(The Cartridge Lit blog.)
She frowns, turns off her phone, and hikes the blanket closer to her chin. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 for two hours while she’s browsed the Internet. This is as close as we’ve come to her watching me play in the past month. The counter says 100 hours. This does not include death time, reloads, freezes, and the time I copied the game to another account, played until dawn and then realized I couldn’t save.
We have a vision of devoting a month of literature to the voices that most often get shouted down in a world that has, traditionally, been dominated by the white, the male, the straight. We want to give the work room to breathe, to play off one another. To give the world of video games a different, sustained perspective.
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Georgia Bellas’ poem, “How Not to Win At Big Buck Hunter,” has been selected for the Best of the Net 2014 anthology, published by Sundress Publications.
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).
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.
