Generally in my fiction the characters are collectors or creators of some kind and totally driven by that, or they’re hung up on a particular idea, trying to figure out how to deal with it or escape from it—now that I say this, it kind of sounds like I’m describing fiction in general. My stories also tend to wear disguises, solve mysteries, hang around with monsters.
Video games, especially older ones when designers were more limited in terms of what they could do/show, have such strange internal logics, making for totally unfamiliar, surreal narratives that I don’t think could’ve arisen in traditional fiction (the same way film opened up all sorts of doors for stories, too).
Maggie Sullivan’s “Ode to Oot“: three wonderfully lyrical, wonderfully searching pieces of non-fiction, existing both within the world of Hyrule, and all worlds, somehow simultaneously. Check those out, and then tune in below to her favorite games and thoughts on being a writer/gamer! Maggie is a non-fiction MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. She’s been published […]
I am a visually inclined person, and this definitely translates into my poems but was definitely something in my aesthetic that became, how would I say—tweaked?—after being groomed by the visuals and movements and patterns of video games. Additionally, I find myself pulled toward accumulation, saturation, bombast, and overlap, in language as well as image—looking back at my gaming history, it’s no surprise…
I would then go back and show the other girls how to shoot in Golden Eye, drift in Mario Kart, or find their missing Pokémon.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
