About

So what is this?

It’s my blog where I talk about video game narratives, fiction, vocabulary and other things I’m not totally qualified to talk about. Right now I’m considering oscillating between reviewing video game storylines and general fiction discussion.

Who plays video games for the story? I sure don’t!

That’s fine. However, the way I see things, solid storylines are one of the areas where video games stand to make the most progress. Game companies already spend loads of money on storyline development anyway. They hire writers, editors, voice actors and tear away various animators from perfecting jiggle physics to create cut scenes and cinematics. Developers might as well get their monies worth out of all of their investments. And that means having a good story.

So, in my own small way I hope to bring some attention to improving game storylines by trying to seriously critique/analyze them based on their merits. Or at least I can attempt to provide interesting insight as to why specifically certain parts of game stories did or didn’t work.

‘Serious’ critique? Sounds boring.

These won’t be super serious scholarly essays as I find it somewhat difficult to stay super serious when writing anything for any period of time.

Plus! At the end of any critiques I write will be my “Creative Changes” section. Here I will provide some kind of change(s) that I think would have helped the game. Usually this will be something like adding a main character, or reorganizing the progression of the story, or changing the genre/theme. Important, amusing changes! None of that waffle ball easy stuff like just deleting the story altogether or removing a minor character.

Some people already talk about game stories you know.

Yes, but most people who write about game stories write about them because they either love it and want to tell you about it, or they hate it and want to you to hate it as well. I will try to act like an impartial critic for the most part. No slobbering all over the shoes of a storyline I think is good like an overly friendly fandog, nor will I go into an eyeball exploding rage rant of “It’s terrible! A terrible game for terrible people!”