Video Games in The Haunted Wood

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The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading, by Sam Leith, comes highly recommended.

"One of the best surveys of children's literature I've read," blurbs Philip Pullman. "It takes a particular sort of sensibility to look at children's literature with all the informed knowledge of a lifetime's reading of 'proper' books, and neither patronise (terribly good for a children's book) nor solemnly over-praise. Sam Leith hits the right spot again and again. The Haunted Wood is a marvel, and I hope it becomes a standard text for anyone interested in literature of any sort."

In the run up to the release, Leith appeared on an episode of Backlisted, a wonderful podcast which I first found thanks to their episode with Pullman on The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of those tomes, like Gargantua and Pantagruel, anchoring my own personal backlisted pile.

The main reason I bought Leith's book new and read it right away is that its final chapter is about Pullman's work. As far as that goes, I'll have more to say in another place. But what brings me out of my extended spring break to write about it here is the way video games surface in the text as a point of comparison and contrast with children's books.

The first reference to video games comes roughly midway through the book in a strangely interpolated chapter, "The Idiot Box," which does not appear in the table of contents. We are in the transition from the era of Philippa Pearce, CS Lewis, and Tove Jansson (about all of whom Pullman has quite a bit to opine) to that cohort of writers, immediately preceding Pullman himself in publication, that includes Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Madeleine L'Engle.

Here Leith takes up Roald Dahl's critique of television, memorably sung by the Oompa Loompas against Mike Teavee in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in order to set the scene for "the early sixties": "Dahl's message...was not just that the then infant technology would make children stupid: it was that it existed in a zero-sum war against children's literature" (369).

Leith goes on: "The relationship between television and children's fiction is a complicated one--and not as simply antagonistic as Dahl suggests. What is undoubtedly the case is that the narrative worlds of children were changing, and that television, as the dominant cultural medium, had a huge part in that... But it hasn't shown any sign of wiping out children's literature, any more than videogames (the moral panic of our own day) have seen off television." The only problem with this framing is that "our own day" is already too dated. The moral panics of "our" youth, such as Dungeons and Dragons and video games, have been largely eclipsed by smartphones, social media, and AI.

Citing Jacqueline Wilson's memoir to support his contention that "Television came to be freighted with the same anxieties as, two centuries before, fairy stories had been," along with early studies of the effects of television on children in England from Hilde T Himmelweit, Leith comes around to "a crucial point. Children's stories have always existed, where they get the chance, in more than one medium, and spilled between them. Playground games draw on things that children have read about in books--remember the Bastables playing The Jungle Book on the lawn?--and children's stories in turn draw on or feature playground games and children's books. Children's stories themselves depict children consuming children's stories and using children's stories to make more children's stories. In this respect, these properties have something of the quality I've remarked on in myth: a blurriness, an availability to be reinvented, and even an orality, in the way that the spoken performances of the playground remix the mythos each time. The boundaries of children's writing, of children's storytelling, are as indistinct as the boundaries of the haunted wood itself" (373).

This is all brilliant. As everywhere in a wide-ranging, mellifluously written book such as this, there leap out opportunities to widen and enrich the field still more: reference to Neil Postman's far more trenchant critique of television, rather than the strawman Dahl, would have made the same "crucial point" even stronger; acknowledging the ways in which fears about video games have flowed into still more addictive technologies would have kept Leith's work, at least momentarily, abreast of the present time rather than snug in "our own" childhood at the end of the past century.

Again: "In our own age there are probably more videogames that have become TV series than there are videogames made of TV series... From the top-down point of view, this is no more than the free market doing what it does... but from the bottom-up, child's-eye perspective, it's completely natural: stories spill over. When you're playing with an action figure, you're writing a story" (374). A world of interpretive, ideological messiness hinges on that "but" distinguishing the "market" from the "natural," but all we would add, really, is that when you're playing a video game, particularly from the early era of the medium which Leith seems to be thinking about, your imagination is engaged in filling out the story in much the same way. He would probably agree; it's implied in the thick bundling of media connections here evoked.

So it is strange that when we come to the end of the book, Leith writes in his Epilogue, "as an unashamed lover of videogames," that "even in the sort-of-storytelling ones, the story and world-building are secondary to the gameplay... A videogame will always struggle to do what fiction does, which is to allow yourself to envision what it might be like to be somebody else... If you and I play through a videogame, we will have experienced the same world on screen" (552-3). All of which is preposterous, especially given the story-embracing account of play that Leith provided around the midpoint of the book.

Perhaps Leith is carried away by the fear of "more than just figuratively addictive" games like Fortnite, which he singles out and sums up with the footnote: "If you don't know what this is, count yourself lucky--or ask an eleven-year-old. It's a hectic videogame in which everyone's trying to shoot everyone else." In an attempt to acknowledge and reckon with more recent statistics which paint a much bleaker picture of the reading habits of young people, Leith produces his own Oompa-Loompa-shaped strawman doing a DLC dance. He conflates online games like Fortnite with videogames writ large, setting them in opposition to fiction, as if that, too, were a monolith.

As a history of children's books, The Haunted Wood is wonderful. As cultural commentary on the interplay between books and video games over the more recent history during which both have figured in our imaginative and social lives, it demands considerable filling out. To be fair, Leith does not even pretend to provide such a commentary, with the exception of these two widely separated passages. But as a lover of video games and reader of books, I will say I remain perplexed and disappointed by the turn from that one passage to the other.

If I ever get around to writing something comparable for the games that have shaped my experience of the world, alongside books by the likes of Tolkien and Pullman, I'll be sure to credit The Haunted Wood for encouraging me by its example.