A Divergent Path in the Evolution of Literature

Until recently, the idea of an electronic text seemed to me to be very much like a print text, but accessed through a computer. After “reading” – or maybe playing would be a better word – an electronic text-based game, it occurred to me that an electronic text can be more than just words. Although the game I played was text-based, I realized that any interactive game could be an electronic text, and that I’ve been exposed to electronic texts my entire life, as I’ve been playing video games from an early age.  A lot of the video games I’ve played have had a full narrative to them, and so I began to consider whether or not they could be texts with literary merit. One game that seemed like a good candidate for analysis was the original Resident Evil (originally titled Biohazard in Japan), particularly because it began as a video game and was remediated into movies and even books. I began my analysis expecting the game to prove itself to be a valid piece of literature.

The game takes place in a mansion, isolated in the fictional Arklay Mountains, near the fictional Raccoon City. The story begins with the Raccoon City Special Tactic and Rescue Service searching for clues about a series of grisly murders in the area, some of which involve corpses that have been partially eaten. When the S.T.A.R.S. team is attacked by vicious dogs, they take shelter in a mansion, where the team is split up. Eventually the characters discover that the mansion is overrun by zombies, and that underneath the mansion is an underground science facility where biological weapons are being developed. The zombie infestation turns out to be the result of a rapidly mutating biological weapon that reanimates dead bodies and causes them to attack the living, and the characters learn that this weapon, known as the Tyrant Virus, has unintentionally been released in the mansion.

After finishing the game, I came to the conclusion that the biological weapon in the game could easily be used to make points about biological weapons in real life. I took the game to be a criticism of biological weapons, and the dangers of experimenting with them. One thing that makes video games a powerful medium is their immersive nature. Reading about biological weapons can create a sense of fear in the reader by describing their dangerous effects. Film can describe the same effects with images, causing them to hit a little closer to home as we imagine what it would be like to see such devastation. Most powerful of all, Resident Evil places the player in the shoes of someone encountering the biological weapon. You don’t just see a person fighting off zombies, you fight them off yourself. Assuming the identity of a person in such a crisis, and being responsible for your own “life” makes the threat incredibly real for the player. If you don’t push the right buttons fast enough, the character dies. In Resident Evil, when this happens the game doesn’t tell you “The character is dead”, but rather makes it more personal by saying “You are dead”, forcing you to resume from the last point your progress was saved. This level of immersion doesn’t exist in a film or a book. Even when the Resident Evil series was adapted into film and novel media, they lack the sense of personal fear that makes the message so powerful. If the game criticizes biological weapons by associating them with fear, the medium is important for creating that fear.

Another form of interaction I took note of while playing were some obvious choices the player has to make, as well as more subtle ones. At the beginning of the game, the player is given the choice between two protagonists, Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. This choice influences how the game is played from that point on, as Jill possesses a lockpick that grants access to different rooms in the mansion, and thus alters the progression of the narrative for the player. Throughout the game, certain pieces of the story are revealed through “documents” found in various places such as desks, lab tables, and even clutched in the hands of corpses. These texts range reports of how the Tyrant Virus was developed to diaries of scientists who were accidently infected. Though these intertextual texts give a layer of depth by providing information from the point of view of other characters, they add another layer of variability to the game. Based on the nonlinear layout of the mansion, the player may find these documents in a different order, or miss some completely. For use in settings like classrooms, where books are a standard medium of study, a video game would be ineffective. If a teacher wanted to lead a discussion on a certain one of these texts, it would be impossible to be sure that every student took the same paths and found the same documents.

Sven Birkerts asks, “If everything is possible between reader and writer…does the idea of literature vanish altogether in the new gratification system of exchanged and shared impulses (161)?”  Birkerts’ implication here is that for literature to be valid, rather than just a source of meaningless entertainment, it must be concrete, permanent, and uninfluenced by the reader. A lot of electronic texts, especially video games such as Resident Evil, not only require the player to make choices, but to exercise more than just reading skills.  With a book, the narrative moves forward in a linear fashion on its own. The writer writes it, and anyone, provided they have a grasp of the language the text is written in, can read it. The reader reads and interprets the text to the best of his or her ability. If a person decides halfway through reading a print text that the text is frustrating, the reader can still move freely through the text. This may seem like an absurd statement, but when electronic texts are considered, it becomes relevant. With a video game, the entire textual product doesn’t exist at once. If a person is not able to solve a certain puzzle or defeat a boss (tasks which require skill on the player’s part), all points of the process beyond the present are not available. Just as those who missed certain “documents” in the mansion, students who were not able to progress forward would be lost in the conversation, whereas they could easily skip ahead to a passage in a book.

After playing through Resident Evil, I would have to say I believe it to be a valid medium, but only for certain purposes. Just as film may convey a certain message to a broad audience more effectively than a book, and a book can be used to ensure uniform understanding of a concept (among countless other things), a video game can be a better medium for certain ideas. To take an idea from N. Katherine Hayles, print texts, film, and even video games play their own roles in medial ecology. As mutations in a population evolve in divergent paths, they become more diverse, but are often equally viable. Video games merely represent a new species filling its own evolutionary niche.  I’ve already started noticing more and more video games with strong narratives and deep messages.  But unlike Sven Birkerts, I don’t believe video games to be a species competing with books, but one that happens to inhabit the same ecosystem.

Works Cited

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies. Faber and Faber, Inc., 1994. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Mit Press, 2002. Print.

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~ by timcoon on April 24, 2010.