Video Games as Literature: A Reflection

John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room No. 118

By the time you’re reading this, my ten-week Video Games as Literature course will have officially come to an end. I probably have a little work left to do—post grades, submit materials for evaluation, make notes for next time—but there won’t be anything else to anticipate or plan for. For me, that’s the difficult part about coming to the end of a teaching term: the sudden loss of a future. I know that sounds dramatic, and I know it’s not true, but it feels that way for awhile. Because I’ve been in the habit of thinking ahead, in a specific way, about a particular set of students, I’m always a bit lost when a class finishes. I feel lost even when I’m relieved to be done. And in the case of Video Games as Literature, I am definitely relieved to be done. In this John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room, I want to explore that crossroads of relief and sadness and video games.

The course I designed over the summer was boiled down from an earlier course on the intersection of games and storytelling. I thought Video Games as Literature had a more academic, scholarly ring, which better reflected my new, narrowed focus. I wanted to think about games as if they were books, poems, or plays, as cultural touchstones, artistic expressions, and reflections of the zeitgeist. I wanted to create a class environment to sustain thought and discussion about video games as a serious medium, a form capable of moving us emotionally, philosophically, intellectually. I wanted to be able to use the word zeitgeist in context.

In essence, the course succeeded. I enjoyed ten weeks of sustained thought with my students, in conversation and in writing, about the way video games reflect our humanity, but fell short of my loftier, change-the-world kind of goals. As I write this, I never want to play another video game again.

While I suspect my aversion will pass, it’s worth thinking about. When I finish teaching a literature course, I don’t swear off literature. When I finish a writing workshop, I don’t avoid writing. In fact, the contrary is often true: I find I’ve stored up energy and inspiration for my own writing and reading. Why do I feel suddenly repelled by video games? Why are video games different?

There’s a physical presence required for video games which is not required to read a book. More is asked of the player than holding a game controller, which is already more involved than a reader holding a book. Mustering the coordination and motor skill to make progress is a video game is an active, intentional act, and much more involved than turning the pages of a book. Playing video games can lead to physical fatigue—sore thumbs, strained eyes—but it can also lead to intellectual and emotional fatigue, depending on the story you’re playing plays out on the screen and in your imagination.

At the same time, there’s so much else going on in a video game that’s out of a player’s control—music, sound effects, graphics—that its easy for one’s attention to selectively fade. Always paying attention to everything in a video game is it’s own kind of exhausting. In effect, that’s the task I set for my class. For ten weeks, my students and I tried to pay attention to everything all the time. The nature of the medium makes makes this feel like opening up to a sensory barrage.

When reading a novel, and my attention wanes, I can turn back several pages and reread, or I can bookmark my place, take a break, pick-up the book after a rest. Each of these options is more complicated in a video game. Not every game can be saved at will, and saving is rarely as clean as putting a bookmark between pages. Which leads to a larger point about tackling Video Games as Literature. Readers know how a book works when they start reading, while players must learn how each new game works. It’s one more in a long list of systems a player must become familiar with, or even expert at, that has no parallel in reading.

I think this leads into and partly explains a pattern I noticed in my students. With a few exceptions, my students weren’t particularly literate in video games in general, but were literate in their preferred genres—RPG, Shooter, Platformer, etc.—and significantly literate in one game title. The majority of my students were highly experienced Minecraft players, for example, with hundreds of hours logged in their Minecraft worlds, but those hours comprise anywhere from seventy- to one-hundred-percent of their total video game time since the pandemic lockdown in 2020. Which makes sense, now that I think about it: most readers have a preferred genre, and even a preferred writer, that forms the bulk of their reading list. But I’d assumed that kids these days would have broad video game literacy. Most, it seems, do not. I am an ass. As a result, the class materials, and the class itself, proved more challenging than I anticipated.

If the course had been an unmitigated success, and my students intensely engaged, and everything we read and played and talked about further enflamed our passions for video games, would I be itching to start playing a new video game now that I’ve got time on my hands? In other words, is my current aversion to video games a byproduct of an ordinary, average teaching experience? I suppose it’s possible. It certainly contributes something, some feeling of mild disappointment. I think I have a better answer, however.

I don’t love video games. I like video games. Sometimes, I like them like them, like, you know, a lot. But I don’t feel the same draw to video games that I do to books, stories, poems, plays. I’m not willing, or able, to make the same life commitment to video games as I’ve made to fiction, for example. Therefore, the distance between focus and burnout is shorter, and the inspiration I draw from games shallower.

What am I trying to say? It’s not you, video games, it’s me.