Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Last week I wrote about my experiences at the recent Video Games Live concert, and how the interactivity I saw in the video game footage, not to mention the reaction of the crowd at the mere mention of the names of some of these games, presaged — in my mind, anyway — the death of the novel. Well, after last week’s release of the ultra-successful game franchise Grand Theft Auto, I can’t help but continue to think that, for at least a certain generation, books are on the way out and these new, hyper-realistic and interactive games are in (and are here to stay). According to an article last week in The New York Times, “The [Grand Theft Auto] release is expected to be one of the biggest video game debuts ever, extending a franchise that has already sold 70 million copies since its arrival in 1997.”

But wait; there’s more:

But customers’ intense desire for video games extends beyond Grand Theft Auto. Despite pressure on consumers’ entertainment budgets, they keep spending more money on games. Over all, the industry is having a banner year. Software sales were up 63 percent in March compared with March 2007, according to NPD Group, which tracks sales. Equipment sales were up 46 percent over the same period.

“People say that if consumers are down to their last $50, the last three things they’ll buy are milk, eggs and video games,” said Colin Sebastian, a video game industry analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

When’s the last time you heard people talk like that about books? Well, specifically, it was last July, when the final book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series came out. But that was almost a year ago, and no more Potter books are set to appear. In fact, she’s finally off the bestseller list for the first time in a decade. And yet, whereas studies have shown that — despite the phenomenal interest in and success of the Potter books — literacy rates among children have continued to decline, the success of games like Grand Theft Auto are a gateway to the playing of yet more games (and probably the reading of even fewer books). Potter may not lead to Pynchon, but Auto certainly leads to Halo. You can argue about whether or not this is good for society, but you can’t deny that it’s a trend that shows no sign of reversing itself.

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?