Could a video game developer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
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My personal favorite example is Sam Barlow's "Her Story". It's a video based detective games where you sift through archive clips of a woman's police interviews. The questions are all lost. You have only answers to piece together the story. Without giving too much away, the game allows you to figure out what happened and come to your own conclusions without excessive handholding or explanation. You become the detective in the truest sense. I urge anyone with an interest in mystery or detective stories to try it.
Her Story is also interesting because it doesn't require any particular technology. It could have been made in video form 20 years ago, or in text form even earlier. It is a work of pure creativity and shows how there are vast depths to explore in the world of video game story telling, away from the bright lights and big budgets of AAA titles.
The vast majority of video games, though, and probably the most commercially-successful, are written really badly and show no particular regard to narration. The cliches are so bad, the writing either childish or more or less intentionally B-movie style.
I think games can still get a lot better on this front. In other areas, the medium has developed and experimented a lot. But, aside from indie games and a few noteworthy exceptions, I don't feel videogames focus a lot on telling good stories. At least, they don't do this as much as other media, such as literature or cinema or songwriting, have done in their history.
I was always plagued by doubt when people only talk about game worthiness solely based on their writings and ignoring (or even disparaging) its mechanics. Then I found this video which spelled my mind in a very good essay https://youtu.be/a33ITEZDQwg
I don’t think anyone is proposing to solely rank games by their writing. Games are multi faceted. You can (try) to rank them by many aspects. How beautifull the graphics is, how engaging the game loop, how rewarding the puzzles or the progression, how well balanced it is. How realistic a simulation, how much it teaches you new skills, or shows you different perspectives.
Most people would agree that pacman, The Last Of Us, and Pokemon Go are all masterpieces in their own right but clearly they are not exceling along the same one dimension.
For some games, story telling doesn't matter. Just like for some blockbusters movies the story doesn't matter, people just want to see cool explosions.
VR games in some instances doubly so. Playing Half Life Alyx was almost a spiritual experience, I can close my eyes and remember the alleyways of the city.
Improv is the penultimate storytelling form. You and one or more partners share a communication and world building protocol and write directly into a shared narrative in real time. You establish rules and explore mini microcosms together, almost without limit.
The cool thing is that with LLMs, improv is now starting to include AI agents in this exercise. See CodeMiko for a VTuber that improvs against LLMs regularly. That's hardly the only or even best example of this.
The future is going to be wild - multiple people writing into a shared persistent narrative world together. Visually and spatially, too.
On topic though, I think improv and video games are going to come together over the next decade. The old standard of solid linear storytelling has been getting more and more liquid, and will soon get 'gaseous', imo.
While I do think that the writing of a game can be important and can be of high quality I also think that it is inappropriate to award a game as a written work. A game shouldn't be measured by it's writing alone and in some sense I think it is even insulting to give such an award, like awarding a photography award to a still frame of a movie.
"Visual novels" are definitely niche, but they are somewhat games and have very minimal interactivity. Yes some have branching narratives but others are just "click click click". They just tell a story and that's perfectly fine.
You wouldn’t say that “platformers” are not games just because we have a name for them.
I think it is fine to count them as games as long as there is some interactivity, but that obviously puts them at the outer edge of what games are.
To get back to the point, I think a visual novel should be eligible for a literature award, but that is because the interactivity is inherently limited.
The market finds simple denominations to help consumers navigate the offering, but these are not always accurate or very descriptive.
Focusing on the content as opposed to the label, why do you not think that these are games?
As I mentioned above, to me interactivity is the core element. Certainly a VN can have interactivity, although that is usually limited so I would put them at the outer edge of games. If it has no interactivity, then I wouldn't count them as a game though. A picture book is not a game.
Interactivity is just the ability to respond to a user's input. Even VNs with very limited branching do that.
There are games that have poor interactivity and masterful writing.
Those games are the reason I just finished a PhD focused on NLP. I've long been interested in giving players even more freedom to roleplay within the confines of narrative driven games.
The research platform I created based on Disco Elysium [1] has enabled some cool new research I just finished up for my dissertation that I hope to publish soon.
Similarly, Beckett and Shaw were awarded for their work as playwrights. Nobody thinks the Academy overlooked the actors who brought their work to life, or the stage manager at the Abbey Theatre, or their literary agents. They simply didn't contribute to that part of the work that is considered literary.
In the same way, I submit that someone could be considered to have made a Nobel-worthy contribution to literature through screenwriting or writing video games, but not for their camera work or their innovative 3D engine.
The other aspect is the for whatever reason there simply is no culture as it were around reading movie scripts, the way there is around reading plays or even song lyrics.
It may (presently) be inappropriate to compare him to Tolstoy (a towering figure in literature) though it must be said that the novel, at one time, was considered a low status medium compared to epic poetry and Greek theatre.
That said: it's a bit asking too much of games for them to have to validate their status as "art" by winning prizes proper to another form of art. Nobody expects films to win Nobel prizes; nobody expects land art to win Oscars.
The video game medium is basically less than 50 years old and it's likely that the most compelling justifications for games as art have yet to be written. In practice, museums do treat them as art, but with a special focus on their "interaction design": https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/798
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#share
When a movie wins the Best Picture Oscar, only a few people actually get the physical object, but of course almost all modern movies (especially those likely to get Best Picture) have huge numbers of people involved and even the Producers are too numerous to all get up on stage for some movies. To fix this, a movie that's a plausible Best Picture contender will ensure that it deliberately highlights some of its Producers in the credits as the people to whom such a prize would be awarded. Take "Barbie". Margot Robbie is on that short list of Producers who'd have got the actual statuette if they win Best Picture, in the end Oppenheimer won.
I would grade something as portal 2, or dwarf fortress as literary vehicle vastly superior
They are always highly gameplay focused, basically not even possessing a story you could follow.