scrivscriv.bsky.social
Contract says game writer.
I wander around Excel like an old man looking for the bathroom, trying to convice collegues to pay attention to me cause I know what I'm doing.
I also teach SF at Uni. That part's great.
ADHD/assorted issues stemming from it
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Just now thought of how Finnegan's Wake is the equivalent of adding 1 to an endless sequence of numbers, and Tristram Shandy is the equivalent of endlessly dividing by 2.
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But it feels to me now the algorithm for choosing the winner has devolved into "has the clearly defined conventional genre bits? -> looks like a 'straight-up story'? -> has a lot of superficial buzz around it? -> we have our winner!", game-narrative nerdom's informed appreciation notwithstanding.
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And yeah, often such games are at least partially conceived with that mainstream in mind. And yet... Judges should know better. The genres matured by coming to terms with trying weird, out-of-way shit and carried it mostly by enthusiastic word of mouth, not commercial or even cultural clout.
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Just occurred to me that the mainstreaming of the fantasy and SF genres in general might be at least part of the reason. Games appear to be perceived as the vanguard of that even among people who should know better, and so they give preference to those that fit better into the mainstream.
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Maybe they won't say anything. Maybe they'll do something with their body. Maybe they'll imply "You've got this" by talking about something completely different. Sadly, the youvegottingthisitis is rampant in game writing (through circumstances not having to do with the writer usually).
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Lack of specificity in general. It tells me the writer paid no attention to their own writing up to that point.
Unless you're on the literal first sentence of something new, there are heaps of statements you've already made about the world, the events, the characters...
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Love to finally see it. Let the music find you.
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The best of luck and inspiration!
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The way it happens is by letting them know that you understand other kinds of gamedev work well enough to be able to gauge its impact on yours, as well as finding the moments in that work where you can actually contribute in a way that no one else would be able to.
/fin
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Make people respect your professional presence. Sadly, this will not happen by writing well. Everyone thinks they can write, few can tell (or take it on faith) that your writing is objectively better than theirs (especially in the game'a industry).
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Find a way to insert yourself in these kinds of conversations much earlier than the moment you receive the writing task. If you get used to just filling in blanks with flavor, you may as well work freelance on your own. (super reasonable, sanity-sparing, but not what I'm talking about.)
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Writing and narrative design are absolutely inextricable. You can't do the former without at least thinking about the latter. A lot of the time, your thoughts will be much more relevant and valuable than whoever else does that job (unless it's an honest to God narrative designer, of course).
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If you're a writer whose job turns out to be just ad-libbing some flavor in addition to whatever a designer thought up in their black box of a creative space: prepare for the all of the above.
If you don't want that, learn as much as possible about the work (not just YOUR work!)
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--because they're cool and reasonable people who, however, absolutely don't have the capacity to monitor everything, including the massive bag of shit simmering for months before it was served to you, the writer.
Takeaways:
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7a. (Because problems causing writers to want to drink wiper fluid are not as important apparently.)
8. You talk to the project lead, and the game director, and they both understand and agree this absolutely must not happen again--
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7. That doesn't help all that much because much of the implementation has already happened according to the insane initial design and deadlines are killing us in more fronts than one, and my stupid fucking insanely misscoped feature is just one among many that have "more important problems".
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--and that only because the person who made that mess left the company for unrelated reasons and was replaced by a much more competent and reasonable person that let you do it. All of the changes are directed toward cutting corners instead of making it make sense and being a cool feature.
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5. You don't have 7 times the time to do your job. It's a rework of a feature which itself is one of half a dozen, and no one even suspected it would turn out to be the mess that it is.
6. You start narrative-designing your ass off 3 months too late, unable to change certain givens--
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4. After the intitial cold sweats, you burrow down into the nitty-gritty of the feature. The amount of time it takes you to understand it and also to roughly reconcile the design with the narrative representation it's going for would turn the estimate up from 4 to 7 times more compared to average.
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1. A task comes around. You take a look at the brief. There is none.
2. You cobble one together for yourself after you've read up on the game feature's design.
3. It comes out at about 4 times the word count/effort it would take compared to similar features.
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More like years for me, and until a month or so ago, for some reason, I didn't "let" myself read/watch/more. Things got dark, so I started again, and it really is amazing how much it helps to remember you're not (just) a spiralling neurodivergent brain. Even work stupidities feel not as bad.
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First thing that comes to me when I'm presented with this (as a writer, be it because I spontaneously thought of a system-like thing or 'cause my game writing boxes me in in that regard) is to be "consistent" in the weirdest possible way, if at all.
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Yay <3 Also! His premises are gamifiable-enough without feeling too transparently like potential transmedia projects.
For personal projects, I'd gladly absorb John Crowley/William Gibson/Susanna Clarke/Jeff Vandermeer's souls. The real them would be a pain in the ass to work with, I imagine.
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(don't know what it says about me that I tried to consider realistic/workable options as opposed to personal subjective favorites, working for a mammoth franchise where scoping and constraints determine one's heartbeat might have something to do with it........)
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As a balanced mix of interest in/understanding of the medium and overall chops: Robert Jackson Bennett.
IMO, he has more varied and intriguing premises than the Big B. Sanderson, a better sense of scope that also allows for genuine prose flourishes, and he's a fan of Disco Elysium, which seals it.
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Not to mention years of not having enough money to save for the good boots has made me wary of anything that costs more than the cheap ones -- and no amount of assurance that they'll last me a long time can truly convince me of it.
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Only recently did I realize I'm definitely in the hyperactive bucket after learning that it's expressed differently in adults (though some of the physical components persist). And what with the modern world outright causing some ADHD-like symptoms, people are throwing it around all too willy-nilly.
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That bit of you is the seed of the real you which may be a lot like that other artist, or not. The latter, more likely, if you allow more and more artists to light that candle on the top of your spine for you. Through all of them, more pieces of you will be coaxed into view by happy accidents.
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Yeah... unless you fuck yourself up about not being able to do what that other person did the way they did it, which means that even if you are theoretically capable of it, that mindset will cut you off at the ankles when you try it. If you allow a bit of you in the mix, it suddenly comes together.
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That's where *you* are, and you'll always be there even if you are in fact capable of perfectly emulating these other people. Something in you will always make you want to stray ever so slightly from that emulation, you just have to listen to yourself.
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I firmly believe that the salt of one's personal art lies in the "accidents" while you're trying to emulate someone else. Your voice just does something of its own while you're trying to nail that Chris Cornell vocal line. You add a smidge of an adjective more (or less) emulating John Crowley.
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Being able to do is exactly the skill of looking for that hit of top-spine pleasure in others' work and consciously, conscientiously applying it to your stuff.
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Those two sentences that will save your story, the real frog in the artificial pond, are what only the unconscious and the models it's absorbed can find for you, if you turn off that stupid self-defeating internal monologue post-rationalizing you out of your chance to do it.
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It can deal with basic writing flubs, sometimes purposely rejecting words, asking your unconscious for another batch.
But it can also make you feel like shit because the last couple of paragraphs lead nowhere, instead of focusing on the couple of sentences that will actually drive your story forward
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The conscious mind is most useful when it controls the circumstances surrounding your writing. What you think of yourself, sitting down to work, is a crucial circumstance that your conscious mind can pay attention to in good and bad ways. It can remind you that you've done it before, so it's okay.
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In the other thread, I added how seeing flaws -- a comparatively more "conscious" activity can develop your basic troubleshooting skills, but those are rather unrefined. I said this because the refined part of your writing mind is the unconscious.
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The "going beyond" will happen on its own, your unconscious soup will always make these models resurface ever-so-slightly different than what they were when they sank down.
As to the undervaluing yourself part... this is, I believe, the domain of the conscious mind in writing.
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--and *submitting* to good narrative models is what being good at writing is.
You can always enjoy them as a reader, but if you forever stop yourself from working with them, because you undervalue yourself, or inversely, you think you should go "beyond" them now that you've grokked them, you lose.
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Whatever writing lights that candle at the top of your spine -- a phrase, a sentence, a sequence of any size -- is what you're apt to try and emulate, even subconsciously (as it sinks down into your non-verbal understanding of narrative)--
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Seeing what is wrong with a piece of writing is mostly added to your general troubleshooting method, which is somewhat low-level. It may help you write competently, but not much more than that. It's a basic tool but not an especially refined one.
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I think this is very important. The things you react to positively in others' work are the things you absorb into your own understanding of how you can write enjoyably, too. Writing is being aware of and working with narrative models, and the positive examples are what sticks in that respect.
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Absolutely. Grimly funny.
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In that sense, never having the feeling of something being "final" is actually useful, because I can hold a number of mutually-exclusive ideas about how to do something in my head. Keats' "negative capability" and whatnot. One just needs an environment that doesn't frown on it.
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Yeah, very good point.
Suddenly people listen to me a lot more, even about storyboard ideation, etc. Maybe it's "let's not fuck up so we should double-check with each other more" and it turns out a writer is a real asset in giving voice to how narrative alternatives compare to one another. Who knew
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only recently started*, no initial that... gah.