My personal favorite example is Sam Barlow's "Her Story". It's a video based detective games where you sift through archive clips of a woman's police interviews. The questions are all lost. You have only answers to piece together the story. Without giving too much away, the game allows you to figure out what happened and come to your own conclusions without excessive handholding or explanation. You become the detective in the truest sense. I urge anyone with an interest in mystery or detective stories to try it.
Her Story is also interesting because it doesn't require any particular technology. It could have been made in video form 20 years ago, or in text form even earlier. It is a work of pure creativity and shows how there are vast depths to explore in the world of video game story telling, away from the bright lights and big budgets of AAA titles.
Some video games have shown you can have incredible writing and narrative in the format (recent ones that stuck with me: Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds).
The vast majority of video games, though, and probably the most commercially-successful, are written really badly and show no particular regard to narration. The cliches are so bad, the writing either childish or more or less intentionally B-movie style.
I think games can still get a lot better on this front. In other areas, the medium has developed and experimented a lot. But, aside from indie games and a few noteworthy exceptions, I don't feel videogames focus a lot on telling good stories. At least, they don't do this as much as other media, such as literature or cinema or songwriting, have done in their history.
While I appreciate games that do the further mile to enhance its story, I think we should still celebrate game as they are, an activity we do to have fun. Do Mario or Tetris have good story? But did they change the world anyway? If we rank games solely because of its writing and narratives, then all games should just be like Life is Strange which is a modern iteration of visual novel but in 3D.
I was always plagued by doubt when people only talk about game worthiness solely based on their writings and ignoring (or even disparaging) its mechanics. Then I found this video which spelled my mind in a very good essay https://youtu.be/a33ITEZDQwg
> If we rank games solely because of its writing and narratives, then all games
I don’t think anyone is proposing to solely rank games by their writing. Games are multi faceted. You can (try) to rank them by many aspects. How beautifull the graphics is, how engaging the game loop, how rewarding the puzzles or the progression, how well balanced it is. How realistic a simulation, how much it teaches you new skills, or shows you different perspectives.
Most people would agree that pacman, The Last Of Us, and Pokemon Go are all masterpieces in their own right but clearly they are not exceling along the same one dimension.
Some books and movies also have childish and terrible writing.
For some games, story telling doesn't matter. Just like for some blockbusters movies the story doesn't matter, people just want to see cool explosions.
I personally view video games as the penultimate story telling medium humanity has devised.
Sure, gameplay and mechanics and all this other stuff is cool, but the ability to tell a story where you ARE the main character, you have control over their actions and you are in a sequence as it unfolds is breathtaking.
VR games in some instances doubly so. Playing Half Life Alyx was almost a spiritual experience, I can close my eyes and remember the alleyways of the city.
> I personally view video games as the penultimate story telling medium humanity has devised.
Improv is the penultimate storytelling form. You and one or more partners share a communication and world building protocol and write directly into a shared narrative in real time. You establish rules and explore mini microcosms together, almost without limit.
The cool thing is that with LLMs, improv is now starting to include AI agents in this exercise. See CodeMiko for a VTuber that improvs against LLMs regularly. That's hardly the only or even best example of this.
The future is going to be wild - multiple people writing into a shared persistent narrative world together. Visually and spatially, too.
Guys, penultimate means second last; not 'super ultimate'.
On topic though, I think improv and video games are going to come together over the next decade. The old standard of solid linear storytelling has been getting more and more liquid, and will soon get 'gaseous', imo.
The only game I’ve played which had writing of a similar standard to “classic literature” is Disco Elysium. It really can be played repeatedly and each time you can learn something new or find another way of understanding the characters or game world.
I don't think that makes much sense. The core quality of a game is interactivity and to me that is what games should be build around and measured.
While I do think that the writing of a game can be important and can be of high quality I also think that it is inappropriate to award a game as a written work. A game shouldn't be measured by it's writing alone and in some sense I think it is even insulting to give such an award, like awarding a photography award to a still frame of a movie.
That's a lot of must and shouldn't that are not backed by anything.
"Visual novels" are definitely niche, but they are somewhat games and have very minimal interactivity. Yes some have branching narratives but others are just "click click click". They just tell a story and that's perfectly fine.
They are a subgenre of games. Visual novels, and interactive fiction is definietly computer games. The developers of interactive fiction are also game developers.
You wouldn’t say that “platformers” are not games just because we have a name for them.
To me interactivity is the core element here. Platformers can only be interactive. There is nothing about a visual novel which has to be interactive, in fact the interactivity is usually limited to a few branching paths (although more involved VNs do exist).
I think it is fine to count them as games as long as there is some interactivity, but that obviously puts them at the outer edge of what games are.
To get back to the point, I think a visual novel should be eligible for a literature award, but that is because the interactivity is inherently limited.
>Focusing on the content as opposed to the label, why do you not think that these are games?
As I mentioned above, to me interactivity is the core element. Certainly a VN can have interactivity, although that is usually limited so I would put them at the outer edge of games. If it has no interactivity, then I wouldn't count them as a game though. A picture book is not a game.
At the same time you can imagine a visual novel without any choices. I don't see that being a game, it is a novel with pictures presented in a digital format. Not a game.
I think the articles is missing out by not mentioning Visual Novel, which I think will most likely be the first of such case. The genre is very close to traditional novels.
Agree wholeheartedly. I still have a big box shrink wrapped copy of Planescape: Torment on my bookcase. I'd add Arcanum to that list as well.
Those games are the reason I just finished a PhD focused on NLP. I've long been interested in giving players even more freedom to roleplay within the confines of narrative driven games.
The research platform I created based on Disco Elysium [1] has enabled some cool new research I just finished up for my dissertation that I hope to publish soon.
I personally hate visual novels. They are usually a very clumsy mix between the interactivity of a game and the lengthy writing of a novel. Never have I felt like a visual novel was succeeding in either aspect.
Surely Dylan won the Nobel Prize for his work as a songwriter and in particular as a lyricist. That is, someone who works with words and language. It would be out of the question to give the award to someone known for being a great drummer or composer of orchestral music.
Similarly, Beckett and Shaw were awarded for their work as playwrights. Nobody thinks the Academy overlooked the actors who brought their work to life, or the stage manager at the Abbey Theatre, or their literary agents. They simply didn't contribute to that part of the work that is considered literary.
In the same way, I submit that someone could be considered to have made a Nobel-worthy contribution to literature through screenwriting or writing video games, but not for their camera work or their innovative 3D engine.
playwrights have won in the past so in principle it could happen. The problem is that the way tv and movies are made today, there really isn't one person you can point to as 'the screenwriter' of a movie. Between writing rooms, script doctors, rewrites and on set changes, it's hard to give one person credit for the words and actions that end up on screen.
The other aspect is the for whatever reason there simply is no culture as it were around reading movie scripts, the way there is around reading plays or even song lyrics.
Also, screenwriters seem to be mostly people hired by a producer to write something, not single authors who may be writing a genius story (a novel or short story, or stage play in the past) simply because they are struck by inspiration. There are many famous novelists but hardly any famous screenwriters. A large portion of famous movies are actually adoptions of preexisting books.
The best screenwriter I know of is Vince Gilligan (best known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul). Although he -- like everyone else in the TV business -- works in a writer's room, his writing style and his method for "breaking the episode" has led to some incredibly nuanced and compelling characters.
It may (presently) be inappropriate to compare him to Tolstoy (a towering figure in literature) though it must be said that the novel, at one time, was considered a low status medium compared to epic poetry and Greek theatre.
That said: it's a bit asking too much of games for them to have to validate their status as "art" by winning prizes proper to another form of art. Nobody expects films to win Nobel prizes; nobody expects land art to win Oscars.
The video game medium is basically less than 50 years old and it's likely that the most compelling justifications for games as art have yet to be written. In practice, museums do treat them as art, but with a special focus on their "interaction design": https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/798
That only stops them dividing the prize further, it doesn't stop them awarding for work which in fact took a great many people - only some must be highlighted. I'd guess almost all the modern Physics and Chemistry has a long trail of people who were crucial but didn't get the prize, some of whom the actual winners would cite if asked, and for others they'd probably say "Look it's a cast of thousands, if I forgot to mention you I apologise" or similar.
When a movie wins the Best Picture Oscar, only a few people actually get the physical object, but of course almost all modern movies (especially those likely to get Best Picture) have huge numbers of people involved and even the Producers are too numerous to all get up on stage for some movies. To fix this, a movie that's a plausible Best Picture contender will ensure that it deliberately highlights some of its Producers in the credits as the people to whom such a prize would be awarded. Take "Barbie". Margot Robbie is on that short list of Producers who'd have got the actual statuette if they win Best Picture, in the end Oppenheimer won.
I disagree, Think this developer is the has the most overrated worldbuilding out there. People are just willing meaning on whatever they make. Just a cheap trick where gamers, starving for actually decent storytelling in gaming are walking straight into scrapes to fill a void.
I would grade something as portal 2, or dwarf fortress as literary vehicle vastly superior
In my mind video games are absolutely literature.
My personal favorite example is Sam Barlow's "Her Story". It's a video based detective games where you sift through archive clips of a woman's police interviews. The questions are all lost. You have only answers to piece together the story. Without giving too much away, the game allows you to figure out what happened and come to your own conclusions without excessive handholding or explanation. You become the detective in the truest sense. I urge anyone with an interest in mystery or detective stories to try it.
Her Story is also interesting because it doesn't require any particular technology. It could have been made in video form 20 years ago, or in text form even earlier. It is a work of pure creativity and shows how there are vast depths to explore in the world of video game story telling, away from the bright lights and big budgets of AAA titles.
Some video games have shown you can have incredible writing and narrative in the format (recent ones that stuck with me: Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds).
The vast majority of video games, though, and probably the most commercially-successful, are written really badly and show no particular regard to narration. The cliches are so bad, the writing either childish or more or less intentionally B-movie style.
I think games can still get a lot better on this front. In other areas, the medium has developed and experimented a lot. But, aside from indie games and a few noteworthy exceptions, I don't feel videogames focus a lot on telling good stories. At least, they don't do this as much as other media, such as literature or cinema or songwriting, have done in their history.
While I appreciate games that do the further mile to enhance its story, I think we should still celebrate game as they are, an activity we do to have fun. Do Mario or Tetris have good story? But did they change the world anyway? If we rank games solely because of its writing and narratives, then all games should just be like Life is Strange which is a modern iteration of visual novel but in 3D.
I was always plagued by doubt when people only talk about game worthiness solely based on their writings and ignoring (or even disparaging) its mechanics. Then I found this video which spelled my mind in a very good essay https://youtu.be/a33ITEZDQwg
> If we rank games solely because of its writing and narratives, then all games
I don’t think anyone is proposing to solely rank games by their writing. Games are multi faceted. You can (try) to rank them by many aspects. How beautifull the graphics is, how engaging the game loop, how rewarding the puzzles or the progression, how well balanced it is. How realistic a simulation, how much it teaches you new skills, or shows you different perspectives.
Most people would agree that pacman, The Last Of Us, and Pokemon Go are all masterpieces in their own right but clearly they are not exceling along the same one dimension.
Some books and movies also have childish and terrible writing.
For some games, story telling doesn't matter. Just like for some blockbusters movies the story doesn't matter, people just want to see cool explosions.
The Static Speaks My Name and Braid also come to mind for me, but yeah I feel like most games are similar to folk literature if anything
I personally view video games as the penultimate story telling medium humanity has devised. Sure, gameplay and mechanics and all this other stuff is cool, but the ability to tell a story where you ARE the main character, you have control over their actions and you are in a sequence as it unfolds is breathtaking.
VR games in some instances doubly so. Playing Half Life Alyx was almost a spiritual experience, I can close my eyes and remember the alleyways of the city.
> I personally view video games as the penultimate story telling medium humanity has devised.
Improv is the penultimate storytelling form. You and one or more partners share a communication and world building protocol and write directly into a shared narrative in real time. You establish rules and explore mini microcosms together, almost without limit.
The cool thing is that with LLMs, improv is now starting to include AI agents in this exercise. See CodeMiko for a VTuber that improvs against LLMs regularly. That's hardly the only or even best example of this.
The future is going to be wild - multiple people writing into a shared persistent narrative world together. Visually and spatially, too.
Guys, penultimate means second last; not 'super ultimate'.
On topic though, I think improv and video games are going to come together over the next decade. The old standard of solid linear storytelling has been getting more and more liquid, and will soon get 'gaseous', imo.
They already do, check out the roleplay twitch streams! It’s all improv 24h drama in GTA and other games.
How did you move? With the controller or actual walking?
The only game I’ve played which had writing of a similar standard to “classic literature” is Disco Elysium. It really can be played repeatedly and each time you can learn something new or find another way of understanding the characters or game world.
I don't think that makes much sense. The core quality of a game is interactivity and to me that is what games should be build around and measured.
While I do think that the writing of a game can be important and can be of high quality I also think that it is inappropriate to award a game as a written work. A game shouldn't be measured by it's writing alone and in some sense I think it is even insulting to give such an award, like awarding a photography award to a still frame of a movie.
That's a lot of must and shouldn't that are not backed by anything.
"Visual novels" are definitely niche, but they are somewhat games and have very minimal interactivity. Yes some have branching narratives but others are just "click click click". They just tell a story and that's perfectly fine.
I think even the term "visual novel" separates them from "games".
They are a subgenre of games. Visual novels, and interactive fiction is definietly computer games. The developers of interactive fiction are also game developers.
You wouldn’t say that “platformers” are not games just because we have a name for them.
To me interactivity is the core element here. Platformers can only be interactive. There is nothing about a visual novel which has to be interactive, in fact the interactivity is usually limited to a few branching paths (although more involved VNs do exist).
I think it is fine to count them as games as long as there is some interactivity, but that obviously puts them at the outer edge of what games are.
To get back to the point, I think a visual novel should be eligible for a literature award, but that is because the interactivity is inherently limited.
Visual novels are like choose your own adventure books with pictures. Are those books games? Is it useful to classify them as such?
Yes they are.
What if they were called "interactive story driven games"?
The market finds simple denominations to help consumers navigate the offering, but these are not always accurate or very descriptive.
Focusing on the content as opposed to the label, why do you not think that these are games?
>Focusing on the content as opposed to the label, why do you not think that these are games?
As I mentioned above, to me interactivity is the core element. Certainly a VN can have interactivity, although that is usually limited so I would put them at the outer edge of games. If it has no interactivity, then I wouldn't count them as a game though. A picture book is not a game.
What about a picture book where the reader is supposed to find things on the page?
Interactivity is just the ability to respond to a user's input. Even VNs with very limited branching do that.
At the same time you can imagine a visual novel without any choices. I don't see that being a game, it is a novel with pictures presented in a digital format. Not a game.
> The core quality of a game is interactivity
There are games that have poor interactivity and masterful writing.
I think the articles is missing out by not mentioning Visual Novel, which I think will most likely be the first of such case. The genre is very close to traditional novels.
And RPGs, which have probably gifted some of the best written games ever (Planescape Torment, Fallout 1-2, Disco Elysium).
Agree wholeheartedly. I still have a big box shrink wrapped copy of Planescape: Torment on my bookcase. I'd add Arcanum to that list as well.
Those games are the reason I just finished a PhD focused on NLP. I've long been interested in giving players even more freedom to roleplay within the confines of narrative driven games.
The research platform I created based on Disco Elysium [1] has enabled some cool new research I just finished up for my dissertation that I hope to publish soon.
[1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev
I personally hate visual novels. They are usually a very clumsy mix between the interactivity of a game and the lengthy writing of a novel. Never have I felt like a visual novel was succeeding in either aspect.
Surely Dylan won the Nobel Prize for his work as a songwriter and in particular as a lyricist. That is, someone who works with words and language. It would be out of the question to give the award to someone known for being a great drummer or composer of orchestral music.
Similarly, Beckett and Shaw were awarded for their work as playwrights. Nobody thinks the Academy overlooked the actors who brought their work to life, or the stage manager at the Abbey Theatre, or their literary agents. They simply didn't contribute to that part of the work that is considered literary.
In the same way, I submit that someone could be considered to have made a Nobel-worthy contribution to literature through screenwriting or writing video games, but not for their camera work or their innovative 3D engine.
If a songwriter has done it, why not a scriptwriter o screenwriter.
playwrights have won in the past so in principle it could happen. The problem is that the way tv and movies are made today, there really isn't one person you can point to as 'the screenwriter' of a movie. Between writing rooms, script doctors, rewrites and on set changes, it's hard to give one person credit for the words and actions that end up on screen.
The other aspect is the for whatever reason there simply is no culture as it were around reading movie scripts, the way there is around reading plays or even song lyrics.
Also, screenwriters seem to be mostly people hired by a producer to write something, not single authors who may be writing a genius story (a novel or short story, or stage play in the past) simply because they are struck by inspiration. There are many famous novelists but hardly any famous screenwriters. A large portion of famous movies are actually adoptions of preexisting books.
The best screenwriter I know of is Vince Gilligan (best known for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul). Although he -- like everyone else in the TV business -- works in a writer's room, his writing style and his method for "breaking the episode" has led to some incredibly nuanced and compelling characters.
It may (presently) be inappropriate to compare him to Tolstoy (a towering figure in literature) though it must be said that the novel, at one time, was considered a low status medium compared to epic poetry and Greek theatre.
There's an entire genre of literature called "Electronic literature" of which interactive fictions are probably a subset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_literature
That said: it's a bit asking too much of games for them to have to validate their status as "art" by winning prizes proper to another form of art. Nobody expects films to win Nobel prizes; nobody expects land art to win Oscars.
The video game medium is basically less than 50 years old and it's likely that the most compelling justifications for games as art have yet to be written. In practice, museums do treat them as art, but with a special focus on their "interaction design": https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/798
Nobel Prize can be shared by up to three individuals [1] so barely any modern game would qualify.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#share
That only stops them dividing the prize further, it doesn't stop them awarding for work which in fact took a great many people - only some must be highlighted. I'd guess almost all the modern Physics and Chemistry has a long trail of people who were crucial but didn't get the prize, some of whom the actual winners would cite if asked, and for others they'd probably say "Look it's a cast of thousands, if I forgot to mention you I apologise" or similar.
When a movie wins the Best Picture Oscar, only a few people actually get the physical object, but of course almost all modern movies (especially those likely to get Best Picture) have huge numbers of people involved and even the Producers are too numerous to all get up on stage for some movies. To fix this, a movie that's a plausible Best Picture contender will ensure that it deliberately highlights some of its Producers in the credits as the people to whom such a prize would be awarded. Take "Barbie". Margot Robbie is on that short list of Producers who'd have got the actual statuette if they win Best Picture, in the end Oppenheimer won.
Dara O'Briain had a marvellous take on acknowledging the place video games have among literature and cinema:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeFPIDTkWyA
A genre where one of the most enduring cultural impacts is "Press F to pay respects", absolutely not.
Wasted
Let's see how long it will take to read: Could GPT-X win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
I’d give it to Naughty Dog, were it up to me.
I'd give it to From Software.
I disagree, Think this developer is the has the most overrated worldbuilding out there. People are just willing meaning on whatever they make. Just a cheap trick where gamers, starving for actually decent storytelling in gaming are walking straight into scrapes to fill a void.
I would grade something as portal 2, or dwarf fortress as literary vehicle vastly superior
I love their games but the stories are normally painfully abstract and difficult to piece together.
From Software games work because they force the player to fill in the gaps of a non existent story.
They are always highly gameplay focused, basically not even possessing a story you could follow.
Give it to Hideo Kojima.
I'd give it to team Silent for their writing of Silent Hill 2.
All of them deserve one
Then to Sam Lake.
Warren Spector for creating Deus Ex
No