She lived happily ever after.”) Nonetheless, we

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150 (1) Winter 2021Eric Hayot

may want to note that the general lack of unhappy endings provides an interesting
brake on the overall capacity of video games to represent culture and, particularly,
to enter into the consideration of those of us whose tastes and modes of interpre-
tation have been weaned on tragedy, pathos, and trauma, for whom something
like “realism” is usually associated with emotional difficulty and devastation:
Pecola Breedlove, Hamlet, the man without qualities, and so on. It seems unlikely
that video games could become a fully mature cultural formation–mature in the
sense of having the capacity to represent the entire range of emotions and out-
comes that we associate with all the developed aesthetic forms–without being
able to access the unhappy endings of the tragic mode. (Or even, more minimally,
to ironize them: to taint the happy ending, as so often happens in Dickens, con un
sense of loss or anxiety that undercuts the very finality of the story.)

In other words, the structural constraint created by the need to win makes it
difficult for video games to break out of the basic comedic structures that charac-
terize genre and popular culture more generally. And this in turn makes it difficult
for games to fully represent, as can novels and films, the full emotional and social
range of human life.

B ut the situation is changing. Consider Toby Fox’s Undertale (2015). IL

game presents itself as a role-playing dungeon crawler, a genre in which
the player moves through underground spaces encountering various crea-
tures and killing them for their gear, progressing toward a final encounter with
the main villain, whose defeat ends the game. In an echo of the genre’s origins
in the 1980s, Undertale presents this generic structure in a deliberately anachro-
nistic design language, the visual equivalent of a film shot entirely in sepia tones.
The resulting nostalgia, and the fact that the game’s protagonist is a young child,
vibrates against the major traditional constraint of the genre, which is that any
movement forward through the story traditionally relies on killing any creature
that gets in your way.

What is odd about Undertale is that, as it turns out, every single encounter in
the game can be won by subduing or otherwise pacifying–but not killing–your
enemies. Questo, in effect, reveals the traditional constraint of such games as a form
of mass murder, and opens a dark window onto our contemporary fascination with
child killers (consider La Femme Nikita, The Hunger Games, or Tana French’s In the
Woods). Players can, of course, play the game any way they would like, but the
game’s endings differ substantially depending on what the player chooses to do.
Infatti, the decision to kill everyone the player encounters produces the game’s
only decidedly tragic ending, in which a traumatized and angry opponent de-
stroys the entire universe, essentially deciding that, if genocide is the only way to
move through the story, neither the player nor anyone in it are worthy of contin-
ued existence.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesVideo Games & the Novel

For the ordinary player who enters the game-world with no knowledge that
mass murder can be refused–for whom killing has not yet become mass mur-
der–the fundamental moral logic and surprise of the game will come, Poi, some-
where in the middle of the game itself, when she realizes that it has been possible
all along to avoid killing anything at all. At that point, Ovviamente, it is already too late
to go back. The game’s creatures, who have been until then, in the nature of all
video game obstacles, eminently killable–who have seemed in fact to invite being
killed–suddenly become endowed with the possibility of further life, and enter
thereby into a field of moral consideration and legitimacy that has the effect of
turning the game completely upside down (an under-tale, Infatti). What players
do next is, Ovviamente, up to them: one can finish the game more pacifistically, E
then replay the entire game (whose diegesis will recognize that this is a second
playthrough, and respond to the results of the first one) in that mode, in order to
achieve the game’s “happiest” ending. Or one can shrug one’s shoulders and go
on killing.

Something like that, minus the shoulder-shrugging, characterizes another re-
cent game, The Last of Us (2013). Published by a major studio, Naughty Dog, IL
Last of Us tells the story of a postapocalyptic United States on a planet that has
been devasted by a zombie-creating fungus. Part of the game’s pathos involves
walking through the devasted ruins of our contemporary civilization, witnessing
the fall of buildings and the fall of the political and legal institutions that support
our (relatively) safe, healthy lives, and witnessing, Perciò, the return of the
forms of inhuman brutality, including cannibalism, that we today imagine would
characterize the loss of technological modernity. In this way, the emotional struc-
ture of the game takes part in the larger postapocalyptic imaginary characterized
by films like Mad Max or The Day After, and by any number of novels, graphic nov-
els, or television shows that fantasize the zombified future of ordinary life.

The plot of the game is simple enough. The protagonists are Ellie, a thirteen-
year-old girl who seems to be the first person to be immune to the virus, and Joel,
an embittered forty-something whose daughter was killed during the first days
of the apocalypse, twenty years earlier. Joel reluctantly agrees to accompany Ellie
from Boston to Salt Lake City, where a team of doctors will examine her in order to
begin researching a cure. Over the course of this journey, Joel’s hard-bitten interi-
or gradually crumbles, and he begins to love Ellie as a daughter and imagines that
they could live a life together as parent and (replacement) child.

This growing emotional intensity causes what happens next. As the two reach
Salt Lake City, it becomes clear that the only way for the doctors to create an anti-
dote or vaccine will be to destroy Ellie’s brain. She willingly steps into the operat-
ing room, confident that her sacrifice will save humanity. But Joel cannot stand it.
Under the player’s control, he rushes through the hospital, killing doctors and se-
curity guards along the way, to reach an unconscious Ellie, and pulls her from the

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150 (1) Winter 2021Eric Hayot

operating table. The game ends as she wakes up in a car, with Joel driving, taking
them to an encampment in the wilderness. What happened? she asks. Oh, Joel
says, the doctors took a look, and realized they didn’t need you–you were just like
a number of other patients they’d already seen.

I need to explain what it feels like to play the game in these moments. I did not
want to kill the doctors, who, as far as I knew, are literally the only experienced
medical professionals left on the planet. I did not want to rescue Ellie, and I did
not want to remove her from the operating room. But the game treats any refus-
al to pursue Joel’s course of action as a refusal to play and sends the player back to
the game’s opening screen. The player therefore must choose either 1) to refuse
to continue playing the game, O 2) to become directly complicit in Joel’s love for
Ellie, to pull the trigger on the diegetic gun that kills the doctors, to move to pull
her from the table, and so on. In short: the player participates actively in the cre-
ation of a tragedy or must cease to play entirely.

One has of course felt, watching Othello or Hamlet, the desire to reach out and
stop the madness, to throw oneself athwart the inevitable and often stupid march
to disaster. But one was not, at the time, actually playing the characters involved.
Here, part of the emotional force of the tragedy happens because one is so accus-
tomed, in video games, to the possibility of a happy ending, that one cannot, at
first, accept that the game is going to force one to participate in its opposite. Che cosa
makes The Last of Us interesting, Poi, is how it takes away the possibility of inter-
activity; in order to produce its tragic ending, it must keep the player from choos-
ing any other ending. This makes it more like a novel, to be sure, but not entirely
like a novel. For in The Last of Us, the work of art gambles that we will care more
about reaching the end of the story than we will about losing the chance to save
the planet, that we will, correctly prompted, like Joel, love the end of the world
more than we love the possibility of its redemption.

With The Last of Us and Undertale, Poi, we have two games that, if they ap-
peared in another cultural genre, one accustomed to the kinds of interpretive force
I am putting on it here, would minimally be recognized as significant works of art.
That they are not, and probably will not be, reflects the strangely narrow social
band within which video games operate today. Everyone has seen some television,
watched a few movies, read a novel or two. But many, many people have never
played a video game. And the group of those who do–the stereotypical gamers–
are young, White, and male, though less and less so each year. My argument here
is not that, if these things were to change–if, for instance, video games achieved
the kind of cultural penetration that characterizes the other genres, or if they were
regularly able to “equal” (whatever that would mean) the aesthetic achievements
of the best novels or films–then video games would finally somehow deserve the
right to be included alongside those more prestigious genres in the pantheons of
the university or the magazines and cultural reviews of the elite. The point is rath-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesVideo Games & the Novel

er that any consideration of what the novel is today, and any true understanding
of what narrative aesthetics are doing in general, is impossible if we do not also
understand the work video games are doing on that front, or how, or why, or for
whom they are doing it. If, as I have been arguing, one of the things video games re-
veal is the centrality of libertarian choice to a certain fantasy of modern life–and
if some recent video games themselves are engaged in a critique of that fantasy,
in precisely the represented practices of world-saving and mass killing that have
been its bedrock–then anyone trying to understand the combination of neoliber-
al individualism and righteous murderousness that characterizes our world today
will do well to pay attention.

about the author

Eric Hayot is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Stud-
ies and Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania
State University. He is the author of Humanist Reason (forthcoming), The Elements of
Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities (2014), and On Literary Worlds (2012).

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