Larger Than Life

By Lev Grossman

The first time Marc Laidlaw played Doom it made him sick. It was not the violence; it was motion sickness--the game was so intense and immersive it actually messed with his inner ear. He immediately switched to the gentle, atmospheric adventure game Myst and developed another ailment: he became addicted. "I pretty much didn't get up from the computer for two days," he remembers.

Laidlaw was a published novelist, not a computer programmer, but he saw in those games new ways to tell stories. So in 1997 he joined an upstart game company in Seattle called Valve; Laidlaw had heard that he and the founder, Gabe Newell, might be thinking along the same lines. "We were going to take the idea of storytelling over to a straightforward first-person shooter [game] and see how far we could get with that," says Laidlaw. They got pretty far. The game they created was called Half-Life, and right from the beginning people could see it was a different sort of animal. The first few minutes had no action at all, just dialogue and scene setting, building suspense and establishing a world. That was a radical idea for a video game, but what followed was even more radical: Half-Life had actual characters whom you cared about and a plot with genuine dramatic tension. When it was released in 1998, Half-Life shocked the industry, sold 8 million copies and won 50 "game of the year" awards. Half-Life 2, released last fall, has already sold millions of copies.

"They're different beasts, and they both do different things," Laidlaw says about books and video games. "But I have no question that they can be equally powerful. There are emotional responses a game will create that a book just simply cannot. Very rarely when I'm reading a book do I physically, literally gasp--even though that's an emotional response that writers would love to create."

When you're writing a novel, you have to live in the shadow of giants like Dickens and Proust and Roth. But video games are only 30 years old, and they don't have their Dickens yet. Or do they? "Creating a game," Laidlaw says, "there's always this feeling that you're going into unknown territory." --By Lev Grossman