Abstract
This essay presents a version of the relationship between novels and video games in the contemporary moment, suggesting the importance of understanding the video game and the novel as sitting in a shared network of narrative storyworlds, focusing specifically on the examples of Halo and BioShock as franchises making use of the novel in efforts to utilize the specific affordances of the form. The chapter first presents a version of video game narrative and pursues the question of the relative positions of novel and video game in the contemporary novel-network, arguing for the possibility of understanding video games as importantly “novelistic” in the sense Mikhail Bakhtin posits, as possessing and often requiring some of the qualities usually understood to be the novel’s domain, qualities that both enable narratives to be picked up in franchise novels and make those narratives themselves ever closer to the novel’s ideal.
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Notes
- 1.
Figures are from https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Halo.
- 2.
AAA-type games are titles published on the back of large development budgets by big-name publishers in the field. Microsoft’s Halo, 2K Games’s BioShock, but also such games as Bethesda’s Fallout series, Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, or Electronic Arts’s various sports titles function as the equivalent of major blockbuster movies: they have not just a long and costly production process, where major games may easily reach into triple-digit millions of dollars, but also come with the advertising power needed to make them viable—as well as with the franchising that permits publishers to draw in additional revenue. Indie games are video games developed by small companies independent of money or resources from big production companies, with correspondingly smaller budgets.
- 3.
For more detail on basic game design and production principles and practices, see Bob Bates’s Game Design (2004).
- 4.
“Perceiving” is the same as “focalizer” in Gérard Genette’s structural narratology. In more recent sources on literary theory, the term “perceiving agent” replaced “focalizer” to answer the “who sees” question because “focalizer” implies seeing only, which is just one of many senses, while perceiving may include more senses. For more details, see Herman and Vervaeck (2005: 77).
- 5.
Cf., though, Roland Barthes’s arguments on the playfulness of literary texts in The Pleasure of the Text (1975).
- 6.
To present complex story events, perhaps heavy with emotional or psychological aspects, game makers frequently rely on the more cinematic concept of cutscenes, short video clips shown between gameplay stages, and operating narratively like movies, including dialogue, voice-over narration, and audiovisual information.
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Thabet, T., Lanzendörfer, T. (2020). The Video Game Novel: StoryWorld Narratives, Novelization, and the Contemporary Novel-Network. In: Lanzendörfer, T., Norrick-Rühl, C. (eds) The Novel as Network. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53409-7_11
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