The Guardian published its countdown of the 100 best novels of all time this Saturday, assembled from votes by authors, critics, and academics worldwide. The list — released in installments this week, with the top twenty unveiled this morning — is a landmark exercise in literary canon-making. It is also, almost entirely, a list built on print. Interactive fiction, digital narrative, and video game writing are absent from the methodology, the voter pool, and the results. That absence is not an oversight. It is a decision, and it tells you something.
The stakes here are not bruised feelings in a Discord server. The question of who gets to define “serious” storytelling is a question about cultural power, class, and whose labor counts. Game narrative designers — many of them trained in literature, some of them published novelists — have spent decades producing work of genuine formal ambition. The continued refusal of institutions like The Guardian’s books desk to even frame interactive narrative as a comparable category is not a neutral editorial call. It is a gatekeeping act, and it has material consequences for how the industry is funded, regulated, and respected.
Who votes, and who is left off the ballot
The Guardian’s methodology, as described in its own coverage this week, solicited votes from authors, critics, and academics. That is a voter pool drawn almost entirely from print culture’s institutional infrastructure — literary agents, MFA programs, broadsheet review sections, prize committees. It is a self-reinforcing loop: the people who get to define the canon are the people the existing canon already legitimized. Game writers, narrative designers, and interactive fiction authors — even those with substantial critical reputations — were not, by any public account of the process, part of that electorate.
This is not a small community being excluded. The game industry’s annual revenue has for years dwarfed the global book publishing market, a gap that has only widened. Pew Research has documented that gaming reaches a broader demographic cross-section of American adults than novel-reading does. The storytelling happening inside games — from the branching political tragedy of narrative RPGs to the formally radical work being done in independent interactive fiction — is being consumed by tens of millions of people who will never see it acknowledged by a list like this one.
The people who get to define the canon are the people the existing canon already legitimized — and that loop is not accidental.
Medium bias dressed up as quality judgment
The standard defense of lists like this one is that they are about novels, specifically, and that comparing a novel to a video game is a category error. That defense has grown thinner with each passing year. Interactive fiction — work produced in tools like Twine and Ink, distributed through platforms like Itch.io, and reviewed seriously by outlets including The Guardian itself in other sections — uses prose, character, and narrative structure in ways that overlap substantially with the novel form. The distinction being drawn is not purely formal. It is also about prestige, about which distribution channels carry cultural weight, and about which labor markets are considered intellectual versus commercial.
That last point matters in labor terms. Game writers are among the most precariously employed workers in any creative industry. Organizing efforts through groups like widely covered union campaigns at major studios have repeatedly highlighted how narrative staff are treated as interchangeable contractors rather than authors with creative stakes in the work. When the literary establishment declines to recognize game writing as literature, it reinforces the industry’s own tendency to treat writers as a production input rather than the primary creative force. Canon-making is not just cultural signaling — it shapes how workers are valued.
The Guardian is not uniquely villainous here. The pattern recurs across the Booker Prize, the National Book Award’s eligibility rules, and the curricula of virtually every university English department. But The Guardian’s list is the news event today, and it is worth being precise about what the paper has done: it has convened a global panel of literary experts, asked them to define the best storytelling in the English language, and structured the exercise so that the medium used by the largest storytelling audience on earth was never eligible for consideration.
Game writers responding to the list’s release this Saturday on social platforms have been pointed, if unsurprised. The sentiment, broadly, is exhaustion rather than outrage — the sense that this argument has been made, won intellectually, and lost institutionally, over and over again. Follow the credit list on any major narrative game from the past decade and you will find writers with literary credentials that would qualify them for The Guardian’s voter pool. They just were not asked. That, in the end, is the whole story.
Sam Vance writes about the games industry as a real industry: layoffs, unions, mergers, crunch, exclusivity deals, and the long history of cultural battles inside gaming. He plays games seriously and reports on them more seriously. He is interested in who owns what, who makes what, and who gets credited for what.
