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29 April 2012

Computer Games as Literature

Despite the bad press that video (computer) games get, they still are a multimedia text type. Utilising all five components of media (text, still images, audio, animation and video), they combine them along with interactivity in a way rarely seen with other forms of literature. This combination gives it great potential for immersive and effective storytelling.

Considering that, I will treat computer games as fictional literature and engage in a summary kind of literary analysis. To help with this, I will pretend to try to convince a public library to include some examples as part of their collections. Please note that, because of strict licensing requirements, this is often not actually practical, despite a strong supporting case!

Standard form
As part of maintaining its collection, this library solicits suggestions from the public for works that should be added to or removed from it. It does so through a form a member of the public fills out. Thus, my 'literary analysis' will take the form (mind the pun) of a filled form. As the form may have been designed with more traditional text types in mind, some questions will take some interpreting: