Why Charles Dickens would have made Great Expectations a videogame if he were writing today

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 23:21:16 +1100

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://theconversation.com/why-charles-dickens-would-have-made-great-expectations-a-videogame-if-he-were-writing-today-249199>

"Despite dying over 100 years before the release of Pong, the novelist
Charles Dickens has connections to a number of videogames. He appears as a
character in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015); is the subject of a mobile
app walking-tour, Charles Dickens London: The Writer’s Journey (2022); and
his works are brought to virtual life in the forthcoming The Mysteries of
Gad’s Hill Place
.

There’s also plenty in Dickens’ work to suggest that were he alive today, he
may be writing his own videogames as well as appearing in them.

Great Expectations (1861) in particular demonstrates Dickens’ ludic
credentials. A sense of progression is common in the Bildungsroman or
“progress” novel, but Pip seems to embody ideas of “levelling-up” more
reminiscent of a playable character accumulating XP (experience points) than a
typical protagonist."

Share and enjoy,
               *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

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