Since I’ve realized that it’s essentially impossible to read everything that I should be reading (after a few breaks with overly ambitious readings lists that ended up leaving me burnt out on the written word altogether), this year I decided that I would read the entirety of a very narrow genre: specifically, all of the books that have emotionally destroyed my friend Joel Tibbetts. That list included the Nobel Prize-winning novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro* and The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer. While all the novels succeeded wonderfully on their promise of emotional destruction, The Southern Reach Trilogy in particular left me paranoid of everything and everyone around me in the way that only the best sci-fi can. While I liked all of the books, I think there was a drop in quality with each installment, and I think it’s because each book felt less and less like a video game.
The first book in the series, Annihilation, follows a biologist working for an underground government department charged with investigating the secrets of a paranormal parcel of land. Though it seems at first like the setup for an action-adventure story, the main character really doesn’t do much besides wander around and look at things. The second book, Authority, has a somewhat more active protagonist, this time someone within the government itself, but still, the real driving engine of the book is that sense of observation and discovery. There’s more to my disappointment with the third book, Acceptance, than its decreased focus on exploration: the roving point of view means that there isn’t the same depth of characterization as the first two, and some of the powerful ambiguity from the first books is lost when the series turns from setting up mysteries to solving them. But, when thinking about what I didn’t like in the third book, I realized that what I really liked about the others: the moments of discovery, of finding hidden trap doors and attics that lead to long-buried secrets, of turning a corner and finding some scene of horror, and feeling as though you were the one who turned the corner. That emphasis on exploration and discovery, that’s really the essence of video games.
I feel strange making that argument, especially since the author of The Southern Reach Trilogy himself said that aspiring fiction writers should put down their consoles and focus more on the written word in his creative writing guide Wonderbook. No matter how many points I hear about how video games have just as much literary value as a great painting or novel, I can’t get over the snobbish instinct that something written in ink that you hold in your hands innately has higher artistic value that something you load into a Nintendo system.
But, at the same time, there are things that video games can do that other forms of media can’t. The rush of dopamine and electronic fanfare that comes with solving a puzzle, the stress of facing a fork in the story path, and above all the sheer joy (often mixed with dread and horror in darker games) of discovering new areas, it’s all legitimate engagement, and it’s all emotion that you can only really get from this one specific type of media. Even Jeff Vandermeer’s lush prose can’t mimic the feeling of real exploration that you get from, say, a dungeon in a Legend of Zelda game.
I think what this all comes down to is the feeling of immersion that video games offer. In fiction and film and pretty much every other medium, you have to filter everything you feel for the story through the central characters and, no matter how empathetic they are, they’re never quite you. Even second person prose and point of view camera shots ultimately fail to make the audience feel like they’re really in the story. But in video games, it’s you who’s exploring an area or crafting a solution or making a difficult choice. Even if the world your avatar inhabits is glitchy or so poorly rendered that no one would ever mistake it for real life, the way that it responds to your controls always makes it more real than even the best writing or film can.
Admitting that is a little disappointing, actually. I’ve stuck myself on the path to be fiction writer, and I don’t particularly want to backtrack and go into game design. Maybe some of the superiority I feel for books over games is really just envy that I know that games can promise immersion that my writing, no matter how good, never can.
But, at the same time, prose has its own strengths. Yeah, maybe the protagonist never feels like it’s really you, but that gives the writer an opportunity to form fascinating characters and create different emotions in the reader depending on how closely they connect with the characters. Meanwhile, no matter how many interesting people populate the world of a game, inevitably the player’s avatar will be something of a blank slate. To get that kind of immersion, you sacrifice complexity.
Recognizing the different strengths of different genres is vital for anyone creating in any field, I think. Not just so that you can understand your limitations, but so that you can borrow creatively from other fields, and maybe even push past them. Part of what makes Annihilation so good, after all, is the way that it takes the exploratory horror found in the best video games and grafts it onto a protagonist who is very much her own person, and often an unlikable one at that, even as we feel as though we are her in the moments when she’s skulking around the woods of a mysterious off-limits area.
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* Which is incredible, by the way. I know that pretty much everyone has an overly long list of books that they should be reading, but if I can add just one recommendation, it’d be that.
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