Video games are today's literature
Evidence from the theology of Fear and Hunger
I have failed on my goal of publishing every day, but I’m going to gamely resume attempts to publish. Now every other day, and less slop than before.
I
Video games are art, but that’s obvious. What I think is not obvious is how much interesting art and philosophy today is being expressed through video games, even art and philosophy that is not tailor-made for the medium of video games. It would be easy to argue for the artistic value of video games using a literary epic like Disco Elysium, or a beautiful narrative reinforced by game mechanics like Celeste. But I think it would be underselling the point to focus on those games.
Most games (rightfully) distinguish themselves by maximizing the impact of player interaction. Celeste is a story of a girl who climbs a mountain to heal her relationship with herself, but it only feels impactful because the platforming of Celeste feels like actually climbing a mountain. Disco Elysium has a sprawling story, but it’s the choose-your-own-adventure style unique to video games that makes it feel meaningful. Focusing on examples like that would imply that video games only succeed by boxing themselves into a niche – telling stories that depend on player interaction and player choices for their impact.
I don’t think this is true. I think that many video games today are telling stories that would historically have been told through literature. And I think that video games are an ascendant medium for telling those stories, taking ground that has normally been held by literature.
To back up this provocative claim, I want to tell you about the theology of Fear & Hunger – the most interesting theology I’ve encountered in any medium, and something that would have been expressed as literature a century ago.
II
Fear & Hunger is a survival-horror role-playing game in which the player navigates a dungeon while fighting enemies and the steady drain of their resources. It is an indie game made by one developer, Miro Haverinen, who toiled away in obscurity until the game went viral on YouTube last year. Like most people, I discovered the game through YouTube. Like most people, I have not actually played it myself (it is Windows-only), which strips the game of all its medium-specific appeal. To me, Fear & Hunger may as well be a TV show or a graphic novel. Of course, the gameplay still plays a role in whether it is entertaining to watch, but the story is what comes to the forefront in how I experience Fear & Hunger.
The action takes place in a medieval kingdom, in a world rotted through by magic. In the beginning, there were the old gods. The old gods are primal deities that represent forces of nature, like creation and destruction. They created humans, but they don’t act on the world. Only their traces remain on this plane of existence.
But these traces fill the air with power, and humans crave that power. Over centuries, many humans have journeyed to the seat of the old gods’ power, the ancient city of Mahab’re, to claim the power of the old gods for themselves. Some of these seekers have succeeded, becoming “new gods”. But the new gods were little more than powerful toddlers. They became immortal, and they had immense physical and magical abilities. But that did not give them the ability to fulfill their ambition, of shaping a new civilization. They became more like bloodthirsty warlords, gathering some meager cultists, but never really seeping into the fabric of civilization. And they were inevitably targeted by even more seekers who strived to defeat them and become new gods themselves, repeating the cycle. In the default ending of Fear & Hunger, the player defeats all the new gods and ascends to new godhood themselves.
The problem is that in the world of Fear & Hunger, divinity is not something you can claim by force of will. That is a trap that humans fall into, time and time again, in their attempts to ascend. They endure trials and tribulations, they ascend the throne, and they are presented with something that looks like godhood. And without fail, they claim it. They have the same ambition as the new gods they slew to claim the throne, and the same ambition as the seekers who will inevitably come to slay them. Of course it didn’t work for them… it never does… but maybe it will work for us. But this is a broken ambition from broken humans. An ape with the power of a god is still an ape, still subject to its basest instincts.1
The most fascinating way this argument is made is in the true ending of Fear & Hunger. One of the startling things the player finds in the dungeon is... a girl. A human child, locked in a cage, with no caretaker. She is the daughter of a human and a new god, and she was born in the dungeon. She has never heard language before, and has no ability to speak. It is possible she has never eaten food before, never seen another human being before. If not for her divine parentage, she would certainly be dead. In the true ending, the player takes the girl to the deepest level of the dungeon, to the rotting corpse of an old god. The girl’s soul reacts to that corpse and the power emanating from it, and she transforms into a god. She doesn’t become a mere new god like her mother, but a true ascended being on the level of the old gods. She becomes the God of Fear and Hunger.
The girl had a dark innocence about her. She was born in the dungeon, and never saw the sunlight even once. The only life she knew was relentless terror and starvation. She was not tarnished by even the slightest hope that life could be different, even the slightest desire for anything.
This innocence is why her soul was able to ascend to the level of the old gods, to the level where she could influence the course of civilization, while the new gods could only squabble over a few cultists like powerful toddlers with their toys. She did not have the acquisitiveness that trapped all the seekers who became new gods. Fear & Hunger argues that divinity is fundamentally innocent. It arises from souls that simply are their nature, rather than being twisted by human complexities. The girl was not a human, but rather a being of pure suffering.
But the darkness of her innocence also set the tone for the kind of deity she would become, and the kind of civilization that she would create. The God of Fear and Hunger created a civilization in which humans were fodder for the gears of progress. A civilization in which suffering was the currency that would pay the way forward. In the sequel game, the God of Fear and Hunger is confirmed to be the steward of a society that looks quite a lot like the modern world.
Viewed in this light, Fear & Hunger is a theological narrative about the industrial revolution. The girl’s ascension into the God of Fear and Hunger marks the first time that humans have actually claimed the mantle of divinity from the old gods, and industrialization is the vehicle for that claim. The idea that industrial civilization emerged from the dreams of an Omelas-esque tortured child is a mindfuck that I return to over and over. Even though I do not agree with that theology – I venture that industrial civilization has been a good thing – it has a magnetism that has continued to fascinate me for years after I stopped watching playthroughs of the game. As far as I can tell, it is a genuinely original idea with no direct precursors. It has some influence from Nietzsche, some influence from Gnosticism, but that’s nothing compared to the standard fare in fantasy literature, where the theology is often a thin veneer over the Greek pantheon.
In the real world, Fear & Hunger is the story of one Finnish guy, toiling away in obscurity, who produced a game that is not only fantastic for its genre2 but also has a startlingly original mythology that could have been expressed in Gothic literature or a philosophical treatise a few centuries ago. In a nutshell, that is why I’m enthusiastic about video games as a cultural medium that can express the concepts that have historically been expressed through literature.
III
For most of history, if you wanted to express an idea, you had to write it down. So most creatives throughout history have been writers. (Some ideas were compressible into the form of a painting or a sculpture, but most were not.) About a hundred years ago, visual media expanded to include film and television, and some of the creative energy of civilization went towards those media instead. After all, visual media had much richer information than text, so it could convey things like body language, aesthetics, tension much more vividly.
But film and television are gated behind capital costs. Making a film is by and large too expensive and impractical for an individual. So individual creatives have continued to work through the medium of writing.
I think that three forces have conspired to cause the creative energy of individuals to shift away from writing and towards video games.
The current generation of creatives is filled with people who grew up playing video games. Someone who started their creative career in 2015 and grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s would have been exposed to the arrival of consoles in the household, the widespread access to PC games, the handheld games that captivated children. They would have grown intuitively familiar with the medium as a venue for play, for emotional investment. So it would be no wonder if they grew up and decided to channel their creative energy into making a video game, when 30 years before they would have decided to channel that into writing fiction. The developer of Fear & Hunger, Miro Haverinen, is an example of this. He initially created the concept of Fear & Hunger for a school assignment and turned it into a thesis. So he could have naturally turned it into a story that he would have published in a magazine or on the internet. But he was simply more inclined to make it a game, both because Fear & Hunger was inspired by games, and because he was more accustomed to games as a medium.
The cost of making games as an individual has fallen dramatically. Non-gamers may not know this, but gamers do: we are living in the Golden Age of indie games. Balatro, a deckbuilding game from a solo developer, was nominated for Game of the Year in 2024. Undertale, a role-playing game from another solo developer in 2015, became a global cultural phenomenon. Hollow Knight: Silksong, developed by only two creators, was the most anticipated game for seven years before its release this year. One of the reasons for this Golden Age is that video games are easier to make than ever before. Game-making engines are easier to learn to use and more powerful than before, the online communities around game-making are supportive, and the encouragement people receive when they post demos and works in progress are a big driver of continued effort. Haverinen described this effect on Fear & Hunger; when he was younger he had messed around with RPG Maker, the game engine he eventually used for Fear & Hunger. When he returned to make the demo for Fear & Hunger as part of his thesis, he showed the demo to a few friends who were hooked while playing it. That pushed him to make it into a full game. And it pushed him to develop the sequel, Fear & Hunger: Termina, through years when Fear & Hunger was relatively obscure, because it had a small fanbase that was dedicated enough to keep him motivated.
Fiction-writing has declined precipitously as a vocation. This is a phenomenon that has been bemoaned ad nauseam, so I won’t get into it. But it makes sense that young creatives with a vision that could have been expressed through fiction are much less likely to ever want to try and make writing into their vocation. Of course, game development is also a precarious source of income, but at least the monetization is more direct. People are willing to spend a couple of dollars on a first-time game that looks mildly interesting, and if even a few hundred people do that, a first-time game can be more remunerative than the toils of trying to sell your fiction.
All three of these forces have conspired to make video games the natural home for modern visionary storytelling.
IV
Substack is the platform for writers, and if I want to find any community through this blog, it is the community of writers. So it is certainly an interesting decision to burn my bridges by crowning video games as the ascendant medium over literature. Of course, mine is not a new argument, and you can find a dozen video essays on YouTube arguing the same thing. But that’s because YouTube is the platform for gamers, and Substack is not.
So let me offer my apologies and caveats to a literary audience. Writing is a millennia-old medium and will not be dethroned by a flash-in-the-pan medium like video games. I view this only as a statement about the past ten years of culture, and maybe the next ten years of culture. And I don’t think it is really true that the prevalence of highbrow video games will ever be higher than the prevalence of highbrow literature – this is just my attempt to document a relative trend.
But today, if you are a literary consumer looking for raw creative ambition, you are more likely to find it on Steam than in Barnes & Noble. I encourage you to search for it, and give video games their due as a cultural medium.