Days of High Adventure: Gaming Fiction

Many critics hate these books. They lump them all together as derivative crap, and they complain about how they steal shelf space from original works of fiction. To be fair, no gaming fiction has a prayer of winning its author the Nobel Prize for Literature. That fact has more to do with the subject matter than the manner in which it's dealt though. The literati often look down on genre fiction of any stripe, no matter what its origins might be, and games wear their genres tattooed on their bulging biceps. Mix in the perceived taint of commercialism that comes with books based on licenses, and even regular science-fiction and fantasy fans turn their nose up at gaming novels.

Many more people buy them though.

Today, gaming-related tie-ins occupy large tracts of the science-fiction and fantasy bestsellers lists. They cover not only roleplaying games but tabletop and computer games of all stripes. Two gaming companies - Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast - have their own fiction departments, while many others license out their brands to some of the top publishers in the world. World of Warcraft, Vampire, StarCraft, Gears of War, Halo, Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Battletech, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and many other games have - or at least had - entire lines devoted to them, not to mention the various series dedicated to several different D&D settings.

Tie-ins have become so pervasive that they have their own section in most bookstores, usually right at the end of the science-fiction and fantasy aisle. There's even an author's organization - the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW) - dedicated to the people who work so hard to bring these games to life in their tales.

Lots of people read gaming tie-ins, and a good number of them don't even bother with the games. The latest batch of Dragonlance novels from Weis and Hickman, for instance, far outsold the most recent round of Dragonlance roleplaying game supplements.

These extra readers - beyond those who play the games - pick up the novels not to explore their favorite games but for ripping good yarns imbued with a particular brand of fun. They don't care about the games, just the stories that arose from them. They don't want a chance to play in the sandbox but rather a guided tour brought to them by a polished and professional effort.

In that vein, I'm going to pull back the curtain on this process. The next time around, I'll talk about how gaming novels make their way to bookshelves, and how this differs from original fiction.

Matt Forbeck has been writing and designing award-winning games professionally for over 20 years. His next novel, Guild Wars 2: Ghosts of Ascalon, hits shelves this summer. Visit Forbeck.com for details about his current projects.