The relationship between books and video games goes back a very long time. The Bioshock games were inspired by the writing of Ayn Rand and if we go back even further, novelist Zelda Fitzgerald served as the inspiration for Princess Zelda from ”The Legend Of Zelda” games.Books have inspired countless games and video games and video games has done the same for books. What games influenced books and how did those games influence those books? Those are the questions I seek to answer today.
There are many video games that influenced the creation of novels. An example of a book being influenced by video games is Epic by Connor Kotick. The story revolves around a boy who is trying to get revenge on the people who killed his parents. The world of Epic is a fantasy world similar to games like World of Warcraft and Everquest, where trolls, dwarves, elves, treasure and adventure are a daily occurrence. However, unlike Everquest and World of Warcraft, whatever your social status in the game world is, is your social status in real life. This means if you are poor in the game, you are poor in real life and if you are rich in the game, you are rich in real life. The only way to go up the the social ladder is by grinding and doing quests. The reason why I think video games influenced this particular book a lot is because the structure and story of a lot of video games is a very flexible structure that could be adapted in different mediums. The story of most mainstream video games involves a lone protagonist who discovers he/she is the chosen one who must save the world from the great evil and that is exactly what you do for the rest of the game. This format could be easily adapted to books granted, with less control over the actions of the main character but more detail in describing the world and its inhabitants.
One example of this is the Assassin’s Creed games. We get to explore different places at different time period as Assassins, in this sense we get to know how these places look like. If that was a book however, we would also know how it feels to be in these places. We would know how it would feel like jumping on the rooftops of the river city that is Venice in the Assassin’s Creed books. We would know how it was like roaming around and fighting criminals in Industrial era London as assassins. Finally, we would know how the character would feel in these scenarios. We would know how the characters would feel jumping off rooftops like ninjas and we would know how they feel once they start killing of targets they were hired to take out. Another example of this are the Five Nights at Freddy’s books. The game and the books are required reading and playing to understand the whole story the franchise wants to tell. Video games makes great book stories because of how flexible the story format of video games is.
In conclusion Video Games are not a difficult medium to adapt to book. Books would give more detail to the world and make the world feel more alive than the game ever did. That is the influence of Video Games on books.