Game or Supernovel? Playing and Reading Massive Game Novels

Abstract

For half a century, digital machines have lent their computational power to mediate text-based, diegetic worlds, in the shape of software that we call games, video games, or sometimes interactive fiction. Perhaps the first such was Gregory Yob’s simple labyrinth-monster game Hunt the Wumpus (1973), but ever since then the games (if that is what they should be called) have become larger and far more complex, and, in recent decades, a single such work can contain more text than, say, Shakespeare’s collected plays. Given this massive textual content, as well as the often experimental and innovative nature of these works, they can also be considered a new form of novel; a kind of text that has much more in common with literature than with other digital games such as Candy Crush Saga, Age of Empires or Counterstrike. In these ‘games’, we find complex characters, difficult ethical choices (left to the player), imaginative landscapes and mythologies, and thousands if not millions of lines of carefully crafted prose. Teams of writers work collectively to stich these textual universes together, under production conditions that might remind us of multi-season TV series, but which are structured and consumed very differently – in fact, more like literature than TV. The claim made in this article is that the perspective of the novel (or supernovel) is a productive one for understanding the nature of these artistic works of ludic software. Should they be considered Literature? Through a discussion of the notions of literature, novel, and fiction and through a close ludic reading of Fallout: New Vegas (2010) I will argue that these textual games are in fact Literature, a new kind of novelistic genre, and discuss the wider cultural implications of this assessment.