(The Cartridge Lit blog.)
First goes the speed and agility, then the athleticism. Strength was never there. Finally you’re just a scrawny grad student with a mediocre mid-range jumper, getting blown out on the B-court every other week. It would be a sad game.
Games with great graphics are cool, sure, but I want something that’s going to take me deeper in and give me an emotional reaction to it. Inspire me to feel something, whatever that might be. The Last of Us was the last game I played to do that—to put the story absolutely first, in my opinion. And it was incredible. And I try to remind myself of that: that storytelling, in any form, in any medium, can be a powerhouse.
I do wonder, however, if a writer wrote about, say, 1940s Hollywood, if someone would ask them, “How do you balance watching movies and writing?” It’s just that, in terms of time commitment, I devote as much time to playing games as some writers do to watching TV or reading blogs.
In the past there’s been a lot of talk about whether video games can be considered art. Dead End Thrills sort of obviates that argument, at least from the visual and technical sides—the people who make these games are clearly doing so with an eye for the artistic.
Cartridge Lit contributor Brian Oliu has a new book out, Leave Luck to Heaven, from Uncanny Valley Press. The book is a collection of video game-twinged lyric essays that have been published in just about every literary magazine imaginable, and they’re all pretty amazing. Go “play” this.
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.
