Clockwork Storyteller

I have finished two play throughs of BioWare’s latest RPG blockbuster, Dragon Age: Origins. As expected from a BioWare game, the storyline of Dragon Age is one of its many highly touted strengths. On the whole, I feel like the game delivered on its promises of a strong story. But it also had areas that I felt fell rather flat as well. I’ve personally got into more than one argument about its strengths in relation to BioWare’s previous RPG, Mass Effect.
More… »

Ok, so I’ve been playing this game called Dwarf Fortress recently. It’s an interesting game. Technically, it’s still in an Alpha stage, but it’s being developed essentially by one guy all by himself. It’s not a graphic juggernaut (the standard interface uses ASCII characters to represent virtually everything, so it looks a lot like NetHack or something that was developed in the early 80s), but it has an amazing depth to it. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.

In my most recent fort, something weird happened. My parent civilization happened to be at war with an elf civilization. Early on, my fort discovered mithril deposits. Normally, discovering this (or adamantine) causes the dwarf king to come and set up his home in your fort. Only when mine showed up, it was an elf.
More… »

Love at first sight is a popular cliche that is used in writing. Most recently, in an incredibly popular poorly written novel that has been turned into a poorly written and poorly acted movie. It’s a terrible cliche, one that helps to rob stories of any effort to make characters experience personal growth and reflection in establishing interpersonal relationships with others. This is especially true when two characters mutually “fall in love at first sight.”

In truth, love at first sight doesn’t really exist. More… »

As I said in last night’s blog, I just recently finished Fallout 3. Let me preface this post by saying that I greatly enjoyed the game. The mechanics were incredibly balanced and fun. The area to explore was vast and had a lot of nice secrets and a smart layout. The engine and game mechanics would be a selling point for other games to me.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about the story of Fallout 3, where it worked, and where it failed. Since I’m going to be talking about the storyline, I will be posting spoilers, so if you don’t want to see them, don’t read after the break.

With that warning out of the way, without further ado… More… »

I just finished playing Fallout 3. Or rather, my first play through of Fallout 3. For Fallout 3 is one of the increasing new breed of video games that has what I call Limited Non-Linear storytelling. It’s not the pinnacle of storytelling that video games can achieve, but it’s pretty much the best you can get right now with much depth.

There are three broad categories of video game storytelling that I see in games. They are what I call Linear, Limited Non-Linear, and True Non-Linear. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses and has varying degrees of usage in video games. More… »

I have a new project. I am planning on writing a story a week for EVE Online. These stories will generally be short, most no longer than a couple of typed pages. Each one will deal with a different subject in the EVE universe, depending on what catches my fancy at the time I’m writing it. I’m planning on eventually covering each “subject” in EVE in some sort of detail.

The thing I’m doing that goes against what most people who write fan-stories for EVE is that I am totally going to play with Prime Fiction material. Prime Fiction, for those who are not familiar with the term, essentially means the canon material for the game setting that is produced by CCP. It comes from the EVE Chronicles, Short Stories, in-game information, and the like. Generally, any time CCP states something about the setting in an official capacity, it is PF.

A lot of people who write EVE fiction try to avoid touching PF, and for a very good reason. If they write something and CCP later writes something that contradicts it, the story is essentially rendered invalid. Claim that a planet is inhabited, then later find out it is a radiation-blasted wasteland, and your story loses credibility.

Additionally, it takes some boldness to really delve into high level PF. After all, it’s CCP’s job to write their own PF, and while players contribute their own stories, writing about someone else’s characters can be a tricky affair. And in this case, it’s CCP that are the someone else.

It’s safe to write about what your own character is doing, or couch a story in terms of small scale events that don’t have a great impact on the setting. I’ve decided to be unsafe. If CCP later writes something to undermine a premise of one of my stories, so be it. It won’t invalidate the story itself.

In general, these stories will try to be somewhat informative as well as entertaining. They won’t really be infodump style stories, because I do not have the access to information that makes such stories entertaining. But at the same time, they won’t be pure atmospheric pieces. I’m trying to strike a balance.

These stories will be released once a week on Friday. The first, Doriam’s Widow, will be available on the 14th.

This year’s EVE Fanfest was quite an experience. I didn’t get to do much sight seeing while I was there. I spent the first two days adjusting from EDT to GMT. Luckily, by the time FanFest started, I was on an Iceland-friendly sleeping schedule. This also was a big change from last year, where I was half asleep the entire time.

I won’t really talk about all the big news that came out of FanFest in regards to game shattering changes. Those are covered in more depth and with more spotlight elsewhere. Instead, I’ll talk about the writing-related issues that were brought up this year. With the release of the EVE novel still fresh in many people’s minds and the explosion of news and story content recently, there was a lot being spoken. More… »

CCP’s annual EVE FanFest is November 6th through 8th. It takes place in sunny Iceland, the company’s HQ. I am headed there for drunken parties with the CCP employees, listening to hungover CCP employees talk about EVE Online.

Last year, I made the grave error of landing in Iceland on Thursday morning, after an entire day of travel and no sleep. Suffice to say, that did not make for a good time. I ended up sleeping that day until 4 PM (thus missing an entire day of the FanFest), then never quite recovered from the 4 hour time change.

This year, I am arriving on Tuesday morning and will fight off sleep deprivation to try and stay up the entire day so I can go to sleep at a normal hour their time, then be on a better clock. This will additionally give me the time to actually have fun in Iceland, so I can see some sights and try out some of the local restaurants instead of just eating at the Pizza Hut as I am underfed and under-rested. I’m looking forward to checking out the hot springs that I never had the energy to see last time and… uh… enjoying the Viking bleakness.

This time should be a lot more interesting for me as well. I now know several people who work for CCP in a personal capacity and I am on a friendly professional basis with several of them as well, thanks to the writing I have done for them. I also recently learned my best friend knows one of the artists that was recently hired by CCP. So that should be neat too.

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… »