The use of video game metaphors in contemporary fiction

Not a survey of the question, but I have been reading Junot DíazThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, whose title character is, of course, a geek in every way. What is special is how this matter-of-factly spills into the narrator’s use of video game (and role-playing game)  references for illustration:

When the young Beli meets the man later known as The Gangster, she:

Shrieked: No. Me. Toques. … Then let him have it with a stack of cocktail napkins and almost a hundred plastic olive rapiers, and when those were done dancing on the tile she unleashed on of the great Street Fighter chain attacks of all time.

Later, when Trujillo is assasinated we hear:

Shot at twenty-seven times – what a Dominican Number – and suffering from four hundred hit points of damage, a mortally wounded Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina is said to have taken two steps towards his birthplace, San Cristóbal, for, as we know, all children, whether good or bad, eventually find their way home, but thinking better of it he turned back toward La Capital, to his beloved city, and fell for the last time.

2 thoughts on “The use of video game metaphors in contemporary fiction”

  1. On a somewhat related note – throughout Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, the titular character repeatedly says “You don’t want to play this screen” to suggest someone’s unwillingness to engage in this or that situation.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *