September 2nd - Telling Stories

Good afternoon solar system, it is my day off.

As I've mentioned, I have been playing a game called Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled a lot lately and I have also started (and finished) reading An Abundance of Katherines, and Will Grayson, Will Grayson. And so I've been thinking of all the different ways people have of telling stories. Either in novels, or in video games, or in movies, or in tv shows. I have realized that I really love writing, but that I think I would much rather write video game scripts than I would writing novels.

I love books. Books are great and I love the smell of new books, and I wish I had about a billion more books than I do, but most of the ideas I have for stories simply would not work well as books. A lot of people don't like video games because they think they rot your brain or turn you into a serial killer etc etc. But personally, if the story is good, I can find a video game equally as engrossing as any novel I have read.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, because I don't think you can really compare them. One of my favourite books is called Speak - it is about a girl who loses all her friends because of something that happened at a party the year before and her friends just made assumptions and never bothered to find out the details. And I loved the book a lot. But there's no way at all that it could work as a video game. It's not the right kind of story.

What I especially love about video games is that you get to walk around the (unfathomably small) towns and talk to everyone and you get to direct the steps of the characters from point A to point B and you get to open the treasure chests and you get to fight the monsters and you get to feel the excitement of YOUR decisions, YOUR actions taking down the big bad guy. You get to go on all of the hundreds of little sidequests and explore every corner of the world and learn a hundred different stories about the characters you have met along the way. I find that really incredible.

I have been reading about video game scripting online, and it's really discouraging. First of all I read that in order to propose a video game idea, you have to a) already be employed by a video game company, which I certainly am not, b) generally have to have a working demo of the game, which I am entirely incapable of creating. I know nothing about graphic design. I can't draw worth a crap. And I also found out that c) the script is usually only written after the premise for the video game has already been decided, meaning I likely would be writing other people's ideas.

So... what to do with all these ideas I have whirling around in my brain.

A couple additions:

I have posted a rough draft of the thing I wrote yesterday at work on my Tumblr, which I have decided I am going to be using for my creative writing. You can find that here.

Secondly, I have made an "about me" type of page which can be found over in the right-hand sidebar, and which also has links to my twitter and formspring accounts. You should read the about me thing because it contains something said to me by one of my best friends that made me really happy.