Sympathy for the Pixel: Will video games kill novels?
Over the weekend I went to an odd but fun concert. Entitled Video Games Live, it was an evening of video game music played by a full orchestra and backed up by a choir. The ensemble played the music of everything from Halo to Frogger (the clip above is music from The Legend of Zelda; they played this on Saturday, but this clip is not from the performance I saw). The concert was a lot of fun, and the music was really great; by turns cinematic and surprisingly beautiful, at one point a lone pianist played a rousing rendition of the Super Mario Brothers theme music while wearing a blindfold as the adoring crowd cheered him on (during which I was thinking, “I bet this kind of thing doesn’t happen at Carnegie Hall”).
But it was also kind of strange for me since I haven’t really played a video game in the past decade or so (except the classic ones that I collect; once I hit puberty, I pretty much stopped playing video games). When the orchestra was running through a number of themes from classic arcade games, I recognized pretty much every one of them — Front Line, Tempest, Elevator Action — but as the graphics became smoother and more realistic, and the game play more involved and sophisticated (especially in the home versions), I was hopelessly out of my element. As the orchestra played the themes to things like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy the crowd went absolutely nuts, and I observed it all very much from the outside; this was berserk, but not Berzerk. Due to the frenzied reaction of the crowd, I could tell that this music had been the soundtrack to countless hours of their lives. Much the same way that The Big Chill soundtrack epitomized the youth of an entire generation of Baby Boomers, the music to games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Metal Gear Solid has provided a similar aural backdrop. And, frankly, who’s to say that the Rolling Stones mean more than a Playstation 3?
But something else struck me as I sat there watching these truly amazing games — many of which looked better, in terms of special effects, than any movie I ever saw growing up — I kept thinking to myself, “The novel is dead.” Because how in the world could books compete with these games? What were mere words next to those incredible graphics and complicated stories? At one point there was this game called Civilizations, where whole societies were built in seconds, and I thought, “If I’d had a game like that as a kid, I would have never left the house.” Growing up I always heard stories of college students so taken with the board game Dungeons and Dragons that they started living in the sewers and playing the game all day long. And that was just with some dice and graph paper! So what’s happening now that people literally have worlds at their fingertips? It used to be that books provided an escape from everyday life by providing a portal to incredible new worlds, but today that function is handily served by video games.
True, the satisfaction one gets from a novel is more sublime and arguably deeper than one gets from a video game, but books hardly elicit the same kind of fervor or devotion. The crowd during the Video Games Live concert went bananas at just the mention of certain games; it was apparent that these characters and worlds meant a lot to them. When’s the last time you went to a book festival and heard people screaming merely at the mention of a book’s title?
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I just sent a link to your entry to The Shifted Librarian, who is the games-in-libraries evangelist.
I came to computer games fairly late (age 36) but soon became fascinated with the narratives found in many games. There’s a lot of interesting research on the intersection of new media, game studies, and literature.
I think anyone who argues that a video game cannot be an engaging, even intellectual experience, hasn’t ever played a good game. One good example is Morrowind.
I must admit that I did find the hours spent game playing interfered with my reading time.
Interesting thoughts. My personal experience is that videogames are just one of the many distractions in life that take me away from reading. In fact, the internet has had a far greater impact on this activity for me during the last decade. When I was a kid, it was television. Around this time of year, it’s spring. This summer, I hope to add geocaching to the list of things I’m doing when I’m not reading.
Right now, I’m also being drawn away from reading by modern boardgames, which I’m enjoying immensely. This has also eaten into my internet and television time, as have videogames. So for me, it’s cyclical, and it’s okay. I consider it all to be a media diet, and as long as I have a healthy mix of formats and channels, I’m doing pretty well. It’s when I’m *only* reading or watching television or surfing the net or playing outside that I would start to worry, and that was my philosophy raising my stepchildren. It worked well for us.
I guess I’m just trying to emphasize that it’s an “and” proposition, not an “or” one. These things don’t have to compete, although I do recognize there are only so many hours in a day. There are times I desperately want to do one of them, and other times I desperately don’t want to. Kids are no different, and it’s up to parents, teachers, and other guides to help them strike the right balance so that they can become well-rounded adults who can balance a multitasking world.
P.S. I’ve heard *plenty* of screaming about Harry Potter titles, and I’ve even seen kids (and adults) lined up at midnight to grab a copy at the first possible moment. Folks don’t scream about every videogame, movie, or book, but there are popular titles in each category. So you have to compare apples to apples (which, btw, is a great card game!).
I should note, too, that when I list things that distract me from reading, I specifically mean reading books and magazines, as I read more than I ever have before if you add together books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, email, PDFs, reports, games, and websites. So, even then we have to be careful what we mean when we say kids are playing videogames “instead of reading.”
I’m a gamer, run a gaming blog, etc. If I had to pick between video games and reading as the one form of entertainment I’d have to stick with the rest of my life, I’d pick reading. Fortunately (as Jenny points out) it’s not an either/or proposition. I will say that gaming probably cuts into my television watching time, though.