&NOW 2018

Recent years have seen the rise of novels, such as Ready, Player, One and The Hike, that pattern themselves on or around games. What motivates this literary turn, and what does a game model do for and/or to the traditional literary text? Where, also, do these game narratives fit into a larger and longer tradition of fictions that conceive of and play their own games, formal and linguistic and otherwise (some examples being modern and postmodern avant-garde and experimental texts).