The Video Game Novel: StoryWorld Narratives, Novelization, and the Contemporary Novel-Network

Abstract

This essay presents a version of the relationship between novels and video games in the contemporary moment, suggesting the importance of understanding the video game and the novel as sitting in a shared network of narrative storyworlds, focusing specifically on the examples of Halo and BioShock as franchises making use of the novel in efforts to utilize the specific affordances of the form. The chapter first presents a version of video game narrative and pursues the question of the relative positions of novel and video game in the contemporary novel-network, arguing for the possibility of understanding video games as importantly “novelistic” in the sense Mikhail Bakhtin posits, as possessing and often requiring some of the qualities usually understood to be the novel’s domain, qualities that both enable narratives to be picked up in franchise novels and make those narratives themselves ever closer to the novel’s ideal.