Video games as elit: SS

 I found the question proposed in this chapter to be really interesting because I had the same question while I was doing previous readings and finding examples for hypertext poetry and other bring-it-to-the-table assignments. So many of my examples, the ones I immediately thought of, were games. By reading this chapter, I would like to quote what Jim Andrews says, “It is a question of velocity, density, and other concerns of visual (even multimedia) rhetoric, of emphasis and intent”. The emphasis on the text or the game is what distinguishes the work as a game or as literature. But I believe as games become more interactive, as game developers continue to give more life to each character in their game and each aspect of game playing, the two distinct categories will merge into one, maybe called playable literature.

 The best examples I can think of are games created by Telltale, a game company that creates really detailed stories within their games, and how players interact with the characters determines how the game ends, which characters stick around, and how successful the character is. Often, these games have hidden stories only unveiled by players determined enough to find all endings. There is usually an overarching end to the story, one all players reach despite the differences in their choices, but the stories are complex, there is a good degree of literature within the stories from allusions to detailed dialog and technology ties it all together. I suppose as someone who has grown up always having access to games that are interactive and are dense with reading material, I find little distinction between the two. I also find it quite amusing that the first commercially successful PC game was about caves and collecting treasure and the current most popular game in the world is about the same: collecting treasure and exploring caves (Minecraft). 


My bring-it-to-the-table example this week is Telltale Games’s own, The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead was first a comic book written by Robert Kirkman, then a TV show that premiered in 2010 then a game released in 2012 only to be followed by several other spinoffs of the show. It should be noted that while all works are based on the source material, the comics, all of them have different characters, different plots, and different geographical locations and are only tied by the apocalypse. The game must be purchased to play so I just included a link that shows the game’s storytelling capabilities. I chose this story/game because it is one of the earliest memories I have of being exposed to a game that was so dependent on a story instead a player's pure skill to beat other players. 


https://youtu.be/neqi8B2tBv0

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