In the second in a series entitled "The Future of Reading," New York Times critic Motoko Rich speculates about books pitched with video game tie-ins expressly in mind.
Sound counterintuitive? Shouldn't that be the other way around?
Yes, for the most part, but sometimes no. The line between reading and gaming has always been elusive -- it's more like a fractal than a line, really -- just like the borderland between gaming and music or gaming and movies (and, increasingly, gaming and "reality"). While books and games remain functionally distinctive from a marketing and materials perspective, you're increasingly able to read the equivalent of a novel's worth of text in a game, be it a literal, singular novel, or the sum total of all the things you come across in your experience, interface to iterative labels to interactive dialogue.
NYT's Rich references one or two outlier examples of books written with the idea of moving from the printed word to the digitally illuminated variety expressly in mind, but the history of gaming is already strewn with fictive tie-ins. Legend Entertainment based a whole series of adventures on novels from popular writers like Piers Anthony, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Terry Brooks, Spider Robinson, and John Saul, and MMOs like The Lord of the Rings Online or Age of Conan certainly owe an inextricable debt to authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard respectively.
And what about games and books that swing the other way, where the imaginary video game world has become popular enough to spawn small piles of paperback tie-ins?
Can't get enough Mass Effect? Try Mass Effect: Ascension or Revelation by Drew Karpyshyn. Halo? Check out The Flood, First Strike, and The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund. Gears of War? Watch for Aspho Fields, coming end of the month by Karen Traviss.
Sure, those are generally lowbrow advertorial fodder -- cheap entertainments that feed our need to "immerse" and "extend" -- but they speak to a broader trend in all our forms of entertainment. Mediums are merging like swirling, spiral galaxies, slowly and inexorably drawn into each other. We're still in the very early stages of convergence, but when writer Jay Parini says in the piece that he "wouldn't be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky," he's precisely right, and if anything, hugely understating where things are headed.
