The Depiction of Videogames in Novels

There is something quite unfortunate about the depiction of videogames or pretty much anything having to do with computers and internet in novels.

The starting point always seems to be a quite self-conscious conception especially from authors of children's literature that videogames keep children from reading books and in essence produce dumb people. That is a harsh prejudice that is simply not justified. Children these days will read books or they won't. Videogames are not going to change that, you might as well blame TV for the decline in sophistication. And true enough, when TV was at its advent the older media had a very critical view of the new media on the block.

Furthermore, even though I have to admit it is only a small exception, some games are in their narrative and psychological framework just as brilliant and sophisticated as a good movie or even a novel. Sadly, these works of course remain in the minority but if you have a look at any medium you might find an overabundance of trivial narratives and flat characters anywhere.

But even if you disregard the very sceptical and sometimes downright condescending point of view of the author, oftentimes the depiction of videogames is ridden with silly mistakes that make it very obvious the author probably has never touched a videogame with a ten foot pole. I vividly recall one instance where a new game was installed on the pc by putting a new microchip on the motherboard. Ridiculous.

Then I remember a novel series that was entirely set in a bleak future in which social power is earned by successfully fighting in a MMO type of game. The depiction of the MMO game within the novel was actually very accurate, so much that it poked fun at typical behaviour of MMO players, such as grinding or power gaming. On the downside the narrative soon lost itself in the most terrible and dumb Mary Sue characterisation. If I want to play an MMO game, I go and play. If I want to read a book I do so. I do, however, not see a point in reading a book about people playing MMO games, assumed that the narrative doesn't offer any other interesting points, which it sadly didn't in the admittedly brief time until I lost my patience with the book series.

I have yet to read a believable and also interesting depiction of a videogame in a novel. Most of the time the author tries to cram in some kind of message about how videogames are evil and are programming the young generation to be killing machines. Sadly, even Terry Pratchett's novel Only You Can Save Mankind seems to be one of those novels and even though I usually love reading Pratchett I can't bring myself to give that book even a try. Maybe once videogames have become a respectable enough medium, such as it happened with film, people are able to write about them in a reasonable and realistic enough way.

Self-Aware and Self-Unaware Fantasy

Picture by Tom Woodward

If you are into fantasy books then you have a big problem. The genre is huge and has a lot of different sub genres and all of these harbour a lot of different styles of writing.

One thing, one underlying theme that just stuck out to me in fantasy is whether the author is writing fantasy in a self-aware way or not. It's really kind of hard to define but generally you have authors saying stuff like "Oh, it wasn't a conscious decision to write in this genre, I just want to tell a story! I write because I need to tell this story." or they don't say that.

It's usually people who are writing a kind of self-unaware fantasy who claim that they just want to tell you a story. That's not a bad thing at all. I'd put J. K. Rowling into that category of self-unaware fantasy writers and George R. R. Martin, too. Their stories are amazing and they can be amazing metaphors for what is going on in the real world, but they aren't consciously written as fantasy stories because they use the genre as a part of their construction, they are just written as fantasy stories because that's what the story is like. They are good stories and I especially like Harry Potter but I just find there is something fundamentally different about self-aware fantasy.

Self-aware fantasy would be stuff like The Lord of The Rings, obviously. J. R. R. Tolkien was not just a fantasy writer, he was a scholar and researched linguistics just as much as Anglo-Saxon culture. His Lord of the Rings can be seen as very awarely constructed work, just as you might look at the Middle English poem The Pearl. Some amazingly constructed piece of work like that, whose form alone is so extremely complex and yet perfectly corresponds to the content can only be the work of somebody who exactly understands what he is doing and what traditions he is drawing on when he is completing his work. Alright, The Lord of the Rings doesn't rhyme or have a certain number of lines or stanzas as far as I am aware of but it's a huge piece of work and draws on not one but many writing traditions. Tolkien incorporates elements from Anglo-Saxon culture just as he uses motives from World War I literature to create a critique of militarism and within that industrialism. The usage of that pastiche of elements and traditions is a commentary in and of itself. To create something like that, you have to have more than a "simple story" as a starting point. You must be aware of the writing traditions that you are drawing from, of the motives that you are using and what you are creating in the end is not a "simple story" but it is also a commentary on the genre itself.

It's hard to find somebody to liken to Tolkien and say: "Self-aware fantasy as it is written by Tolkien and..." yeah, by whom? Who else can we say writes fantasy in a way that is aware of the construction of the genre itself, its legacy and its potential? I might say that we could count Sir Terry Pratchett among these people. He doesn't strike you as somebody who just wants to tell you a story. I think he is very aware of the traditions of the genre and breaks them quite a lot. What I look for most in his books are his "moments" as I have come to call them. In every book, at least once, there will be a moment where the funny fantasy story in front of you just vanishes and it turns into a social commentary on our world. Those moments are why I read his books. And he doesn't do it in a lazy or obvious way either. When you read his works you realise that there is something behind it and that the author just has to be aware of it. It's like you are stepping behind a curtain and there you find the author, standing with you together and him saying: Oh yeah, I know. I am here, too. That's why I wrote it the way I did.

This idea of self-aware and self-unaware fantasy has been in my head for quite a while and I have never really found a way to exactly put it in a satisfying way. Even now I can't really make up a definition that always fits. In a way, a lot of it depends on what you think the author had in mind when they wrote something and this is something you will never be able to tell for sure, so I haven't decided how much merit this categorisation does have right now. It's important to stress though, that you can't tell the two apart by asking yourself whether the story can be an allegory for real life or not. Harry Potter is an allegory for a lot of things, among them J. K. Rowling deals with the terrors of the Third Reich in a very thoughtful way, but allegory and metaphor is not the same as self-aware fantasy. The author has to be aware of fantasy as a genre and specifically use that in their writing. The starting point isn't necessarily the story but the genre itself.

Also, self-aware fantasy doesn't necessarily have to be better than self-unaware fantasy or the other way around- Not at all. A skilled writer tells you an amazing story, whether they deconstruct the entire fantasy genre in the process or not. But let's just say, I don't think Stephenie Meyer was very aware about the genre and its traditions when she wrote her series.