It must be the sense of anonymity that compels people to share secrets with strangers. I was having a conversation with a woman in a bookshop when she decided to tell me something I could tell was troubling her about her nine-year-old son. “The thing is,” she said (she had a twitch in her lower lip), “he’s a bright boy, but… he still likes books with pictures in.” As a children’s bookseller, I hear things like this all the time. Proud parents like to tell me that their children no longer ‘need’ pictures in their books, as though they had just collected their children from a clinic specialising in the treatment of visual withdrawal. Sometimes it’s the children themselves that need reminding: “You don’t books with pictures in- remember?” In either case, the message seems clear: pictures are mere training wheels for text, and the sooner we’re done with them, the better.
This idea often goes hand-in-hand with the view that children’s literature is merely a simplified version of adult literature, the literary equivalent of a Playmobil fire engine. On the contrary, I think picture books in particular have their own grammar and perspective that you simply don’t find in such abundance elsewhere. In fact, I would argue that if picture books have a torchbearer anywhere in the creative arts, it’s not to be found in literature all. For that, you would need to look to video games.
In the heyday of printed games magazines, we ate with our eyes. In the absence of video, we studied still images and tried to animate them in our minds. It’s hard to imagine now but seeing a game in motion for the first time really was just as big a revelation as how it played. In the years since, video games have made art critics of us all. We even learnt a new vocabulary to talk about them: references to pixel density, shading, style and perspective made themselves at home in even casual conversation, and how could they not? Try explaining these four images without them:
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Video games thus provide a level of engagement with visual art most people never get to experience once they’ve ‘outgrown’ picture books. Even in the internet age, a game with a distinctive art style still has that power to grab a player’s attention and make them ask: What you? How do you work?
People (adults and children alike) respond to picture books in much the same way. The work of David Litchfield, for example, never fails to capture people’s attention, and it is easy to see why:
In Lights on Cotton Rock (above), a spaceship evoking a gumball machine descends upon a clearing in forest; in When I Was A Child, a grandmother and child sit by a sherbet pink lake; in The Bear and The Piano, sunbeams spotlight a bear in a tuxedo leaning over a piano. The varied textures, digital effects and distinctive colour palette bring to mind the bewitching art style of Moon Studios’ Ori games.
While Ori belongs to a special genre of game that actively requires backtracking, I think it’s fair to say of most games that they invite us to linger in their spaces. While prose cannot help but push us forward word by word, cinema frame by frame, the default state of a picture or video game is . The world, or at least its aperture, stands still until you move it. So, not only do picture books and video games share a focus on the visual, by their very nature, they encourage us to explore their visuals at our own pace.