Is literature doomed? Are movies doomed? In the future, maybe no one will read or watch a movie, but they will play a game instead.
Video games are considered an inferior form of art, but maybe they’re just an emerging form of art.
Humanity really craves entertainment. Here you have an estimate of the market size of different forms of entertainment. Remember, this is the entertainment industry. It doesn’t include things like youtube, facebook, memes, tik tok and so on. It doesn’t include sports, for example, or some other, shadier, recreational markets.
With the aforementioned exceptions, we have basically three forms of entertainment: betting, storytelling and music. We are going to focus on this post in what we have called storytelling, that is: movies, TV shows, books and video games.
The amount of money we spend on these endeavors is roughly half a trillion dollars. Is it much? It depends on what you compare it to: It’s a third part of what we spend on food, for example, and about as much as we spend making mobile phones (though someone could argue that a big part of the use of mobile phones is to deliver this kind of content).
Let’s say that you have to eat every day, but it seems that you have to watch a movie, or read a book, every day too. Does that sound right? It seems that for humanity it’s extremely important to listen to stories.
Why do we have such a need for stories? Why are we so desperate to abandon our lives to embrace, even for a few hours, someone else’s? The reason could be to simply make our lives more tolerable by escaping them for a little. But the need to escape is there, no matter how perfect your life is, so I suspect that the answer is related to our own evolution: if we know what happens to other people, we can be better prepared if (when) something similar happens to us.
We have been telling stories to each other since we became humans, maybe even before. Up until now, there have been two ways to tell stories; we’ll call them tales and theater.
Tales use language as the narrative device. They began probably around the fire many thousands of years ago and they evolved into what nowadays we call books. Language is what we use to convey ideas, so if we use language to tell stories, we can add as many nuances, explanations and arguments as we wish. Therefore, those stories can be deep, subtle and refined. These stories tell you more than what you know, because you can see not only how people act: you can see what they think. You can even see what God -the writer- thinks.
We have called the second way to tell a story theater. Theater uses an imitation of life as the narrative device. Here no one is telling anything; instead, we see it with our own eyes, the same way we see reality. These stories are simpler. The characters are not explained, we don’t know their inner thoughts and, just as in real life, we have to guess their intentions by their actions.
If you ask anyone what’s better, a movie or a book, the majority of them will say a book without much thinking. They’ll say they enjoy reading, they’ll say it’s an experience like no other, much better than a TV show. But they’re lying. The reason they say they like books so much, while movies, well, they’re ok, is because they appear smarter if they say so.
Books require an effort that movies don’t. You have to render the action that is told in words. So, if you want to appear intelligent, you say that you read books and you don’t watch movies (though movies with subtitles are ok, because you are forced to read. Kidding).
And maybe they are right. Books teach you a lot, not only in your ability to parse phrases into life, but with thousands of details that you wouldn’t experience if you hadn’t read them. But it’s not true that people prefer books to movies.
Follow the money. The global movie and TV market is more than three times the book market. And, in average, the time spent watching TV is more than five times the time spent reading.
So, it would appear that, despite the many times we say books are better than movies, movies are more popular. In fact, some people think that reading is seriously endangered.
But, wait, there is a third form of conveying stories, one that is relatively new and, maybe because of that, hugely despised. We’ll call it role-playing games. Here, the narrative device is more ambiguous: it can be words, like in conventional literature, or cinematic sequences, like in cinema, or a mix, or interactions with other people, truly random events, and many others.
Nowadays role-playing games are associated with computers, but that has not always been the case. The role-playing games were created in the 70s, so they are extremely new compared to the other two forms of storytelling. Of course Dungeons & Dragons can’t compare to Shakespeare, but in a few thousands of years maybe we’ll produce some interesting works of art using the role-playing genre as a narrative device.
The use of computers has really set role-playing games on fire. Some of these games look like books. Interactive novels is a sub-genre that is inadvertently rising, so much that one of the engines that produces them, Twine, is the fourth most popular game engine by number of projects. If words go accompanied by some visuals, we have visual novels, a genre that is extremely popular in Japan, so much that about 70% of new games released in Japan are visual novels.
Some of these games look like movies. You can find some games with really interesting cinematographic qualities; if you don’t believe me go and check Until Dawn, for example. And you can find movies with interesting playable content, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
If we exclude betting games (even if what you’re betting is just bragging rights) all games try to tell a story. All games try to put you in someone else’s shoes. This is true for Monopoly, or for Life, but it’s especially true for video games. Angry Birds tells a story, and a dramatic one, and Candy Crush tells a story.
Imagine that you are living someone else’s life, for example, a soldier, a survivor of the zombie apocalypse or an archeologist. Some games try to take you into the experience of the whole life, like Uncharted or Resident Evil, but others focus only on one aspect of the simulated life, like Call of Duty.
Some games try to be a whole experience and some others are like minigames that focus on an aspect of life, but all of them are life simulators. All of them provide, like literature and movies, the experience to live through alien eyes.
These life simulators have come to stay. There’s more money in the video game industry than in Hollywood and, of course, than in books. It’s not bad for a form of art so young. And the projections say soon video games will be the preferred entertainment vehicle above all others.
In the 20th century, theater won over tales. Take this with a pinch of salt. It doesn’t mean that theater is better and it doesn’t mean that books will disappear. It just means that humanity, as a whole, dedicates much more effort on theater than on tales.
The same way theater won over tales, role-playing is poised to win over theater. It will happen sometime soon, probably in the 21st century.
Let’s forget the device and let’s focus on the force driving this hunger for stories. It would seem that humanity is trying, with a lot of effort, to build life beyond life, to build a simulator where we could experience everything, where we can explore brave new worlds and be everyone we can’t be in our primary life.
Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s difficult to deliver complex and subtle characters and motivations in cinema. It’s difficult to provoke hilarious laughs or jumpscares with a book. It’s difficult for a video game to have coherent non-scripted conversations with NPC’s (non-player characters), and impossible to deviate from a pre-established path.
But players agree on one thing: playing a game is different than seeing a movie or reading a book in the sense that, when time has passed, you remember it almost as vividly as if you had been actually there. When you watch a movie, you are the audience; when you play a game, you are the protagonist.
That’s a step forward in the path to building a life simulator.