There are so many things about this post that make me angry but I can’t tell if OP is joking or not, or what they’re trying to imply.
Novels are not comparable to games in the slightest, not because novels would make “better stories,” (seriously, fuck that idea) but because it’s a ridiculously different medium that tells stories in a completely different way.
Silent Hill 2 has a fucking fantastic and fascinating story that is incredibly held together by the fact that it is a game, and not a book.
The World Ends with You would be such an awful read, in my honest opinion, and so much regarding the feeling of partnership would be lsot.
I could go on, but I feel like I’m taking this too seriously.
Agree. It devalues the art of game writing to say that any game with a lot of story could be shoehorned into novel format. Watch out people, I did my Masters degree in Games as a Storytelling medium and my BA in English Lit, so I may get a bit pretentious and academic here….
Games are, by and large, a Post-modernist literary form. Swathes of the narrative can be completed in different orders, your choices can change events, the abstract becomes real, and the real, abstract. When you grab a medkit, what does that symbolise? Bandaging? Resting? Gathering resolve? Gaming abstractions are a willing suspension of disbelief on the player’s part to make the nitty gritty of the story not get in the way of the excitement of the gameplay, and one that wouldn’t really work in a novel format, where we are encouraged to assume everything is canon unless we are deliberately induced to question the reliability of the narrator, in which case we get Scott Pilgrim, in which the gaming abstractions are possibly Scott’s imagination, but it’s never clear if they’re just elements of magic realism and completely true. If you’ve ever read bad fanfics of games, you’ll have seen things like, “Then Cloud used the potion on Tifa” …I’m sorry, he what? “Mario picked up the mushroom and became Super-Mario” Did he eat it? What are the ramifications of Mario being a twelve foot tall man now? It’s completely surreal Alice in Wonderland stuff, it’s meaningless nonsense that, unless we write tired webcomics about “gaming humour”, we recognise as necessary abstraction to represent nebulous concepts; it’s post-modern noise, like the brands and logos we ascribe significance and value in our modern daily lives; the potion represents a chance to continue fighting, the Macdonalds logo represents food; “This is not a pipe” (it is a picture of a pipe).
Novels are a Modernist literary form. A novel can only be read one way; in linear order. No input from the reader. The author tells you who “you” are, and what you are doing, seeing, smelling. If the narrative says you, (Tidus) went straight across the Calm Lands to Mt. Gagazet with only a brief stop at the travel lodge, you can’t argue. The narrative won’t stop for you because you wanted to look at the scenery and have more fun before getting back to serious business. The novel is always in past tense; it is telling you what happened and that can’t be changed. Games are trickier because when told in past tense, like Prince of Persia or Indigo Prophesy/Fahrenheit, they must constantly rewrite themselves to accommodate branching narratives in which the narrator tells the audience that they or the protagonist died, then retelling that scene as one in which the protagonist did not. Really, games always take place in the present tense, the narrative is being built by the player within the framework of pre-written storytelling; like a colouring book; the lines are there but you can pick any colours you want and even add your own lines to customise the particulars of the image, compared to an illustration, in which the illustrator has already drawn and coloured the full image and you look at it and draw your own conclusions, but do not attack it with a pen yourself unless you want to be called a vandal.
If there was a novel of, say, Mass Effect, it’d only cover a single Mass Effect experience. John Shepard the Sole Survivor Colonist Soldier who falls for Liara and is probably a Renegade who does nice things from time to time. That’s merely ONE Shepard. It’s not MY Shepard. This is the genius of Mass Effect, of Games as a medium, that a novel could never capture; it is written in a way that makes the audience a storyteller in their own right, rather than being told by an author (authority) what is, they are invited to help decide what is. My Shepard is a lesbian do-gooder biotic, and the game treats that as just as canon as any other choice, and that’s special! No other medium that can be recorded and experienced over and over can do that.
I’m not saying novels are in any way a lesser medium here; there are some things I love as novels that just wouldn’t work as a game, like say Song of Ice and Fire, but they’re a completely different medium from games. A game is an experience combining audio, visuals and user input, weaving a story around the player, while a novel lays out a story for the reader to follow.
To say that these games would make better novels is to show complete ignorance about how not only Games work, but how Literature works.
Additional fantastic commentary by a lady far more experienced and well worded than I!
GAMES AS LITERATURE IS LIKE MY FAVOURITE THING!!!
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callanswall 