Digital Mythology
"Considering this phenomenon of narrativization with respect to games, it then becomes important to understand that games as a medium are currently ideally poised to take center stage as the most ubiquitously widespread, appealing, and potent forms of storytelling and narrativization that human society has yet witnessed. We contend that games have the very real potential to become the new classics of the 21st Century. The field of Literature has its classics: the epic poem of Beowulf, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Palahniuk's Fight Club, just to name a few. With Cinema, experts point with ease to Welles' Citizen Kane and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when asked to name their classics. With the newly-emerging medium of games, it is easy to know which titles sell well or which ones were universally lauded by critics, such as Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series or Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, but understanding how these games qualify as narrative classics will go a long way towards further qualifying the medium for future generations. We dare to contend that the children of the future will receive their ideals of heroism not from merely reading the legend of Beowulf as much as they will from becoming Link in the Legend of Zelda."
