[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-134545-en":3,"doc-seo-134545-105":31,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":92},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":21,"is_downloadable":21,"audit_status":21,"page_count":22,"language":23,"language_code":24,"site_id":25,"html_lang":24,"table_of_contents":26,"faqs":27,"seo_title":28,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":29,"read_time":30},134545,2336474466712,"Quinn Holloway","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_a8503ba1806abce46bf441b54a3ca4cd",2,"Literature","Video Games & the Novel - Eric Hayot","The essay traces how video games emerged from cultural conditions shaped by older storytelling media, challenging the assumption that games are categorically unlike novels. It reviews early academic justifications for videogames’ “radical difference,” particularly claims about interactivity, kinesthetic pleasure, and nonlinearity. It then argues that games share narrative relations with a longer history of narrative tropes, borrowing forms and patterns that predate the modern novel.","Video Games & the Novel  \nEric Hayot  \nIn the last sixty years, the videogame industry has grownfrom quite literally nothing to a behemoth larger than thefilm or television industries. This enormous change in the shape of cultural production has failed to make much of an impact on the study of culture more generally, partly because videogames seem so much less culturally important than novels. Noone has ever imagined the Great American Video Game. But videogames have more in common with novels than you might think, and viceversa. Anyone trying to understand the combination of neoliberal individualism and righteous murderousness that characterizes our world today will do well to pay them some attention.  \nT  \nhe scholarly study of video games dates back to the late 1990s, when the field’s first major journal, Game Studies, was founded, and the first major work was published in the field. Perhaps typical for any new academic en-  \ndeavor, the field justified itself partly via claims of video games’ radical difference from other forms of culture. Unlike novels, films, or television, games, we were told, were interactive, not passive and linear; they were oriented toward kinesthetic pleasures (jumping, running, flashing lights), not intellectual or emotional ones. Games were about simulating activities, not just imitating them. In fact, games were so different from novels, films, or drama that anyone seeking to simply slot them into that longer aesthetic history would be effectively attempting to“colonize” a new medium, to strip an exciting and unique cultural form of all of its novelty and interest.  \nThe argument for the uniqueness of videogames worked best if one emphasized certain types of games, games like Super Mario Bros. or Tetris, which highlighted precisely the kinesthetic and interactive structures that early game scholars identified as the crucial distinguishing elements of the genre, and deemphasized the kinds of games, also quite popular, that involved adventure or story. And indeed if one considers games like Super Mario, which draw so clearly from a longer tradition of kinesthetic and antagonistic play (what one sees ina game of jacks or pin the tail on the donkey), then the game enthusiasts had point. Videogames are not like novels and films, partly because they do not simply represent their story-worlds, but rather invite their users to shape them in action. Understanding games while relying solely on existing theories of the novel would be to make a significant category mistake.  \n178  \n© 2021 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Published under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license [https://doi.org/10.1162/](https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01841)[DAED](https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01841)[_a_01841](https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_01841)  \nEric Hayot  \nAnd yet. Plenty of videogames involve stories, enough that attempting to think about what games do or are, culturally speaking, without any sense of how storytelling works would bea pretty odd thing todo. Games, after all, did not just emerge sui generis from the cultural landscape, from a set of technological and social conditions that had nothing to do with anything that came before. The people who made the first video games had, after all, grownup in a cultural environment fully shaped by the existence of the novel, indeed had grownup in a world in which the novel had been a dominant cultural form. And they had grown up in a world full of television, film, and theater, a world about which one can honestly say that–in the United States of the 1960s–practically no one alive had not ever seen a film, watched a play, or read a novel. At some broader level, all the storytelling media, games included, borrow from a set of tropes, cultural patterns, and forms of production, distribution, and consumption that extend backwards to thevery beginningsof human culture. All of which is to say: videogames are not novels, but","cbCaivfFli6KrvZG","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaivfFli6KrvZG","pdf",419051,5,1,10,"English","en",105,"# Video Games and Cultural Study\n## The Claim of Videogame Uniqueness\n## Games, Interactivity, and Narrative Overlap\n## Shared Histories of Storytelling","[{\"question\":\"Why did early game studies argue that video games were radically different from novels and films?\",\"answer\":\"Early scholarship emphasized that games are interactive rather than passive and linear, focused on kinesthetic pleasures and simulations of activities rather than simply imitating story-worlds.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the essay respond to the idea that videogames are too different to analyze using theories of the novel?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that relying only on existing novel theories risks a category mistake, but also stresses there are meaningful overlaps where a broader cultural perspective offers a less fragmented view of how culture works.\"},{\"question\":\"What historical examples does the essay use to show connections between games and narrative media?\",\"answer\":\"It compares video games with interactive fiction and poetry, citing Spacewar! alongside works by Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortázar, and B. S. Johnson, and it places early console gaming within wider aesthetic experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s.\"}]","Video Games & the Novel - Eric Hayot | PDF",1787267720,15,{"code":4,"msg":32,"data":33},"ok",{"site_id":25,"language":24,"slug":34,"title":13,"keywords":35,"description":14,"schema_data":36,"social_meta":87,"head_meta":89,"extra_data":91,"updated_unix":29},"video-games-the-novel-eric-hayot","",{"@graph":37,"@context":86},[38,54,69],{"@type":39,"itemListElement":40},"BreadcrumbList",[41,45,48,51],{"item":42,"name":43,"@type":44,"position":21},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":46,"name":47,"@type":44,"position":11},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",{"item":49,"name":12,"@type":44,"position":50},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":52,"name":13,"@type":44,"position":53},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/video-games-the-novel-eric-hayot/134545/",4,{"url":52,"name":13,"@type":55,"author":56,"headline":13,"publisher":58,"fileFormat":61,"inLanguage":24,"description":14,"dateModified":62,"datePublished":63,"encodingFormat":61,"isAccessibleForFree":64,"interactionStatistic":65},"DigitalDocument",{"name":9,"@type":57},"Person",{"url":42,"name":59,"@type":60},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-09-05","2026-08-20",true,{"@type":66,"interactionType":67,"userInteractionCount":20},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":68},"ViewAction",{"@type":70,"mainEntity":71},"FAQPage",[72,78,82],{"name":73,"@type":74,"acceptedAnswer":75},"Why did early game studies argue that video games were radically different from novels and films?","Question",{"text":76,"@type":77},"Early scholarship emphasized that games are interactive rather than passive and linear, focused on kinesthetic pleasures and simulations of activities rather than simply imitating story-worlds.","Answer",{"name":79,"@type":74,"acceptedAnswer":80},"How does the essay respond to the idea that videogames are too different to analyze using theories of the novel?",{"text":81,"@type":77},"It argues that relying only on existing novel theories risks a category mistake, but also stresses there are meaningful overlaps where a broader cultural perspective offers a less fragmented view of how culture works.",{"name":83,"@type":74,"acceptedAnswer":84},"What historical examples does the essay use to show connections between games and narrative media?",{"text":85,"@type":77},"It compares video games with interactive fiction and poetry, citing Spacewar! alongside works by Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortázar, and B. S. Johnson, and it places early console gaming within wider aesthetic experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":52,"og:type":88,"og:title":13,"og:site_name":59,"og:description":14},"article",{"robots":90,"canonical":52},"index,follow",{"doc_id":7,"site_id":25},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":93},[94,98,101,105,109,114,119,124,129,132,135],{"id":21,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":95,"show_sort_weight":96,"slug":97},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":11,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":12,"show_sort_weight":99,"slug":100},80,"literature",{"id":53,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":102,"show_sort_weight":103,"slug":104},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":20,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":106,"show_sort_weight":107,"slug":108},"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":110,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":111,"show_sort_weight":112,"slug":113},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":115,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":116,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":118},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":120,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":121,"show_sort_weight":122,"slug":123},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":125,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":126,"show_sort_weight":127,"slug":128},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":127,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":130,"show_sort_weight":127,"slug":131},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":133,"show_sort_weight":22,"slug":134},"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":136,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":47,"category_name":137,"show_sort_weight":20,"slug":138},19,"General","general"]