Warcraft III and Victorian Technology?

Just kinda thinking out loud while I prepare to scramble through this first paper next week.

*My class? Victorian Telecommunications. (ZZZzzzz, right? I'm intrigued by the idea of revisioning Victorian technology as precursors to mass culture, but after 7 weeks covering the steam train and the telegraph I'm ready to claw my eyes out.)
*My task? To write a seminar paper for this CFP: A conference on Victorian networks, Connections, and technologies. My angle would be drawing some parallel between some 19th century tech and modern tech.
*My challenge then? To come up with some way of relating Victorian material production concerns and their epiphenomena with similar material production concerns in, say, Warcraft III or something similar (I'm open to other titles, but since I'm reading WC3 for my freshmen it seemed easiest).
*My main concern? That while I can do the mental acrobatics required to make this comparison, I'm having trouble imagining how to make the answers to my questions here - whatever either of those things ends up being - relevant. More to the point, my idea is probably specious (aren't they all!) and there may be some furious spin to get this contraption committed to paper.

My primary idea is to compare serialization in some Dickens novel (probably Great Expectations since I've actually read it) with story-telling in Warcraft III. My premise is that the epiphenomena of Dickens' serial publication - the harsh segmentation of the story, the flattening of characters, the episodic nature of the narrative, the complex legion of characters interwoven through each other, and the effect of the audience as a "floating spectator" that moves from character to character - are each reproduced in Warcraft III. The game is played through chapter-missions and for the most part each mission functions in the same episodic way that a serialized chunk of a Dickens novel does: by giving a small and cohesive story arc that nevertheless emanates from a grander metanarrative. This effect, along with the story switching back and forth between RTS combat and narrative cut-scenes, causes fragmentation of the story. The characters are also largely flattened in the same way a Dickens character is flattened: because the story is more plot-driven in Warcraft III, character development is not as rich as it might be and many characters are easily identified as stock character types and monodimensional plot devices. The game also "floats" from character to character the way a Dickens novel does. There are main characters, and the story in WC3 is ultimately about Arthas, but we as players drift from Arthas fairly frequently, moving to follow Jaina, Kel'Thuzad, Thrall, Tyrande, Malfurion, Illidan, Maiev, Anub'arak, Kael'thas... the list is pretty long. Not to mention the legion of minor characters woven in like Muradin, Mal'Ganis, Medivh, Varimathras, Uther, and so forth. The story of Warcraft III, though, begins and ends with Arthas.

The problem with this line of attack lies in the fact that I'm not sure I can sustain it for very long. The effects are similar and interesting to tease out, but the causes are very different. Dickensian novels are blocky and flat because they're being transmitted in chunks over a huge span of time in a monthly magazine. WC3 is delivered all at once, and its blocky flatness is derived from its primary purpose as a RTS game... Though perhaps this is where the two ideas really meet: in the realm of material production.

At the very basic level, both stories as narrative are controlled in no small part by how they are made: Great Expectations because it has to fit into monthly installments, and Warcraft III because it has to conform to the RTS game format that demands linear objectives. The stories are shaped by the way they exist as material objects then... And if I make that my thesis, my task would be to dip into close readings of each to discuss just how the story is being shaped by its material existence.

Still, the main problem is relevance. To what end am I making the comparison? What is the larger impact of this coincidence? Perhaps my thesis and my "relevance" are tied into one. Making the comparison allows me to broaden the horizon of literary consideration by taking non-literary texts like video games and comparing them to books (that is, after all, my primary goal in academia). More than that though, it forces a consideration of any text as a material object and troubles the idea that texts can be works of singular artistic genius divorced from the material concerns that give that art shape.