Video Games as Metaphor in Contemporary Literary Culture

This project critiques the deployment of video games as metaphor in the contemporary novel to understand how novelists today use gaming forms and concepts to represent the contemporary world. The research builds a critical vocabulary capable of understanding the way novelists use video games as a new technological medium, as a way of experiencing art and as a consumer community. It will analyse the relationship between novels and video games, investigating to what extent the novel succeeds when representing a new, successful and controversial technology and explore what literary resources the novel uses when it deploys the video game metaphorically.