One reason for this is the fact that environments like these are very suitable for action games as bookshelves, counters, tables and so on, offer good places to hide or find cover. 11ĭepending on the genre, it is not uncommon in video games to encounter representations of physical books or bookish spaces, for example libraries, schoolrooms or bookstores. Adam Hammond’s “Books in Videogames,” in which he compares the roles of books in the video games Myst and Gone Home, offers an introductory approach to the topic at hand in this emergent field. 10 For book studies, however, the appearance of books and other reading material in video games is a fairly new subject. More generally, her article “The Page is a Touchscreen” applies haptic media studies while looking at the impact touchscreen technology had on the representation of reading material that is not only readable but also touchable to some degree. 9 Chloe Anna Milligan also published several insightful articles on the topic, including “From Codex to Ludex,” in which she looks at representations of books in Gone Home as well as Papers, Please. Astrid Ensslin’s publications are a vital contribution to the field, especially Literary Gaming, in which she proposes a systematic method for analysing so-called “literary-ludic” texts in video games. Scholarship focusing upon video game narratives sits across multiple fields, such as literary and cultural studies and the digital humanities.
And sometimes, a big part of that expense for video games is spent on writers and the narrative lead. 7 Whilst not all video games are that expensive, it is no longer an exception for game production costs to reach the hundred millions. Grand Theft Auto V, a hugely successful and immensely popular video game from 2013 by the company Rockstar North, reportedly cost approximately 265 million US dollars to develop. Budgets for high class video games (also known as AAA games) at times even exceed budgets for prestigious Hollywood movies.
Even more noteworthy, however, is that many video games offer compelling narratives at times equalling the quality of stories offered in movies or novels. Since the days of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, video games have improved immensely regarding both graphics and sound. 6 It has been firmly established by now that video games are no longer merely about Italian plumbers saving princesses from giant gorillas throwing barrels. Storytelling within video games is no exception. 5īooks, as well as different aspects of book culture, feature in many modes of narratives. 4 A more well-known example is Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, where the location of the story, a medieval monastic library, along with its many manuscripts, can even be regarded as a major character.
3 An obvious example is the Thursday Next-series by Jasper Fforde, in which books, as well as their (fictional) characters, become important for the storytelling. There are many cases in novels where physical books play a significant role for the plot. 2 In both cases, one can assume that the more obvious function of the book – that is, the preservation and distribution of ideas or stories – is oftentimes overshadowed by a secondary function, the “reading” of symbolic book signs. There are studies, for example, about the uses of books in magazine advertisements 1 or television comedy shows.
Book historians, as a rule, are quite sensitive to books in any setting, fictional or real.
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