Clockwork Storyteller

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 since last night and it’s gotten me thinking about storytelling in video games. Storytelling in video games is something I have been interested in for a long time, but only really began to seriously think about in the past few years.

It used to be that the words “story” and “video game” were pretty much mutually exclusive. At most, it was confined to a short blurb in the front of the manual, explaining that Dr. Wily reprogrammed Dr. Light’s robot masters. At worst, we found out that “the President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?”

Even RPGs were fairly bereft of a story. The two big RPGs of my youth were Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Both were memorable because, at the time, they were very good games and both launched franchises that have gone onto bigger and better things. But the stories in the games? Unmemorable.

But as with all mediums, things began to change. More… »

Being bored, having found the latest video game I purchased to be a complete disappointment (seriously, being able to rent computer games would be awesome for letting me avoid two hours of moderate boredom prior to hitting the big X), and with writer’s block (or rather writer’s apathy. I’m sure I could be writing, I’m just too apathetic to do so), I finally took the plunge.

I downloaded PokerStars and started playing online poker. Not for money (because that’s ILLEGAL! *wink wink, nudge nudge*), but mainly in their free tournaments. So far, I’m affirming myself as a decent-not-great player, as I consistently finish in the top 1000 of these tournaments (which generally have 12000 entrants, it seems).

Still. It’s only a stone’s throw away from me hunched over a table in Vegas shuffling my chips in a sweat-stained sports jacket.

Finishing the first draft of a story is a feeling like nothing else I have felt. There’s just a supreme satisfaction at having created something complete. Sure, the story usually still needs some polishing to remove away all the rough edges. But anyone looking at the first draft and the finished product would usually come away having experienced nearly identical things.

I finished a story just a few moments ago. 45 pages and 13000 words in total, written over the course of four days (a brisk pace for me). Whenever I first finish a story, I always have the urge to consider it perfect. I know that’s not true.

I’ll spend at least several more hours going back through, making minor changes, cleaning up words usage, trying to pinpoint typos, and essentially making sure I’m really, really happy with it. Normally, I would then give it to someone (or someones) else to read over, make comments on, and then pass it through for a final edit. This story is a special case, but I would normally do that.

I think that as long as I keep getting this joy out of finishing a story, I can keep writing. I don’t think it will ever go away, and I certainly hope it won’t. I couldn’t imagine living without feeling the joy of being a storyteller.

The most difficult thing about writing for me isn’t coming up with ideas (I have plenty of them). It’s not being inspired (I have plenty of inspiration). It’s not even getting bored with writing (I always enjoy putting word to page). It’s getting myself to sit down and actually write. So many things always serve to distract me from actually writing.

For instance, Sunday night I was getting started on a new story. I was going along pretty nicely, when I changed the TV channel to the Science channel and ended up watching three hours of TV shows about physics. I kept working while I was watching, of course, but it was harder to keep a flow going. I’d keep stopping to listen to something about string theory in the middle of a sentence, then have to take a few moments to collect my thoughts again.

Similarly, last night I was working on the same story when I got the urge to check my e-mail, which I did, and found a message from a friend who had sent me a funny YouTube clip. I watched it, then sent a clip of The Whitest Kids U Know doing the Truth About Abraham Lincoln. That got me to thinking about the Conan O’Brien sketch “Lincoln Money Shots”, which I then watched. Then I spent the next two hours watching old Conan clips on YouTube. Instead of getting 10 pages done, I got a grand total of two.

Of course, there are ways to get myself to concentrate on stuff. More… »

So around the beginning of summer, my brother Alex got me into playing poker in the Stars-n-Bars Poker league in Maryland. I occasionally caught the World Series of Poker on ESPN, but I’d never really been super interested in it. But my brother and my uncle played in the league, so I figured it’d be a good way to spend some time with family so I took it up.

More… »

People sometimes wonder where I get the ideas for the stories I write. That’s not an easy question to answer. The real answer is “everywhere” or “where ever”. I pick up ideas as I go.

Sometimes, random ideas pop into my head. Like the story I’m working on now, titled The Clockwork Batsman (and yes, the thought of that story did influence my blog name). I was just randomly lying in bed one night, about to fall asleep, when the words “The Clockwork Batsman” came into my head. A few more collisions later and I had the idea fully formed, of two men who built a clockwork automaton in the early era of baseball and are trying to sell it to various teams.

Other times, it comes more organically. A conversation, for instance. I wrote an entire novel off an idea I contrived while talking to a friend about a woman who had a rather commanding (and intimidating) presence about her. I refered to her as being like a dragon, which sent the friend laughing, and me writing.

At least once, an idea has come to me by reading something and then going “Ok, and what about the EXACT OPPOSITE?” The first thing I ever had actually published (a short story called “Addiction” in E-ON) came from this. Another person in EVE had his character being deathly worried about cloning (the mechanism in EVE which explains how characters can be killed and keep coming back), so much so that the character fell into a depression every time she was killed. My idea was to do the very opposite of that, someone who loved to be cloned.

Not every idea I have actually comes to fruition though. I have a dozen or so sitting in my head, waiting to progress beyond genesis. Most will probably make it no further than they have already, replaced in urgency by newer ideas. Some may get turned into stories, some might work their way into other stories in a smaller role than I’d originally expected, and some will be ignored. But never forgotten.

Because I never know when I might want to use them.