What The Witcher Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling

/
What The Witcher Video Games Taught Me About Storytelling

Though video games have always been a part of my life, it wasn't until a few years ago when I really began to become what some call a "gamer" and began trying out new games I never had before, branching off from The Sims, Zelda and Nancy Drew (all of which are still fun, by the way) to try out the likes of Bioshock, Mass Effect and Skyrim. This was in part because as a child my parents never permitted us to have anything besides the Wii, so when I began dating my boyfriend I had two separate consoles (PlayStation and Xbox) that I had never owned or played anything on before until then.

Read More

How to Quickly Determine the Best Ending For Your Story

/
How to Quickly Determine the Best Ending For Your Story

A lot of storytellers will tell you that the hardest part about writing is getting started, but for me that has always been the easiest part. Maybe that's because my whole youth involved me starting a bunch of stories I never finished, leading to my subsequent problem of never being able to figure out how to end my stories because all I had ever practiced was beginning. A lot of times I would leave my story endings in limbo, cutting the story off early because I couldn't figure out where to go or tying way too many loose ends together because I figured the reader wanted to know how every single detail worked out.

Read More

How to Write Your First Video Game Quest

/
How to Write Your First Video Game Quest

When I first began navigating the world of video games in my adult years and unearthed the massive world of RPG gaming, I couldn't help but ask myself "What the heck does a script for this game look like?" After all, while I knew these games were written in a format similar to screenplays, I also realized that writers weren't just writing out one scene's dialogue, but all the different outcomes of that scenes dialogue, so I knew these scripts had to be massive to account for all the different possibilities.

Read More

How Video Games Can Help Your Storytelling

/
How Video Games Can Help Your Storytelling

Video games get a bad rep. This is perhaps due in part because to some extent, video games can be really bad for people. There are games that are addictive and remove people from life and games that promote violence and sexist or racist stereotypes.

Yet these traits, especially the latter, are equally as prevalently in movies and books and yet no one seems to be a harbinger of justice for those mediums. And that is because as a culture, we can see how these mediums can also be very good for our culture, parodying what is wrong with it or creating characters who address our current state of the world.

Read More