New intern, who’s this?

As you’re working through your favorite books and games over the summer, VALUE is right there with you. Over the next six weeks, I am writing several blogs on literature and gaming. Let me introduce myself first!

Pleasure to meet you! My name is Tijmen de Vries, I am VALUE’s new summer recruit. In my daily life, I work as a policy advisor for a Dutch political party on all things digital and privacy-related, and I am active in local politics. At the same time, I am finishing up my Master’s degree in Literary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Safe to say, a big part of my life revolves around the stories that shape our world and make us who we are.

For me, these stories can be anything from a political speech to a session of The Sims. As someone who grew up in the digital worlds of The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, and many other games, it feels like a no-brainer to say that games can tell important stories. Gaming has become the primary way that more and more people experience culture. And, of course, that culture in turn influences how we behave. During the year-long Minor in Game Studies at Leiden University, through which I came into contact with VALUE, my conviction of this grew even further.

Then why are games not a larger part of literature studies in the Netherlands? These programs are still limited mostly to books, movies, and comics. After talking to my own literature professors about it, I learned that it has little to do with a snobbish ‘games aren’t real art!’ mentality, but is mostly a logistical issue. Humanities curricula make a lot of use of professors’ own expertise, and most of them do not play a lot of games (yet!). And how can you teach games at an academic level if you’re not equipped for it?

That’s where my internship project comes in. To help my professors introduce game analysis to my fellow literature students, I will develop three classes about games for the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Literature at the VU. The classes will discuss narratology and adaptation; the way games tell a story and how a written text can be turned into a game. Much work has been done on these topics, and I hope to make that knowledge accessible to a new audience of literature students.

With these classes, I want to turn readers into players and acquaint them with the basics of game studies. Any story that makes an impact is worthy of study, whether it is bound in leather or installed on your gaming console. I will write three blogs describing the process of making these classes, with the first of them coming Friday next week. I bet there’s much to learn and play along the way, and perhaps the blogs can be of use to other people trying to expand what literature can be!

Are you interested in bringing games into literature as well, and do you have recommendations or wisdom to share? Feel free to reach out!