The Seattle IF group now has an official website, complete with a blog that lists their meetings and other activities. In addition to running a hospitality suite and content at PAX Prime, they’re planning some content for the Foolscap SF convention.
Sorry about that. I will try to get to it at some point; mix of travel and work is overwhelming right now.
If it’s an Inform question, try the intfiction forum or ifmud.
Homer in Silicon on Coconut Queen. It’s a polished, shiny time management/tycoon game that exemplifies one of my biggest pet peeves in narrative: leading the player on with story and then not delivering.
Oh, and the island is full of buff half-naked dudes. It’s sort of parodying objectification, but sorta not.
A colleague recently loaned me Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter
I knew it existed, but wasn’t planning to buy it immediately. Since I’ve been freelancing in the field, I’ve been focusing on books specifically about writing for games, rather than broader criticism.
This is a stodgy process, requiring self-discipline. There’s much I feel I need to know, but it’s often sandwiched in between things I consider too obvious to be worth saying and things I consider insanely wrongheaded.
The latest book on the pile is Lee Sheldon’s Character Development and Storytelling for Games
Sheldon’s book dutifully describes many, many basic aspects of story-building; offers an introductory view of plot structures for video games, while deftly avoiding any really hard problems or really interesting solutions; and takes care to remind the reader every few pages of Sheldon’s credentials not only as a professional writer but as the sort of person who has shared a limo with Dick Clark.
The prose is breezily good-natured and would not tax the vocabulary of a fourth-grader, but it gets through its material slowly, with many explanations per concept, so that it becomes boring in aggregate. It is the mental-nutrition equivalent of buttered macaroni. I don’t feel respected by this book, though it is probably fairest to say I am not its intended audience. If I were, I might find it a thorough, not-too-hard introduction to many of the core concepts of the craft.
Bissell’s book, therefore, was refreshing. For one thing, it’s very well-written, in the sense that individual sentences give pleasure. After reading a bit, I find my own writing turning into half-conscious, third-rate Bissell pastiche. This is annoying, but also a sure indicator of prose whose rhythm has got into my head like a hooky song.
Extra Lives is observant. It reads like the kind of travel narrative that is as much about the traveler’s inward journey as his outward one. It captures many of the things I find compelling about games as an expressive medium, and also identifies many of the aspects that are hard to defend. If you’re reading my blog because you’re interested in the problems of narrative/mechanic interface I often write about, then Extra Lives might well appeal to you.
It is pyrotechnic in its wording—I said it was well-written, not that it is modest, and I was not surprised by Amazon reviewers who said they had come to personally dislike the author on the basis of his narrative voice. That wasn’t my own reaction, but I can see where it comes from.
Anyway, here is a guy who turns such phrases as “ozonically scorched” to describe the atmosphere of a room after a disturbing presentation; “thermonuclear charisma” for a personality; “Bachelor Futurist” for a decor style. It is characteristic of Bissell to take an idea that would take most of us a prepositional phrase or a whole clause to express, and condense it to one adverb. If he has to invent that adverb himself, so much the better. Sharp observations in small spaces, that’s Bissell.
It is probably for this reason that Bissell’s chapter on Braid struck me so forcefully.
Amara Terra Mia has reviews of several of the games. So does Sarah Morayati. Sarah’s reviews have turned up on Planet-IF, but the Amara Terra Mia ones haven’t.
My latest Homer in Silicon column is on a game called Life Quest. I did not like it. It purports to be a life sim, but it makes you follow a very rigid path. Me? I married a cipher, and lived to regret it.
