Literary Game

Media artifact that contains both ludic and literary elements
Calvin Olsen 2025-03-14

Explication

Astrid Ensslin defines literary games as “a hybrid subgroup of creative media that has both readerly and playerly characteristics” (1). Said another way, a literary game is a media artifact that contains elements of literature and gameplay. Ensslin’s definition builds on the work of Montfort and Moulthrop, who wrote that the power of literary games may derive from the play between their literary aspects and their nature as games. Think of Mad Libs or Exquisite Corpse, whose parameters are largely textual and whose end results are influenced by the decisions made by those playing. These are literary games at their most basic.

Literary games existed long before electronic literature, but e-lit’s propagation and facilitation of the ludic in text-based media expanded both the definition and the scope of literary games by introducing, including, and/or incubating hypertext, nonlinear narrative, interactive/generative texts, and the like. Because of each genre’s reliance on digital technologies, electronic literature and literary games blur the boundaries between “reader” and “player”—a situation that has become all but ubiquitous with the rise of video games, which are now studied as both media and literary objects. Indeed, the history of video games maps onto the history of e-lit in fascinating ways: “like other genres—including, importantly, novels and films—they began more as curiosities than as artistic media” (Coltrain and Ramsay, 43), though that does not necessarily mean all video games are literary games. Traditional video games often focus one gameplay and mechanics at the expense of narrative, while literary games are centered on verbal and textual components and interactivity.

As an example of how one might decide whether a media artifact falls within the definition of “literary game,” let us consider Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel Patchwork Girl. The literary aspects of Patchwork Girl are easy to find: it has long been designated a novel, and its connections to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are multitudinous to say the least. Anyone familiar with Patchwork Girl knows Jackson’s work is well-situated as a ludic hypertext in addition to being a literary one. There is no one way to read/play Patchwork Girl, and any number of readings can be stitched together as the reader interacts with the writing. And Jackson performs a particularly adept suturing of “reader” and “player” early in the graveyard section found first on Patchwork Girl’s title page. Upon clicking out of the {headstone} lexia, the reader is transported to the {out} lexia, which immediately changes perspective and reads “Burdened with body parts, your fingernails packed with mud and chips of bone, you slink out of the graveyard. A kind of resurrection has taken place.” This is a fantastic (in both senses of the word) point of view in/from which to write—it could be anyone: the reader, Jackson, Shelley, Patchwork Girl, or multiple someones else. Regardless of who the author is at this point, the reader has been carried into the story in an almost movie-like (or cutscene-esque) way that includes an establishing shot (the graveyard), a closeup (the headstone), and finally a from-the-grave first-person point of view wherein the resurrected creature/reader becomes both Patchwork Girl and a reader-creature hybrid capable of writing its own story. By so doing, Jackson and Patchwork Girl offer us the reader/player enmeshment that can be triangulated with the literary and ludic elements of the text to classify Patchwork Girl as a literary game. It may not be a perfect fit in all places, but its reliance on interactive storytelling and the reader/player’s decision aligns well with Ensslin’s categorization.

Whatever form it takes, a literary game does not exist in a vacuum. This is because, as Clara Fernández-Vara wrote, “When we analyze games, we study meaning within the game (meaningful play) and around it (cultural significance). The text is not limited to the work itself, but also to where the text is interpreted and by whom” (6). Labeling a media artifact a “literary game” is largely an exercise in symbolism, but the possibilities inherent in the coupling of the ludic and the literary fit well within the porous confines of electronic literature.

See Also

• Electronic Literature (e-lit) - Variety of born-digital genres and formats that engage the capabilities of computing, often investigating the materiality of our everyday interactions with digital media
• Hypertext - Type of document comprised of interrelated textual nodes that are connected via associative links, facilitating non-linear traversal and reading
• Interactive Fiction - Variety of text-based games that allows readers to participate in a story, either by typing commands or making choices that affect the narrative's direction and outcome

Works Referenced

Coltrain, James, and Stephen Ramsay. “Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship?” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein. 2019, pp. 36-45.

Ensslin, Astrid. Literary gaming. MIT Press, 2023.

Fernández-Vara, Clara. Introduction to game analysis. Routledge, 2019.

Montfort, Nick, and Stuart Moulthrop. “Face It, Tiger, You Just Hit the Jackpot: Reading and Playing Cadre’s Varicella”. Fineart Forum vol. 17, no. 8, 2003, n.p.

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