Playfulness in Literature, and Game Theory 101

About the Topic

Roberto Bolaño suggested that people would continue to write traditional linear stories, but that their era had ended.

What happened in literature after European surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s and the Latin American Boom? How did related changes occur in other media?

From the 1960s to the 1990s, Latin American writers experimented with interactivity and literary self-reference.

From another direction, video games since the 1990s have approached those experiments, and in some respects moved beyond literature’s boundaries.

How can video games become art? Where do ludology and literature intersect, and where do they part ways?

This period also saw Raymond Queneau’s mathematically conceived A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems and Exercises in Style.

Bolaño’s fiction crosses the boundary between reality and invention: prophecies in the novels become true, completing them. In Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar uses chapters, interruptions, and shifts in perspective to make the reader an active participant in creating the story.

Video games have realized these possibilities and taken them further.