A few days ago Katy and I were talk­ing, and I started gush­ing about how amaz­ing Star­craft is… like usual. Know­ing she’s an Eng­lish major, I put it in lit­er­ary terms in how old the game is: “Star­craft is like Dick­ens era.”

This got me think­ing about the pos­si­ble expan­sion of this idea. Is it pos­si­ble to jux­ta­pose gam­ing mile­stones to lit­er­ary achieve­ments? What a silly ques­tion, of course it’s pos­si­ble. What fol­lows is my own time­line. I know I missed some, focused too much on oth­ers, and clas­si­fied still more totally incor­rectly. Feel free to chime in with your own input, and remem­ber I have a very thick skin for criticism.

Pong and Moses: The begin­ning. What do they have in com­mon: The start of reli­gions. Moses would start a reli­gion that would later go on vast cru­sades, killing count­less oth­ers, and allow­ing bil­lions to not only go to church, but to believe in a higher power. Pong started a craze that would allow oth­ers to recre­ate the cru­sades in bloody detail, and for thou­sands of nerds to attend vast LAN par­ties play­ing their gospel “Counter Strike.” The higher power? Nintendo.

Pac­man and Shake­speare: These play­ers were both for show. Pac­man brought the pub­lic to arcades, and Will brought the unwashed masses to see his come­dies and tragedies. We still enjoy both today, and really… who doesn’t see the par­al­lels between “Much Ado About Noth­ing” and “Pacman.”

Duck­hunt and Kafka: Ahh, the clas­sic game of duck­hunt. It’s very Kafka-esc to be able to aim a ray gun at ducks. And these ducks are trapped in a box. They’re trapped, and you’re god. Fur­ther­more, that dog? You can’t even shoot him.

Final Fan­tasy and Tol­stoy: Leon Tol­stoy is known for his extremely long and intri­cate novel War and Peace. Final Fan­tasy is known for its in-depth plot and length of game. Unfor­tu­nately, nobody has fin­ished either. So we say they’re great “mas­ter­pieces” of their respec­tive media, and really have no idea how either ends. Because we were too busy read­ing Dick­ens and play­ing Duck­hunt to care.

Star­craft and Dick­ens: Dick­ens sup­ported the idea of elim­i­nat­ing “sur­plus pop­u­la­tion” and was gen­er­ally a wordy and extremely descrip­tive sort of fel­low. Not many Eng­lish majors like him. Star­craft con­tains the Zer­gling and Space Marine, both of which are encour­aged to be expend­able in com­bat, and have an aver­age bat­tle­field life expectancy of 8 sec­onds. If old Char­lie were here today, he’d totally dig Star­craft. Not so much the Pro­toss though. Unless the Pro­toss were killing Zer­glings and Marines.

Melville and Halo: Moby Dick is hailed as a great book. And for what? It’s great if you like long bor­ing essays about whal­ing in the 1850’s, and totally dig vio­lence for no real rea­son. Halo is about the same. We all remem­ber how hyped up it is… but let’s face it. The library level, like the game, is pretty bor­ing. Every­one knows who Mas­ter Chief is, and every­one knows the line “Call me Ish­mael.” But the funny thing is, you don’t know who either of those peo­ple really are.

Dick and WoW: Phillip K Dick, one of the greats in cyber­punk, wrote about futures where tech­nol­ogy con­trolled us, com­put­ers spin­ning out of con­trol, and vir­tual real­ity became real­ity. I won­der how he would feel if today peo­ple will­ingly pay $10/month to sit on their com­puter, run around killing wild pigs, and then hav­ing an online “party” where the atten­dees can dance and expe­ri­ence being intox­i­cated in stun­ning vir­tual real­ity. We are slaves to Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment the machine.

Geisel and Mario: Theodor Seuss Geisel (or Dr. Seuss), wrote books renowned and loved the world over. With sim­ple plots, amus­ing and some­what trance­like graph­ics, and his ever­last­ing pop­u­lar­ity… Geisel is the lit­er­ary world ver­sion of Mario. This Ital­ian plumber is known for his goofy graph­ics, for­ever loved char­ac­ters, and have spawned count­less games. Who can for­get Cat-In-The-Hat? Nobody, that’s who. Even Mario knows who this mys­tery cat is.

Part­ing Thought: Did I miss some­thing? Dis­agree with what I said? Have some sug­ges­tions? I wel­come com­ments… this is a work in progress.