Ever since common language was first founded thousands of years ago within ancient Sumer, libraries upon libraries of written works have been conceived by their authors. This books either provide detailed events to inform, detailed events to make you wonder, or detailed worlds to make you exist in a plane other than your own. A massive bulk of them have the sole purpose of immersing you in their universe.

Do you consider these items literature?

What makes something literature? Is any written thing literature? Yes? For. Sing. Dog.

Was that literature? Why? Why not?

We are on the cusp of an age where we have the capacity to do the unimaginable with technology. We have companies, corporations spanning across the globe dedicated to creating what has become commonly known as video-games. This is a word that we must forget. We instantly associate this word with violence and guns and profanity, we don’t see the potential that this technology holds. It can become more than movies, more than shooters. It can become interactive entertainment that exists to not just tell a story, but to throw you into it. Think of it as Virtual Reality with a true pulse.

Imagine a living, breathing world, choices abound, a story you yourself truly experience.

Only in two “games” have I truly felt immersed and emotionally attached to.

Upon starting Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you are presented with a message from the developers. The message tells you to turn off the lights, and put on earphones, making the events on the screen the only thing you see and hear. As you progress through the story you discover that you are being hunted by horrid monsters, golems of flesh that you cannot fight. These encounters are few and far between, making you always trying to guess when you will encounter another. During your exploration of Brennenburg castle, set in the mid-1800’s, your character’s sanity begins to decrease, you hear and see things that aren’t real, making it difficult to distinguish reality and imagination. Playing as Daniel, born in Mayfair, London, you are finding clues to your cloudy past, and you also discover that there is something infinitely more powerful than the invincible flesh golems pursuing you.

Your story is not thrust upon you either, you must draw your own conclusions as you are presented with more and more evidence and memories of your past. The truth you find is horrid and brilliant, well worth the ten hour journey into darkness.

Yet another outstanding experience is found in the point-and-click Walking Dead by Telltale Games. This story evolves and changes with the choices you make. You play the role of Lee Everett, and are in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Despite this, there are few violent encounters, in fact, there are more with humans than the zombies themselves. You take care of an eight-year-old girl named Clementine, whom you stumble upon after escaping a near-fatal car accident. With every encounter you choose what to say and do, and this decides who helps, hinders, and kills you. You end up spending so much time with the characters that you start to actually form an emotional bond with them, especially Clementine, whom you actually avoid displeasing, not because it affects the outcome of the situation, but because you end up wanting to.

If we can somehow combine the brilliant elements of these two “games,” the immersion, and emotional bonding, we can create something incredibly different and many times as grand. But how?

There is a new piece of hardware, named the Oculus Rift. It is quite similar to a virtual reality set, in that instead of a screen, you put the Oculus over your eyes as if sunglasses. In addition, there is another useful piece of hardware called the Kinect, which reads your movements and duplicates them within the game. Using these two devices together can create an entire, completely interactive world that only you see and experience as no one else but an inhabitant.

Interactive Entertainment. Yes, that a more appropriate word.

This is not a call for the end of books, it is simply a new medium of literature, which has not had a visual and immersive field for its entire existence.

Sadly, so many will claim such an idea a mockery of literature. Guilt by word association.

You watch a movie, you play a videogame, you read books, you experience literature. That is the true definition of literature, something you experience that does not truly exist in your world, born of another mind.

By 2025, this will be realized, a new era of literature is upon us.

Prepare yourselves.