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Novel, Write Thyself
Denver, 12:21 AM
Fri Dec 18
66 posts in the last 24 hours
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Novel, Write Thyself |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
07/12/09
Unfortunately, if you sit still too long to dream in EVE you will get your ass handed to you and there is very real danger of losing good bits of time you have invested in the game. It will teach you patience, risk, reward and loss. Losing a ship you worked countless hours to build or purchase in an anticlimactic explosion will hit you hard. Experiencing all of these aspects of reality with the right mindset in a virtual environment can give a novel writer some powerful buttons to press and help to create a story fabric that players feel even more connected to.
If you're only in a small corporation with a few friends or even soloing, it becomes difficult to work your way up the ladder without great care and persistence. In those cases, the lore around the universe can be a much more appealing way to get your EVE fix while you stay safely docked, spinning your ship and placing market orders. The option is always there though, to escape your ditch and find your calling within the game. That is one reason why it is so hard for many people to decide if they really like EVE or not, there is a huge sense of untapped potential just out of your reach next to the cookie jar.
I haven't read any of the novels, but if player actions become featured in them more specifically, I could see myself diving in just to read more embellished and refined descriptions of all that I'm missing. I suppose that's not unlike the snazzy videos, showing you pretty ships and big explosions in huge battles you will never see with fast paced techno music. The exciting difficulty level of the game does make it even more interesting to hear about the people who succeeded and made an impact.
07/10/09
I'm most reminded of the Dragonlance books. People sometimes make fun of the series as simply being a novelized form of a D&D campaign Weis & Hickman played. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. Especially in Eve, when I read and write about events I either witnessed or participated in, it pulls me in to the world in a way that no other computer RPG ever has.
07/10/09
07/10/09
07/10/09
About chronicling the history of a game: I always thought it would be cool to have a timeline or historical map in games like Civ IV. I could look back and see periods of my civ and when the most wars were clustered or at what point my civ really made a name for itself.
07/10/09
07/10/09
In all honestly we are almost there with the arrival of social messaging apps being tied to games.
Now all your achievements, kills, failures, actions, deaths, wins, losses, messages, and etc. can be saved and shared real time for all too see as they happen.
It's a novel in bullet point form minus the prose.
07/10/09
07/10/09
And that has both fascinating and terrifying implications for the future of literature in general.
07/10/09
Except void of any character, growth, tropes, or imagery.
I get what you're saying, but having a list of gaming-related numbers makes for a fraction of a narrative.
07/10/09
07/10/09
Taken to perhaps too fine a point, the concept of a "game written" novel as you propose it to me is yet another, albeit distant, point on the spectrum of the distortion of language. I write this in full knowledge that we of the Internet generations are by far the worst offenders in this regard; i.e. 'lol', 'teh', and a hundred other abbreviations we casually throw about.
When we have gotten to the point that we passively accept the removal of prose in fiction, and yet still call it art, then do we have any right to word?
Please do not take this as an attack against you, but if we ultimately hope to have our hobby accepted as 'art', then these kinds of issues must be debated, discussed, and thought about.
07/11/09
We really are a destructive lot.
07/12/09
There are games like Alan Wake, Penumbra and many others that give you a feel of reading through a story that has already been written or that you are the one writing it, but they are typically giving you one or more fixed stories.
Some RPGs have their stories, but give you much more freedom to piece it together out of order and to customize your character to a greater extent. With this comes a different sense of individual attachment that leads to this logical next step of the players writing their own story.
I could see a game being designed specifically to write a coherent log of your important activities in story form, even to the extent that it uses flashbacks and foreshadowing. There might need to be a mechanic in place to meter how that part of the game made the character feel so that it doesn't devolve into a flavorless pile of words that the player can't even identify with. If a game can write a story around a player's actions that the player will actually enjoy reading, there will be some damn near magical code behind it. Unless of course they cheat and pre-write a giant database of scenarios and plop them together, in which case after you've read one or two of them, you might be noticing a lot of replication.
07/10/09
Hopefully the new lvl 4 epic missions will be more story/event oriented and less task oriented.