Gibson, Stephenson, et al. are among the fiction writers who have had the most influence on the way games now tell stories -- but in their stories, as Jeremy points out below, there's never any actual gaming, per se. Cyberspace = gaming in some ways; in some ways it doesn't. Can't put my finger on why.
Jeremy suggests Ender's Game and related texts -- I have recently learned that everyone has read Ender's Game but me -- alas, too late to add it to my syllabus for next semester. But there's certainly room for "Dogfight" to go into my course reader for the spring (along with "Burning Chrome").
This is the third installment (of four) of the email exchange between Berkeley and Santa Barbara on the subject (see previous posts).
> You
> are looking for specifically fiction themed around or talking about
> video games, right? Probably the most influential example in science
> fiction would have to be Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, which
> contains three important games - two of which are video games. A good
> companion piece to that is the Corey Doctorow short story Anda's Game,
> which is more themed around World of Warcraft style MMOGs (and in
> particular gold farming) than adventure games and 3D space combat
> simulators.
> Gibson's
> and Stephenson's flagship early works (Neuromancer and Snow Crash) both
> involve cyberspace, but they aren't clearly about games per se,
> although both involve many scenes that are clearly influenced by
> game-like metaphors, in particular the Case's time spent in Molly's
> rig, the Kung run, and Hero's use of the gargoyle HUD. The key short
> story there you are probably looking for however is from Gibson's
> Burning Chrome collection - Dogfight, by Michael Swanwick and William
> Gibson, which centers around the operant conditioning and military
> training aspects of video games, and involves a war vet and a convict
> playing a tournament game in an arcade.
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4 comments:
I should clarify that while the dominant cyberspace elements of Neuromancer and Snow Crash aren't themselves gaming per se, that doesn't mean there are no gaming elements in the works. I seem to remember that Case meets Linda in an arcade - she is an avid gamer. Hiro also engages in a virtual sword fight at the Black Sun early on that demonstrates how he has smoothly integrated video game code into the metaverse. Still, overall gaming as a separate cultural activity takes a back seat to VR. In Ender's Game, gaming is front and center.
I guess the essential issue here is the definition of *game*. A fair argument could be made that any action in VR is already *play*, if not *game* (I'm thinking fuzzily of Huizinga here).
Had Hiro's fight occurred outside the metaverse, with the stakes and seriousness remaining the same, would it still count as being a game?
You might want to read Melissa Scott, though I can't remember whether I mean Trouble and Her Friends or Burning Bright.
I've taught Ender's Game--it was fun for two seconds to tell them that I'd read it the year it came out and to watch them turn to the title page verso. It can be difficult to persuade people to write coherent literary essays on EG; same probably goes for lots of these things that sound as though they ought to be fun (student!readerly expectations go boom).
Oh, and there's always Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept trilogy (only the third is any good), except REALLY NOT AT ALL. But there's gaming in it.
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