Friends, I cannot do Gamelit

Why I'd prefer less to see it 'done well' and more not to see it at all.

The traditional ‘Epic Fantasy’ novel is dying.

First, a definition, one of many genre definitions that will follow, especially because Epic Fantasy as a label often seems murky. By ‘Epic’ I mean literally that. An often long, often sweeping fantasy novel that tours a complex world and often displays its politics, often featuring journeys to defeat evil, often involving multiple points of view. Have I used the word ‘often’ enough, yet? There’s still a lot of murkiness, but I hope I’m still capturing something tangible enough to classify. How about this: An epic fantasy novel will be a fantasy book that does not just feature a map in its inner front cover, it is a novel where you will need that map.

Yes. Those books. Lord of the Rings and Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones. I’m here to tell you: they’re falling out.

A lot of readers do not realize it. But a lot of readers are behind the times. The books they read might be 5-10 years old. And even if they’re reading recent books, they might not be reading between the lines and seeing what’s happening behind the scenes. There are a lot of reasons for it. Epic fantasy is, true to its name, long and complex. And publishers and agents are now asking for shorter, simpler books. Take it from someone who is now querying: short is in. And it will be increasingly so in the coming years.

But even if the book isn’t shorter, more focused fiction is in. Less sweeping, more singular. The biggest boom in the fantasy genre, right now, is romantasy. In fact, a lot of readers might have thought ‘Ah-ha! You’re wrong! I know about Fourth Wing! I know about ACOTAR!’ It’s true that these novels are often long, but their length is not being used to convey a complex or immersive world, in the way that Robert Jordan did. It’s being used for smut.

The biggest issue with epic fantasy, linked to why romantasy is taking off, can be summarized in one word: Saturation. And not just saturation. Saturation with long series that can take years to read. (I keep mentioning Wheel of Time. Did you know that it’s over four million words long?) Romantasy has one advantage: It offers something both old and new. The plot contrivances of romance (and smut) but now in a fantasy world. That’s enough, and it speaks to a new audience who wants something different that the old books saturating the genre won’t provide.

But unlike most people who mention Romantasy, I’m not here to diss it. I actually really like at least one romantasy novel. But I am here to diss something. Because there is a trend that to me, is far more odious and intolerable. Between anime, light novels, and self-published fiction, there is another new subgenre taking the world by storm.

Part 1: What is Gamelit?

Garbage.

Okay, sorry, I’ll restrain myself. Let me start over.

Gamelit is, in a nutshell: any story that uses video game mechanics explicitly. Not necessarily a story that takes place within a video game (though sometimes it is) but always a story that knowingly uses the mechanics, tropes, or worldbuilding concepts that gamers would be familiar with, from video game universes.

Gamelit is a genre category rarely mentioned on its own because it often overlaps with other things. For example: if you’ve ever heard the term Isekai (A genre of ‘Portal Fantasy’ about someone ending up in another world) the piece of media being described is probably Gamelit. Particularly because no one ever seems to describe Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz as Isekai. But everyone uses the term for the the light novel and anime Rising of the Shield Hero. Gamelit also typically overlaps with ‘Progression’ or ‘Cultivation’ fantasy, which focuses on a character starting out weak, and then becoming more powerful over time. These stories are not always Gamelit. But when the mechanics of how the character becomes more powerful resemble video game mechanics, they by definition are.

The gamelit shot heard round the world occurred fairly recently, when the masterful Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End lost an anime of the year award to one of the most popular gamelit anime series: Solo Leveling.

Before that, gamelit had been popular and incredibly profitable, but at least in the west: highly underground. In East Asia, it’s had a massive audience for a while, and as culture diffuses across time zones, it’s spread to English-Speaking countries.

And I hate it.

But let me build my case as to why. I feel like this has a very big chance of being the next big thing in fantasy. Certain series have gotten a surprising amount of mainstream appeal. And books with some of the tropes could be pretty successful here, even long before those tropes were codified.

So to be more objective as I tear down this entire genre, let’s talk about three things: Why I like epic fantasy novels about heroes who rise up from nothing, why I like the role-playing games that were inspired by those novels, and how gamelit fails in being an imitation of an imitation.

Part Two: The Beauty of Heroic Fantasy

Everyone knows the name ‘Frodo.’

We know and remember it, primarily, because of how many times the word got said aloud in Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings film trilogy. We remember it because of Elijah Woods’ relatable and deeply troubled (perhaps even haunted?) performance. We remember it because of the thrill of seeing a small man from a culture based on English busybody villagers endure all the torment of a ring from a dark Lord, and take it to a volcano to destroy it.

We also remember Sam, and his heroic actions in protecting and saving Frodo. We remember how all the main Hobbit characters of Tolkien’s world rose to the occasion as necessary. We remember how, through the overcoming of challenges and the acquisition of a few important magical items, they became heroes in their own right, to rival the likes of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Gandalf, who all seem to have started life as badasses.

This becomes clear in one of Return of the King’s most iconic sequences, and one rarely adapted: The Scouring of the Shire.

I am about to set the scene for those who have never read the actual Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I am also taking the opportunity to warn of spoilers. (Which is fair because this is pretty much the last thing that happens.)

To truncate it as much as possible, in order to get straight to my point: Near the very end of the book, our Hobbits Merry, Pippin, Sam, and Frodo come home to The Shire, to find that it has been taken over by a group of human ‘ruffians’ led by a mysterious character called Sharkey. The ruffians are ‘scouring’ the Shire, and the heroic Hobbits find that they have to lead all the other common Hobbits in rebellion. In the process, they find out that Sharkey is actually the traitorous wizard Saruman. (Yes, movie-viewers, that’s where he went.)

Let’s be clear about what makes this chapter so awesome: The battle is not close.

After fighting in several epic battles for the fate of the world alongside other epic heroes, after killing a Ring-Wraith who cannot be killed and obliterating Sauron himself, after standing up to a dark spider goddess and killing so, so many orcs, these hobbits are put up against a group of common human bandits led by a Wizard who has largely lost his power. What did you think would happen?

Whatever you thought, what actually happens makes perfect sense: It is nothing but ass-kicking. A complete trouncing and, in the end, a deeply somber and pathetic death for Saruman, whose end becomes less cathartic and more tragic.

In this, we see the roots of so much of fantasy’s love of power-progression. We see the inspiration for Rand Al-Thor’s beginnings as a farmboy and (slight Wheel-of-Time spoilers) eventual attainment of borderline Godhood. We see why Guts from Kentaro Miura’s Berserk starts as a weak and abused child before he grows up to become a walking engine of destruction. We see, to use video game terms for the first time: what happens when Level 20 characters decide that they are going to complete a quest that only needs them to be Level 5.

Remember that the Tabletop RPG, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), which all fantasy role-playing games are essentially based on, was deeply inspired by Lord of the Rings. It had to have been. In 1974, when it first came out, many classic fantasy novels (including Wheel of Time, which I referenced above) hadn’t been released yet. It’s impossible to deny that the awesome and, at times, deeply funny anticlimax of the Scouring of The Shire had an influence on the idea of characters leveling up. Of previously insurmountable challenges becoming trivial to characters who had overcome far worse.

But I’d refrain from calling fantasy novels the parents of D&D. Because if they are, the relationship between D&D and fantasy novels quickly becomes weird and incestuous.

TSR started producing D&D tie-in novels as early as the 80s. (Ironically, none of those are gamelit as we currently understand it.) But seeds were already sprouting before that. One of the earliest Dungeon Masters was Raymond Feist, who would start worldbuilding in his games of D&D for what would eventually become his sprawling Riftwar saga. Having read the first Riftwar novel, it reads exactly like the fictionization of a D&D campaign. It’s about characters who start out as weak apprentices, then choose an adventuring profession, and master it over time.

But here’s the thing, and here’s where I want to put a pin: The characters in Riftwar, and in all other epic fantasy series, get better at an actual skill. They learn to fight better, they learn to cast magic spells better. They learn to lead armies or nations, when they didn’t know how to do it before.

“Of course,” a lot of people are thinking. “Didn’t you just say that they get better? What are you implying, that a character could improve without actually learning anything?”

Apparently yes. Put a pin in it. We will get there.

But for the purpose of watching these heroes become stronger, it is invigorating to see a nobody rise to the occasion. To watch a farmboy become a king, or a chosen one, or a chosen one who is a king. We love to see it. It became cliche after a while, but only because it was so effective.

And so, of course, we recreated it for video games.

Part Three: RPGs

As Lord of the Rings is the father of fantasy, D&D is largely the father of all Role-Playing games, both tabletop and digital. Which means it’s worth asking, for those who have never played: How does D&D actually work?

Base summary: Almost everyone at the table is pretending to be one singular fictional character, except for a lone ‘Dungeon Master’ who plays literally everyone else, both allies and enemies. Assuming you’re one of the ‘players,’ your character has certain skills and abilities that allow them to overcome challenges in combat, exploration, and long ‘role-playing’ sections where you talk to each other and the DM, pretending to be your character. Theater kids like turning it into an improv game, and it has become its own medium of storytelling in podcasts like Critical Role or Dimension 20, but it doesn’t have to be about storytelling at all. It can literally just be about tactically overcoming challenges by using your characters’ combined abilities.

So bear with me, especially to those of you who are experienced with D&D. If your character is a strong manly-man, and he needs to win an arm wrestling competition, do you actually arm wrestle your Dungeon Master?

Of course not! You roll! You roll a dice, and you add your character’s strength score to it. As you level up, that strength score might increase, or skills associated with it might increase. Your character will become a more competent arm-wrestler. It will be simulated through numbers, but here is what those numbers mean: the person you are playing is learning. They are growing. They are overcoming challenges and they are therefore up for tougher challenges in the future. The gauge that fills up to determine when your manly-man levels up will literally be called: “Experience Points.”

This, of course, translates over to role-playing video games.

And here, the abstraction gets a lot thicker. When Final Fantasy and other games of its ilk blazed ahead to create a video game RPG genre, they emphasized grinding by killing the same monsters over and over again. Repetitive tasks that would eventually lead to level-ups, so that you could defeat powerful boss monsters. If you squint, you can still see the actual story: maybe you, the player, are not improving at an actual skill. But the characters in your adventuring party are getting better at fighting, right? They’re learning. You just don’t see it because you’re instead engaging with the numerical mechanics of the game, crunching numbers to make sure that your monk does as much damage with his bare fists as he possibly can. It becomes very easy to forget that a sword that does 17 damage is a sharper, rarer, or more magical sword than a sword that does 12 damage.

But to forget this, to see each sword as nothing more than a bigger or smaller number, would be a massive disservice to the flavor and atmosphere of the game. After all, the game is still trying to insert you into an epic fantasy adventure in which the world is more than just a series of vapid, meaningless calculations. Hit points should represent how good a character is at surviving damage, and the effectiveness of magical spells should represent a knowledge and mastery of arcane lore. The game is still, in its own way, trying to evoke the rush of the Scouring of the Shire when you go back to its lower-level, easier areas. The idea that your character started weak, but then became more capable, more powerful, a better, stronger version of himself.

In that same vein, certain worldbuilding concepts often found in video game RPGs should be excused or overlooked. For example: the average RPG takes place in a largely civilized world, with trade and interstate diplomacy and war between kingdoms, but in which characters can be attacked by supernaturally powerful monsters the moment after they step out of any town! How could anyone maintain a society built upon plains filled with roving, fire-breathing hellhounds? Don’t worry about it, it’s a game! In addition, the most powerful weapons in the universe are not reserved for the richest King’s personal armory, but are found either in a weapon shop that anyone could walk into near the end of the game, or buried deep in dungeons which, for some reason, have never been excavated. Some games even present the player with an organization, an ‘Adventurer’s Guild’ that has them pick and choose ‘quests’ to go on, as if a seemingly infinite number of life-or-death struggles for fame and fortune are available for anyone interested.

These things happen because they evoke the rare and special quests in the Lord of the Rings or other fantasy novels in which a forgotten or magical treasure might be found in an unexplored ruin filled with mysterious monsters. But in the fantasy universes of novels, such events are rare both because it lends them more mystique, and because the world makes a lot more sense if they are. In video games, fights against intimidating monsters and adventures to find rare magical loot happen with absurd frequency because a game cannot do something only once. Video games, by design, have something called a ‘gameplay loop.’ A sequence of expectations and actions that the player will familiarize themselves with as they play. In this case, the core gameplay loop of the average RPG is: “Talk to someone who will give you a quest→explore a strange and interesting place filled with monsters, acquiring valuable loot→talk to the person who gave you the quest initially, and get an equally valuable reward from them.→sell all the loot you don’t need in town and/or buy things from shops→find another quest.” The quests become rote, repetitive, and ultimately too mundane to work as good storytelling. But that is the price you pay for having a gameplay loop. A concept that only the video game medium requires and benefits from, and which really shouldn’t show up in novels, film, or other storytelling mediums.

Otherwise, it’d just render all the most magical parts of fantasy as mundane to the point of near-meaninglessness. Right?

Right?

Part Four: Class Consciousness

We no longer believe in the American Dream. Some cultures never did.

This is not a detour.

Once, there was a delusion, a near-religious conceptualization, that people who would ascend in society would deserve it. That the rich would become rich out of skill, intelligence, or hard work. As we look into the past, we can find that this was only ever true for a segment of the population, and many of them started in a good place. As we look into the future, income inequality is rising. Whether or not your parents went to college is the greatest predictor of whether you will. And once people do go to college, cheating using ChatGPT is increasingly widespread. The knowledge that is gained from college is seen as a means to an end. A way to get a degree that will allow you get a better job that you (given the forementioned cheating) are clearly not intrinsically motivated to do a good job at.

I understand that the dream is a lie. I understand that we’ve never actually had it, and that we are moving further away from it rather than closer.

But a culture that does not believe in something like it, I worry, is a culture that does not actually believe in the virtues of merit and mastery. I worry that this simple, vitally important virtue, of actually being organically good at something, is much easier to lose than we realize. All we need is to lose enough belief in it, or to lose enough patience for the hard work of gaining skill or knowledge, to decide that we just want things without needing to actually grow or change as people. Once we make the decision that this is who we want to be, to embrace mediocrity over meritocracy seems second-nature. Because fuck it, right? Who gives a shit if you’re good at your job, or if you’re good at anything? Even the things that you claim to be passionate about. Skill is subjective. Talent and knowledge don’t matter. Fuck everything, right?

This is not a detour.

Part 5: Back to Gamelit

You are reading a more recent fantasy novel that calls itself a ‘LitRPG.’ Within this fantasy novel, the main character hits a giant boar with a sword. It is the sixtieth boar that he has hit that day, according to the exposition. He hasn’t actually learned anything by killing these boars, but what he has gained, explained explicitly in the story as a real thing, are experience points. With zero irony from a writer who likely would not be capable of conjuring irony if he tried, the character in the novel engages in a deeply repetitive gameplay loop, gains the required experience points, and levels up.

This is gamelit.

Remember how I said it would be a massive disservice to RPG video games to see a better sword as just 17 damage, as opposed to 12 damage? To ignore the reverence that a better-crafted or more magical sword deserves? Well here we are, we’ve done it. In gamelit, a character finds a sword, and within the fiction of the universe it does five more damage.

Let’s really, really hone in on this: In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien showed us how the Hobbits became better fighters and more heroic. In Wheel of Time, Rand Al-Thor and all the people around him, many of whom also rise to greatness, learn actual things about themselves and new techniques that are both natural and supernatural.

When role-playing games, digital or otherwise, try to recreate this, they use abstraction, due to the limitations of their medium. They can put you in the shoes of a hero like this, but they can’t make you actually learn how to use a sword. They need to represent that instead. And so they use experience points, strength scores, character skills and abilities that you gain as you level up, and swords that have higher or lower damage. It’s all a giant bow to the necessity of the medium.

But in gamelit, this thing that was once necessity has become the point. We could see a novel character actually learn how to use a sword! We could see him train, and gain skills as an actual human being would! But gamelit fans do not want that. They want the abstraction, the disconnection from actual skill and actual merit. They want the experience points.

After all, wouldn’t it be easier?

Imagine if you actually lived in a world in which, if you did something over and over again, you became better at it through some supernatural force. Imagine if that constant repetition was all you needed. A world in which practicing the piano does not involve questioning your assumptions and learning how to play differently than you did before. You just touch the keys, and watch a bar fill up. A world in which all skill, all improvement at anything is oversimplified, uniform, and easy.

A world in which ‘experience’ is purely an abstract number attached to you. In which you do not need to learn.

And now it’s time to pull the curtain back again: I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. With every fiber of my being do I ever revile it. Never have I thought I would find a genre of fiction so incredibly, absurdly detestable as this.

But here’s the kicker, and here’s why I’m writing this: It’s not just something I can avoid. It is a clear and present danger to the fantasy genre.

Remember above, when I said that Solo Leveling beat Frieren at the Crunchyroll anime awards? Well, between the two, it is very clear which one has more gamelit tendencies. Solo Leveling is about a mediocre loser who becomes the only person in the universe with the ability to ‘Level Up,’ and who then becomes an absolute badass while having zero meaningful character development and learning nothing.

But Frieren is also gamelit.

Frieren fans will likely come at me for this, but let me be clear: Frieren is great. Let’s not take that and use it to deny reality. Remember that not all gamelit is progression fantasy. ‘Gamelit’ literally just means fantasy and scifi in a video game world.

In the pensive and deeply emotionally resonant world of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, ‘monsters’ are a class of beings separate from animals, which people can run into the moment they step into the wilderness. When they are killed, they are incinerated into ash. This happens in video games to save the processing power that might be spent on rendering a thousand dead enemy dead bodies. Dungeons are delved into, and it’s implied that they are frequent. Loot is acquired. Characters have classes. One recurring character is an ‘Elf Monk,’ which literally sounds like a character’s race/class breakdown in D&D. There is a running joke that Frieren, searching for rare spellbooks, will often stick her head into ‘Mimics,’ a famous D&D monster that looks like a treasure chest in order to trick players.

But why, in Frieren’s world, are there so many rare and valuable magical books inside of treasure chests inside of dungeons that no one has scoured yet? Why wouldn’t kingdoms dedicate all of their time and energy to finding all of these rare books, to emptying dungeons of them in a matter of decades? (And Frieren has a 1000+ year timeline.) In the context of a game it’s simple: This is the gameplay loop, man. There need to be dungeons with rare and useful items in them! Chill out!

But in the context of the anime and manga Frieren’s civilized world, in which mages are an established class of people who actively want to hunt down spell books, there is no reason to forego logic to give the ‘player’ a fun and traditional RPG experience. It doesn’t add any meaningful ‘fun’ factor. It’s just an empty and uncreative callback to RPGs that the audience might be familiar with. It’s Frieren choosing to be gamelit for no reason at all.

Which is to say: Frieren, in many ways a masterpiece, could have been timeless. Often compared to classic Miyazaki fantasy films like Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke, it could have been just as classic by bucking trends and forging its own trail. But instead, it’s chosen to be of its time. It has chosen to, while not adhering to all the trends of gamelit, at least be gamelit-adjacent, and much to its detriment.

And this is why I push back. When the tropes of gamelit make even good stories worse, then I have to step in, point at them, and say: “No. Hell no.”

I want worlds that make sense, as living breathing places. Not RPG settings. I want characters who get good at fighting, not characters who put points into their ‘fight’ skill and watch as they kill a previously undefeatable monster with zero effort on their part. I don’t ask for everything to be Lord of the Rings, and I understand that in so many ways traditional epic fantasy is dying, but I do ask for stories in which people become better by actually improving themselves, meaningfully, and not through BS numbers and mechanics removed from the things that they were originally designed to represent.

But seeing Frieren do gamelit with subtlety, and manage to still tell a good story in spite of it, answers a very important question for me: Do I have any interest in seeing gamelit done well? In seeing a gamelit world in which there are consequences for actions? In which characters are not just wish-fulfillment fantasies, and there is thought and care put into the video game elements that the author is using, and why they make sense in the context of the world? Don’t I, a person who really loves and enjoys RPG video games, want to see a world inspired by them, if the author is actually capable of telling a story?

No, because what I respect above all else is what these mechanics are meant to represent. The experiences that they are trying to recreate. I don’t want to see them divorced from that. I want to see characters gain experience, not experience points. I want to see worlds that still have magic and mystery, precisely because magic is not codified into numbers.

And so, with this demonstrable example, I can speak confidently: Rather than seeing it executed well, I’d rather not see it at all.