‘Tolstoy, Borges—How Could An Xbox Or PlaysStation Compare?’


LOS ANGELES—The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo was called off Tuesday after its organizers discovered the immersive power of literature, reportedly realizing that no video game could ever compare to the wonder of opening a work by Leo Tolstoy or Jorge Luis Borges and becoming engrossed in a masterful volume of fiction. “After learning how poorly video games fare alongside the rich explorations of the human condition contained in novels such as Mrs. Dalloway and Moby Dick, we have concluded it is best to cancel E3,” said Electronic Software Association CEO Michael Gallagher, clutching a copy of One Hundred Years Of Solitude as he observed that mere pixels on a screen could ever engage one’s imagination as fully as the majestic sweep of Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism prose. “The rich imagery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and other great works reveals complex worlds that no gaming console’s GPU could ever hope to match. As such, there’s no reason to continue on with this farce of a conference. We could be entertained for a thousand lifetimes simply by visiting our local libraries.” At press time, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony issued a joint press statement confirming they had canceled all future game development and would instead issue leather-bound editions of the world’s literary classics.