Why books remain the superior storytelling medium

I recently came to realise that I haven’t written anything about novels on this blog, which is odd since I write them myself. All of my articles have been about movies and video games, and while I enjoy both of those very much, I feel very strongly that the written word remains the most powerful and important storytelling medium to this day. I’m even more convinced of this ever since I’ve started to read much more than I used to.

Now, before I make my case, I want to get something out of the way first: I consider listening to audiobooks to be reading. I switch around between paper and audio and while there are differences in the experience, they both come down to the same essential activity, which is taking in storytelling in its purest form. Whether you are seeing the words or hearing them, you are receiving them and your entire experience of the story is simply based on those words. As a reader/listener, the story plays out in your mind instead of on a screen. That is the essential difference between books and visual media, in my opinion.

 

Before I started writing this article, I scoured the internet, looking for different viewpoints on this matter but I came out pretty disappointed. Almost every article I could find was about the practical and mental benefits of one medium over the other, and that’s not what interests me. The world is already far too obsessed with practicality and usefulness. Art and entertainment are precisely about what exist apart of and beyond those mundane concerns. I don’t want to make the case that reading is superior because it trains your imagination, increases your vocabulary, expands your memory or even because it teaches you empathy. I think all of those things are true and they add a lot of merit to the act of reading, but ultimately I want to express that reading novels simply gives me more joy than movies and video games do.

I love movies. I’ve enjoyed them my whole life. They have inspired me, excited me, scared me and made me laugh. Movies have meant a lot to me in difficult times. But there are things movies cannot offer, things that only books are able to give. It doesn’t surprise me that most people prefer the original books over most movie adaptations, although I do believe there are exceptions.

I also love video games. I have enjoyed games from the days of pixelated point-and-click adventures like Space Quest and Monkey Island all the way up to Fallout 4 and I can’t count the many wonderful memories these games have given me. But despite all the praise heaped upon certain story-driven games, I maintain that video games are just not that good at storytelling, even though I only play games with stories, I love them and I wouldn’t look twice at a game without a story. Even in board games, I always need a theme or a story framework. Abstract games don’t interest me in the slightest.

With books it’s different. Books don’t offer the sensory experience that movies and games bring to the table, but they have a deeper, hard to define quality that ultimately makes them feel more worthwhile, more real and meaningful. If I watched four movies in a row, I might start feeling that I’m wasting my time. If I played a video game from sunrise to sunset (which has happened in the past, long before I was married and had kids, obviously), I would know I was wasting my time, and if I binge-watched a Netflix show all day long, I would be disgusted with myself. But if I had spent an entire day reading, I would probably feel tired, but also invigorated, inspired and generally good about myself.

Might this have something to do with the mental benefits of the written word? The brain-training, vocabulary-expanding, empathy-improving qualities? Perhaps on a subconscious level that is the case, but I am convinced the experience of reading itself is what leaves us with a better feeling than what watching screens could give. I think it’s because there is something fundamentally human, something very essential about the experience of pure storytelling that always gets lost a bit when it becomes mixed in with other stimuli. Sure, visual media can offer us experiences that are more immediately exhilarating than what a book could offer. The charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor Fields comes to mind. That scene is much more powerful in the film version of The Lord of the Rings than it could possibly be in the book, and it’s a great example of why films are wonderful and have their rightful place. However, if you would just watch the movies and skip the book, you would miss out on the experience of being told about hobbits directly by the man who invented them. You would miss out on seeing the Shire, Rohan, Minas Tirith and Mordor in your mind’s eye, being surprised by what your own imagination can conjure up at the instigation of Tolkien’s gorgeous prose. You would miss out on the incredible depth and breadth of Middle-earth. And you would miss out on the simple joy of a slower, more deliberate and careful form of entertainment in this crazy, hasty world.

There is great joy to be found in being away from screens, if you ask me. There’s something about a screen that is inherently draining. This is not some subjective feeling: screens emit blue light, which taxes our brains and keeps us awake at night. People who look at screens before they go to bed have a harder time going to sleep, don’t sleep as well and consequently end up being more tired, whereas looking at a dull page in warm light actually helps you to relax… But I should stop myself; here I am with the practical arguments again! This article is not about that. It’s about the irreplaceable joy of reading.

When you read a book, you interact directly with the author’s vision. That’s another special quality that books have. Games and movies are created by hundreds of people. True, they have directors at the helm, but they are ultimately a very collaborative effort — which is great. But when you read a book, you get the pure vision of a single author — sometimes two, but not a massive team. As a result, you develop more of a relationship with the artist behind the work in question when you consume it. There is something more personal about the experience.

When it comes to fantasy, one of the things I love most about the genre is lore. The history, the cultures, the geography… Everything that makes a fantasy world a real, living place. Games can be good at conveying this, but movies tend to have a harder time of it. Books do it very well, though, and in my experience, I feel like I internalise the lore better when I learn it from a novel than when it comes from item descriptions or NPC interactions in a game.

Granted, walking around Skyrim gives you a sense of the place that you couldn’t get from reading about it. Every medium has its own strengths. I didn’t write this article to scoff at movies and games, but to praise the written word.

Before you go, I do want to elaborate a bit on why I feel games are less good at storytelling. I think this is needed because lately I’ve seen a lot of comments from people who actually believe that they’re better at it than books. Frankly, it shocks me that anyone could say such a thing, and I had never thought it would be necessary to defend something so obvious, but here follows the essential reason why books are better at storytelling than video games.

The core of a novel is the story. The story is what a book is. This is not true for video games. At their core, video games are games. They offer challenges and rewards. It just so happens that those challenges and rewards become much more interesting when they are tied to a story. The difficulty is that story can impact gameplay in a negative way and vice versa, and there is no real way to completely avoid this. Too much time spent on story can turn a game into a movie with interactive choices, which is fine from time to time, but it feels extremely restricting as a player. Too much gameplay interrupts the story and messes with immersion. These problems are inherent to the medium and cannot be avoided. On top of that, the very concept of interactive stories itself has a huge impact on the notion of storytelling. It provides many possible outcomes, but more is not always better. I can’t imagine the moral points from Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes having any impact if the audience could make the protagonists’ decisions for them. It could even be argued that the very act of giving players a choice in the story stops it from being a story at all and turns it into something else. And then I haven’t even mentioned the inherently clunky of nature video game cutscenes, even in graphically strong cases such as The Witcher or Mass Effect series. These scenes can be beautiful, but they always look fake and very digital. Movements are stiff and facial expressions are very limited even in the best cases. They certainly don’t hold a candle to movies in that regard. That might change over time, but game characters will always be digital. They can never replace the experience of watching something that was actually shot with a camera.

For me, the best story experience I ever got from a video game was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I was completely engrossed in the story of that game. However, if I want to experience it again, I don’t necessarily feel like going through all the gameplay once more. I’m happy that there are novels about the Old Republic era, including some very good ones like Darth Bane. With those, I feel like the adventure always continues.

Again, I still love video games and I think they have their place, but if I had to make the choice for one or the other, I would pick books in a heartbeat. And there are so many of them! My to-read list is incredibly long and it just gets longer the more books I read. To be honest, if playing the newest iteration of Dragon Age makes me miss out on reading Dragonlance or the Gotrek & Felix series, then Dragon Age can go hang as far as I’m concerned. But that’s just me.