Video Games Are the New Literature — Nobody Told the Critics

There is a peculiar cognitive dissonance at the center of modern cultural criticism. The same publications that celebrate a ten-episode prestige drama about suburban ennui will dismiss a sixty-hour narrative game with the kind of condescension that went out of fashion when people stopped sneering at cinema.

Video games are the dominant storytelling medium of the twenty-first century. More people play games than watch movies. The industry generates more revenue than film and music combined. And yet the cultural apparatus — the reviews pages, the literary supplements, the awards bodies — continues to treat games as an awkward guest at a dinner party they were not invited to.

I want to push back on this.

When *Disco Elysium* arrived in 2019, it was unlike anything the medium had produced: a game built entirely on dialogue, choices, and the interior monologue of a detective dismantling himself in real time. It was literary in the truest sense — not literary as a marketing term, but literary as in it said something true about failure, ideology, and the desperate human need to construct narratives about ourselves.

Most critics who reviewed it did so with the caveat that they were not "gamers." As if the form required tribal membership to evaluate.

Compare this to how we talk about cinema. Nobody prefaces a review of *Parasite* with a disclaimer about not being a film person. The medium is taken seriously on its own terms. Its grammar — cuts, close-ups, sound design — is understood as vocabulary, not gimmick.

Games have grammar too. The choice architecture in *80 Days* tells a story about colonialism through the paths you choose and avoid. The checkpoint-less design of *Celeste* mirrors the exhausting, nonlinear nature of anxiety recovery. These are not accidents. They are authorial decisions embedded in systems, and reading them requires exactly the kind of critical literacy we apply to other art forms.

The problem is historical. Games grew up alongside the internet, which grew up being sneered at by people who had built careers ignoring it. The first generation of games writers were fans writing for fans — enthusiastic, knowledgeable, but operating outside the apparatus of cultural criticism. By the time the apparatus noticed, it had already decided that what games critics do is not real criticism.

This is changing, slowly. *The Atlantic* runs serious essays on games. The *Guardian* has expanded its coverage. *Polygon* has published criticism that belongs in any conversation about cultural writing. But the mainstream cultural consensus still treats a BAFTA Games Award as a curiosity rather than a major artistic achievement.

Meanwhile, the games themselves keep getting better. *Kentucky Route Zero* is one of the finest explorations of American economic despair produced this decade, in any medium. *Return of the Obra Dinn* uses mechanical constraint — you are given only what the evidence shows — to create something close to the feeling of reading a great detective novel. *Elden Ring* is a work of world-building mythology that Tolkien would have appreciated.

The critics who are not paying attention are missing the conversation of our time.

There is a generation growing up for whom games are simply the water they swim in — the primary medium through which they encounter narrative, character, consequence, and world. When we fail to develop a serious critical vocabulary for games, we fail that generation. We leave them without the tools to understand what the medium is doing to them and for them.

I am not arguing that every game is art or that the medium is without its problems. Games have a long history of reducing women to objects, of glorifying violence for its own sake, of prioritizing spectacle over meaning. These are real failures and they deserve serious critical attention.

But the way to engage those failures is not to treat the medium as inherently trivial. It is to hold it to the standards we apply to everything else we take seriously.

The critics need to catch up. The games are not waiting for them.