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).
The songs on this playlist are not, by and large, directly related to video games (although the opening to Man Man’s “Knuckle Down” certainly calls to mind 16-bit dungeon trawling). Instead, this is just a set of songs I listened to a lot around when I started work on An Object You Cannot Lose. It was my first year living in Arizona.
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.
