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Some novelists are becoming video game writers – and vice-versa

While the novel remains a high-status cultural form, video game writing is still seen as a throwaway art – despite some of the biggest names in fiction being involved

Mallory Marlowe is a romance writer – her debut Love and Other Conspiracies made the USA Bestseller list last year – and her day job writing for video games is part of what makes that possible. Joe Dunthorne (Submarine, The Adulterants) has written novels, poetry and most recently a memoir ( Children of Radium), and a few years ago he did a huge amount of work on a big-budget video game that got cancelled without ever being publicly announced. Clearly, the emerging generation of young writers grew up as native video game players, so they’re willing and able to switch between the two cultural forms without finding it weird, and without seeing one as necessarily “better” than the other.

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