What is the interplay, for younger readers (and beyond), between video games and books?

Ask Alice is an online column written by our former Secretary, Dr Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction mini, under ‘A B Endacott’.

I love books. I also love video games. Yet video games and books are often presented as binary opposites: you’re either a gamer or a reader. Yet video games still seem to get a bad rap while reading is generally framed as a virtuous activity.

I find that somewhat amusing given the explosion of romantasy and ‘spice’ in recent years, especially if we were to contrast such novels with games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Disco Elysium. Clair Obscur is about as artistic and high-concept as it gets, delving into grief, loss, the nihlistic struggle against time and the inevitable as well as the very nature of artistic creation. Disco Elysium, as game reviewer Yahtzee Crosshaw said, “is about a man who’s burned out, drank himself into oblivion and must now rebuild his entire identity from scratch.” The Off Campus series is about hockey players at American Universities who have sex; sometimes with their girlfriends.

All of this to say that while yes, there are games like Call of Duty where there is virtually nothing in the realm of plot or substance (although after a frustrating day of work I will say it is deeply satisfying to mindlessly shoot “bad guys”), there are many books about which one could level the same critique. Don’t get me wrong, they have their place. But if we’re thinking about the category of books and games which have something a bit more in the way of story and elegance to them, both are narrative formats that can challenge, delight, and deeply engage their audiences. An interesting question arises, here: What is the interplay, for younger readers (and beyond), between video games and books?

To help answer this, I turned to Liuqing Deng who last year completed a project examining the habitus of misogyny across the Mario Bros games. When I posed this question to her, she sent me back such an eloquent, thoughtful reply that I had to basically sit on it for two weeks while I thought to myself ‘well this is basically a complete column by itself, what can I possibly add here.’ I’ll post it in full with her sections indented for clarity:

Whatever their differences in form, games and books share something hard to ignore: Both are vehicles for an author’s attempt to make an audience feel something. They deliver that experience differently – but are they really as far apart as we assume?

Picture this: Ethan Winters, an ordinary man with no special training, walks into a house where something has clearly gone very wrong, because his partner might be somewhere inside. You don’t need to have played Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Re7) to feel the weight of that, anyone can imagine it. But if you have played it, you’ll remember something different: exactly what it felt like to be the one holding the controller.

You aren’t watching someone make an impossible choice to protect the person they love, instead you are the one making it. The emotional weight isn’t handed to you; it’s forged by your own actions and decisions. Even in video games like Resident Evil series, which gives the player almost no say over the plot, you have to walk into that house, you have to face whatever comes next, it still leaves you a choice on a more fundamental level: you can quit out of fear, or you can press on, carrying on as the lone hero pushing forward for her sake. And that is something literature struggles to replicate.

But literature can do something games can’t: It can tell you what someone is actually thinking. Ethan Winters is designed with almost no inner world to speak of – no backstory, no internal monologue, no persuasive account of why he refuses to stop. All you get is his determined silhouette and the occasional frustrated curse hurled at whatever’s trying to kill him. This makes his inner life radically open, but it also means every player walks away with a slightly different Ethan in their head.

Of course, plenty of video games do let the player choose freely. Even so, a character’s inner monologue remains something games rarely build in. The choices a player makes tend to rest on their own judgment and their reading of the story, rather than on any real consideration of the character’s personality, desires, or inner world. Take the ending of Clair Obscur: the player has to take a side, deciding, according to their own understanding of the plot, whether to fight as Maelle or as Verso. Choose Maelle and win the duel, for instance, and she opens up about what she really wanted: simply to live out this lifetime together, free of pain. But in the end, that decision is the player’s own. What the game foregrounds here is the player’s agency , and games that offer multiple endings often make the cost of each choice visible right after the player has made it, so they understand exactly what their choice meant.

This agency has a heavier side to it. In games, you’ll often find it organised around the choice of who to protect. In Re7, Ethan has to choose between Mia and Zoe. The player can only save one; the other is given up for good. I chose Mia. But I knew Zoe had been helping me the whole way. Even if she doesn’t die in the end, in that moment my choice was to abandon her, to watch her walk toward death. This is a weight unique to games: you aren’t watching a character make a painful decision – you are the one making it. And the most unsettling part is this: precisely because I chose freely, the guilt is that much harder to shake off. I can’t tell myself, “The game made me do it.” It was me, after weighing it all, who let Zoe go with my own hands. This contrasts with books. A reader, too, can enter a character’s mind, yet they only ever walk alongside the character: Even when the character does something you can’t condone, you remain a witness, with no responsibility to bear. In a game, though, what you take on is the culpability for the character’s actions. Whether or not you agree with them, it’s you who presses the button, you who carries out the act. A reader has access to interiority but bears no blame; a player bears the blame but is often denied interiority. It’s precisely for this reason that, while a game makes you live through the act and shoulder its weight, a book can supply the very thing the game withholds- understanding of another’s inner life.

In both games and literature, the protected figure, a partner, a child, even a friend, tends to serve a particular narrative function, lending meaning to the protector’s quest, and indeed to their very existence. In the stories we find less satisfying, this position collapses into pure instrumentality, as it does when Princess Peach appears as an NPC in Mario’s RPGs: she becomes a one-directional narrative catalyst, fought over and rescued for no reason that needs explaining, less a living character than a trophy standing in for power.

Still, protective narratives also produce better stories, ones that gives the protected figure a real life. The role of the protected tends to fall to characters drawn as fragile or vulnerable. Their gender is beside the point; what matters is how they are shaped. The protected need not stay frozen in the moment of waiting to be saved. They can have an arc of their own, growing from someone sheltered into a character of real capability and weight, one who, in the end, turns to protect the people they love. Protector and protected are not two sealed-off positions, but roles the same person may come to occupy in turn, or even at once.

Set Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road alongside The Last of Us, and you find that what makes stories like these truly moving is rarely who gets protected, it’s whether the protected figure is given enough room to become far more than someone who is protected: To hold judgments of their own, fears of their own, choices of their own, even people of their own they want to keep safe. In The Road, the boy is, physically, a child who needs his father’s protection, yet morally he plays a crucial role, the one who keeps reminding his father not to lose his humanity. What Ellie gives Joel is not just a reason to keep living; she returns to him a hunger for life itself, something he had long since buried. And the giving runs both ways: In The Last of Us: Part I’s peaceful zoo scene, Ellie rediscovers her sense of wonder, her own appetite for the world. The protected figure is no longer a supporting character waiting passively on the protagonist, but the other half of a genuinely reciprocal bond, full and irreplaceable within the narrative. And by The Last of Us Part II, Ellie herself becomes the protagonist: The girl once protected steps fully into the position of actor and protector, choosing for herself, carrying the weight herself, bearing the consequences herself.

This recognition that positions can shift matters all the more for young readers. In games, we’re more often placed in the protector’s role: We’re the ones holding the controller, the ones making the character’s choices, the ones charging in, shielding, shouldering the consequences. Yet the moment they step away from the screen, teenagers, within the family, at school, inside the larger structures of society, are almost always the ones being protected, arranged for, decided for. Games let them feel, however briefly, the weight of the other end and, vitally, the sense of responsibility for the in-game actions they undertake.

And this is exactly what’s worth having young readers notice: in this story, which position do I identify with? Am I inhabiting the protector, or the protected? And is that the same position I’m usually assigned in real life, in books, in games? Games and books each illuminate a different side of this question. Books can give you more of the inner life, more of the detail as a novel does next to a film, where prose seeps into the places the camera can’t reach, letting you read what a character is actually thinking behind a choice, what they fear, what they can’t bear to lose. Games give you something else: that sense of immersion, of being there, the felt reality of a decision made by your own hand. Put the two together, and a reader’s understanding of these relationships grows richer, no longer just “this story moved me,” but the beginning of asking why it moved me in that particular way…

What Liuqing expertly articulates is that the mediums complement one another by exploring particular ideas or experiences in ways unique to the medium.

I’ll always advocate for the singularity of the written word. No two people’s experience of reading the same text will ever be the same, and the exact impression a reader has when reading can never be fully communicated because the act of reading and of inhabiting the text takes place in the realm of the reader’s imagination. The words on the page are fixed, yet the act of reading is a fundamentally interpretive one that adds to them. I could go on endlessly about this.

However, we shouldn’t take away from what videogames can offer. The immersion within the world is often more complete – which is especially fantastic for people who may struggle to engage with narrative in more traditional formats. A report by the national Literacy Trust, a UK-based independent charity working with schools and communities, has among its findings that we shouldn’t underestimate “the importance of technology as a tool for teaching literacy skills.” The same report notes “2 in 5 (39.5%) video game players are motivated to read to find out more about video games and more than a third (35.3%) believe playing video games helps them to be a better reader.” One other interesting finding from this report is that young people often talk with one another about videogames, making games a point of social connection. If we’re looking at a way to engage reluctant readers, engaging them about gaming interests is a clear way in.

Moreover, a video game simulates an experience – and the agency that accompanies it – far more effectively than a book ever could.

Neil Druckmann, the director of The Last of Us videogames noted of the ending in Part 1, “something interesting that happens when you’re not in alignment with the character and the game makes you do something that you don’t want to do — you wrestle with those decisions in a different way than you would be able to in a passive medium.”

There are valuable opportunities in each medium to tell stories and to provide entry points to discuss story with young people, and encourage them to explore stories in different formats.

To end on Liuqing’s comment:

For libraries and educators, this is a natural extension of the “if you liked X film, try Y book” model, except the starting point is a game, and the recommendation is built around emotional and thematic experience rather than genre alone. A teenager who just finished RE7 isn’t necessarily looking for horror. She might be looking for something that takes seriously how far she’d go for someone, what that costs her, and what role she’s playing in that story.