# Games are Literature’s Great Problem (podcast)

An episode of [Stream of Subconsciousness](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1498345708), 27 Sep 2025, 9:30.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/174662225/e56757244f0a010497907e60021431c8.mp3

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”— Alberto Giacometti, sculptor Storytelling is a Game There are only small differences between games and works of art. The main difference is the involvement of more than one person. Games involve collaboration while the appreciation of art is solitary. Art is usually created by one artist and experienced in one person’s imagination. Many can be present, but each has their own experience. Most games involve more than one person, though there is a growing inventory of single-person games. Among them, some are artistic, though they’re mainly entertaining. We’re starting to see games that focus on expression and creativity. Games will have a hard time becoming works of art as long as they’re created for a market that’s juvenile and unappreciative. Some art is interactive, whimsical, and entertaining but it hasn’t been gamified. Multi-person games, involving two or more people, have a narrow niche and more difficulty in becoming purely artistic. The defining characteristic of art is its suggestion of something you don’t know what to do with; it generates a paradox. As long as something must be entertaining, it’s difficult to also be paradoxical. Multi-person video games are expensive to create, some cost $100 million dollars, more than the cost of producing a movie. To submerge you in your imagination either requires a big budget or a child’s mind. If games are to become art, then we need an audience that has not yet been created. There is also the issue of pacing. Games have built-in clocks—their alternating turns, the duration of their puzzles, and the pace of their rewards. Novels have pacing too, but it’s more varied. Literary works can add digressions, a game can only digress when the digression brings all players with it. This difficulty in shifting the pacing of a game affects the storytelling. Gamifying Drama The trend to create serial dramas was credited to Charles Dickens in 1836. The number of serial dramas has now overtaken single-release movies, as you can see in the offerings of streaming media companies like Netflix. These were called soap operas in the 1950s, whose quality and budgets were minimal. Today’s budgets are huge though their quality remains poor. They are pay-for-play entertainment, not works of careful authorship. Serial entertainment has not made a good platform for art. It takes more than just a continuing plot to create a meaningful world. Authors of the serial format rarely create themes that span more than a single story. Each episode of the travel adventures in The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens)—called the first serialized novel—the 007 spy series (Ian Fleming), and the detective stories of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), all conclude at the end of each installment. “‘Literature’ is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call ‘entertainment.’”— Nicholas Dames (2015) Themes spanning more than a single book are contained in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Many blur the boundary between having a single plot and being a series of adventures. Screenwriters are creating movie franchises, but this has not generated literature of any quality. A quick look on Netflix shows most of the offerings are serialized. None rate as literature and most are poor movies. Even the most popular, like the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, are not literature. Neil Gaiman, author of great children’s stories (The Graveyard Book and Coraline) also creates video serials (The Sandman, Good Omens, and Dead Boys Detective Agency). But the video serials lack the quality of his writing due to the format, cost, involvement of many authors, directors, producers, executives, and limitations of Gaiman himself. Most great literature is ahead of its time, while entertainment must be popular in its time. This…

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