Abstract: This article surveys contemporary Japanese novels that have video games as a theme. It studies two of them in particular: No Life King by Itō Seikō and Te o nobase, soshite komando o nyūryoku shiro by Fujita Shōhei, two first novels published thirty years apart. Their analysis focuses on identifying novelistic motifs specific to the representation of the video game medium, starting with the iteration of death in video games and its confrontation with reality.
