Why Charles Dickens would have made Great Expectations a videogame if he were writing today

Despite dying over 100 years before the release of Pong, the novelist Charles Dickens has connections to a number of videogames. He appears as a character in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate (2015); is the subject of a mobile app walking-tour, Charles Dickens London: The Writer’s Journey (2022); and his works are brought to virtual life in the forthcoming The Mysteries of Gad’s Hill Place.

There’s also plenty in Dickens’ work to suggest that were he alive today, he may be writing his own videogames as well as appearing in them.

Great Expectations (1861) in particular demonstrates Dickens’ ludic credentials. A sense of progression is common in the Bildungsroman or “progress” novel, but Pip seems to embody ideas of “levelling-up” more reminiscent of a playable character accumulating XP (experience points) than a typical protagonist.

Pip (Philip Pirrip) is a young blacksmith’s apprentice whose life is dramatically changed when he inherits a great fortune. Pip’s guardian, Mr Jaggers, who is also the lawyer in charge of the inheritance, describes Pip’s “expectations” (inheritance) as if it is an attainable in-game currency.

He makes it clear, just as a videogame NPC (non-playable character) might, how the story’s currency should be spent – on items befitting a gentleman, just as a videogame character might spend on costumes and items for their inventory. As Jaggers puts it, the inheritance is “a sum of money amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance”

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

On his path to becoming a gentleman, Pip must develop himself in various areas such as intellect and eloquence, and acquire new clothes, which, it is implied, will confer new “powers”. They should not, Mr Jaggers stresses, be “working clothes”.

This spiritual, physical and sartorial growth is not unlike that found in many roleplaying games such as Metaphor: Refantazio (2024), where the protagonist must develop “royal virtues” through building relationships with followers. This is reminiscent of the way Pip must build his relationship with the wealthy, eccentric Miss Havisham to further his place in society. Like Pip, the protagonist of Metaphor: Refantazio also gains access to progressively advantageous clothing and accessories as the story advances.

As literary theorist Peter Brooks has observed, even Pip’s name is representative of growth – a seed full of potential, the kind of on-the-nose naming scheme that would make auteur videogame designer Hideo Kojima proud. Many of Kojima’s characters in the Metal Gear franchise are named in the same way, such as Fragile, the director of a delivery company that has the motto “handled with love”.

And before we even get into the story itself, the contents page in later collected editions arranges protagonist Pip’s journey into “stages” – a term more commonly found in videogames.

Expectations and endings

Perhaps the strongest argument for Great Expectations as evidence of Dickens’ potential as a videogame writer are its multiple endings. The published ending alludes to future romance. After a chance meeting four years after the primary events of the novel, Pip takes fellow orphan Estella’s hand and sees “no shadow of another parting from her”.

However the alternate version, often presented as an appendix, has a quite different outlook. Again Pip runs into Estella, and they share fond words, but this time there is no sign of a romantic union. Instead, it’s suggested that the suffering Estella has endured through a cruel marriage has given her a deeper understanding of Pip’s life – “a heart to understand what [his] used to be”.

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This downbeat tone is more akin to the so-called “bad” ending (or fail state) of choice-based videogames. These are endings which occur when the player has not sufficiently developed their character, or made poor conversational choices during their play.

Even the published ending is not necessarily so positive if the reader has been paying attention to all of Pip’s “side-quests”. Both he and Estella are childhood wards of Miss Havisham, and in adulthood, a man named Magwitch plays father-figure to Pip and is Estella’s actual father.

Therefore, it is only possible to accept their union as romantic if putting aside facts which, to contemporary readers at least, may well have verged on incest. This means there are two possible endings even within the single published ending – one where he commits near-incest and one where he doesn’t, depending on your interpretation.

It could also be argued that the ending of each “stage” is its own potential end, thereby increasing the number of possible endings further still. For instance, literary theorist Caroline Levine has suggested another alternative ending in Pip’s imagined possible future with his childhood friend and confidante, Biddy.

This kind of premature ending is frequently found in narrative videogames. A memorable example is Far Cry 4 (2014), where it’s possible to get the credits rolling some 15 minutes into a game which typically lasts as long as 60 hours.

Had Dickens been writing today, I have no doubt he would have seen great narrative potential in videogames, just as modern videogame creators find inspiration in his novels.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Lynda Clark’s suggestion:

The novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka (2004) remains underappreciated, despite already having been adapted into a manga (2014) and a film (2014’s Edge of Tomorrow).

Like Pip, young soldier Keiji Kiriya is required to undergo intellectual, physical and emotional growth in order to progress. He undertakes this process of “levelling up” in an even more ludic manner, dying and “respawning” (resurrecting) with knowledge of his previous lives. Each death suggests a potential end, and his relationship with fellow time-looped soldier Rita Vrataski is open to similar interpretations of bittersweet love, doomed romance or platonic respect – depending on reader preference.

Lynda Clark undertook part of this research during an AHRC-funded PhD.