Priscilla Wong

Games and Literature

Julie Johannes
12/13/14
More than Stories: Videogames and High Art
There is a story circulating in rhetoric and composition that sometime in the late 1970s
the author died or maybe just dissolved into the semiosis of intertextuality (Trimbur). The
Death of the Author was a revolutionary idea that was conceptualized in 1967 by a man named
Ronald Barthes. For many, it heralded a new age of understanding and literature. For others, it
brought a sense of danger and caution. No longer was the novel protected by the ownership of
the author, but free for the taking by the masses. With the rise of new art forms such as film,
television, literature seemed to be fading in the wallpaper of modern society. Postmodern society
seemed to dig an even deeper trench for traditional literature. The mid 1900s also brought
around a new medium that has attempted to stake a claim in field of literature: videogames. But
the question still remains: can videogames become high art in a post-modern society?
The Death of the Author resulted in many changes in literature. In Agency and the
Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism, Trimbur states,
Although the author was apparently dead, people nonetheless felt that there was
something left to talk about. [] Theorists started to assign as much (or more)
agency to readers and critics as to writers in the production of texts. [] the act of
writing itself was refigured: it was no longer viewed as the [] art of making
meaning and expression a self but viewed as an unending play of signifiers, []
by which writers position and reposition themselves.

What naturally led up to and followed the Death of the Author was the idea that readers and
critics had just as much say as the author in the literary quality of the text. While the Death of the
Author attempted to raise the reader up to the level of the author, the author no longer had a
voice in his own work. Modern society had already shifted culturally towards the rise of
consumerism and the idea that the customer is always right. Death of the Author was
effectively a postmodern construct in that it sought to deconstruct what was already built before
it. The breaking down of the reader and author can be seen as the deconstruction of the boundary
between high art and low art forms that occurred in post-modern society as a result of the
ideologies of that time. This idea is realized in the conceptualization of popular culture as high
art culture, such as pop art. In a sense, art that had lacked quality now had quality if the public
deemed it so. Post-modern culture had placed art in the hands of the audience and literature in
the hands of the reader and by doing so, effectively driven the knife into the heart of these art
forms.
That is not to say that great literature is no longer being produced; rather, it can be said
that so much literature is being produced so that great literature is much harder to find. Postmodern texts also rely on intertextuality, fragmentation, or deconstruction in the sense that they
use pastiche or attempt to deconstruct traditional novels in their writing styles. In addition, less
people are reading compared than the generations before them. According to the Department for
Culture, Media, and Sports (DCMS) Taking part 2011/12 Adult and Child Report, on average,
adults are reading at least twice as much as young adults (16-24) are. The omnipresent and
deadly threat to the novel has been imminent now for a long time getting on, I would say, for a
century and so it's become part of culture. During that century, more books of all kinds have
been printed and read by far than in the entire preceding half millennium since the invention

of movable-type printing. If this was death it had a weird, pullulating way of expressing itself.
[] There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose (Self).
For many people, that future belongs to videogames, television, and films. Television is
the number one art form consumed by people of all ages, according to the DCMS. The Pew
Internet & American Life Project found that ninety-seven percent of young Americans play
videogames. James Paul Gee stated, When people learn to play video games, they are learning
a new literacy. With the death of literature, videogames among other art forms have
become one of the primary modes of narrative and story. Videogames paste together aspects of
film, music, and literature to create a new form of storytelling that brings in the aspect of
interactivity, which is a concept that is not as heavily presented in other art mediums. However,
having these advantages does not inherently give videogames the ability to represent high art. In
Loading the Dice: The Challenge of Serious Videogames (written in 2004), Woods remarks,
Certainly, videogames seem able to represent extremely serious subject matter, [] Inasmuch
as videogames deal with issues of power, violence, mystery, deceit and death, they have,
apparently, been unable to convey the emotional depth with which we might associate such
topics in other media forms. Even today, with exceptionally literary games like Dear Esther,
Bioshock, The Last of Us, the state of videogames as form of high art is debated. Games that
have great narratives and great stories and execution still seem to be not enough to finally push
videogames into history as fine art.
Perhaps one way to address the question, can videogames be a high art form is to
rephrase it. Why arent videogames, despite having great cinematic value, great narrative, and
great story, considered high art? Woods continues on to say in Loading the Dice:

If the current state of videogames is compared to a highly charged action film, a

murder mystery, a fantasy epic or even an informative documentary [] then
where are the significant works of social critique such as Steinbecks Of Mice and
Men or Orwells 1984? While it has been claimed that this seemingly unfulfilled
potential is largely due to the relative infancy of the medium [] some game
researchers have suggested that there are fundamental differences between the
structure of games and other media which might prohibit the medium from
dealing with sophisticated human issues.
What Woods is referring to here is the idea that games are inherently meant for entertainment, or
fun. Games that are not fun or have less appeal will ultimately fail in the industry. Not only that,
the gaming audience themselves reject serious games because they lack entertainment and fun.
After all, who would play a game like Dear Esther if given the choice to play Grand Theft Auto,
especially if they have to pay for the game?
Bridging that gap for videogames to have more meaning than entertainment is a hard task
to take on for any videogame developer. The odds are against serious games and games that
have more functions than fun. To be high art, regardless of postmodern deconstruction then, is to
have more meaning and have more purpose than mere pleasure and entertainment. Videogames
have the potential to evolve further past those ideals. Even more so, videogames have the ability
to combine entertainment and seriousness in a way that other mediums may not be able to.
Regardless of whether the semiotics of high and low art change, videogames can have meaning
and purpose and can explore the human condition in the same way that literature has for
thousands of years. While videogames may not have reached that point yet, the fact that most
games are merely entertainment does not mean that this is all they are doomed to be (Koster).

Works Cited
"Gaming as a Literacy." Beyond Literacy. N.p., 11 Nov. 2012. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
Koster, Ralph. "Raph Koster's Home Page." Video Games, and Online Worlds, as Art. Ralph
Koster, n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
Self, Will. ""The Novel Is Dead (this Time It's for Real)"" The Guardian. The Guardian, 2 May
2014. Web.
Taking Part 2011/12 Adult and Child Report (n.d.): n. pag. Gov.uk. Gov.uk, Aug. 2012. Web.
Trimbur, John. "Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of
Modernism." JAC 20.2 (2000): 283-98. JSTOR. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
Woords, Stewart. "Loading the Dice: The Challenge of Serious Videogames." Game Studies -.
Game Studies, Nov. 2004. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.