On Games, Writing, Games Writing, Games In Writing, And Other Related Topics (for Adventure Rules’ Charming and Open)

What up.

It has been… an awfully long time since I posted anything here, which is on me. I don’t think anyone was, like, hanging out going ‘why isn’t he posting anything, for heaven’s sake?!’, but still.

Very quick update, then, before I jump into the more important subject of the day: since I last posted, I’ve released another book! (See, it really has been a while.) It’s called A Recipe for Disaster and it’s a cosy fantasy about feuding restaurants, mythical wizards, and much more. Check it out – it’s available for free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited. And even if you haven’t, I’d say it’s thoroughly reasonably priced.

Anyway, there is a reason I’m back now, and it’s to give a proper send-off to someone who’s been a part of my writing journey for a long time. I’ve mentioned before, I think, that I spent a few years writing blog posts on gaming and stuff before I got back into fiction, and I really have a lot to thank the games blogging community for. Without them, I wouldn’t have stuck with it, had a lot of fun, and ultimately remembered how much I actually love writing.

One of the people in that community is me old mate Ian over at Adventure Rules, which is just about to leave its old home at WordPress and move to pastures new. Ian is astoundingly talented and dedicated to sharing insights about the games he loves (and some he doesn’t), from writing in-depth guides to analysing news to running community events that bring people together. I’ve been a part of a few of those events, including the brilliantly fun competition Blogger Blitz (which pits bloggers and their chosen gaming character champions against each other in frankly ingenious tests of skill and wit) and the Q&A-style Charming and Open.

And, indeed, Charming and Open is what we’re here for: to say a proper happy bye-bye and whatnot to the old blogplace, Ian’s opened the floodgates one last time, accepting all questions (within reason) and asking his own in return. I’ve asked him a question, and he’ll have to write an answer; in exchange, he’s asked me one, and I’ve gotta answer it. Simple!

The Question

So Ian’s asked me this:

As a fiction writer, do you feel your experiences with gaming have influenced the stories you create, and if so, in what way?

The Answer

OK, so.

Short answer: YES.

Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee –

I can actually think of three ways that games have influenced my fiction writing – maybe four, come to think of it. Let’s say three and a half: two full ones and then two that count for point-seven-five of a way each? I dunno.

WAY THE FIRST: Direct references to games-as-themselves in stories

This one’s probably the simplest, so let’s tackle it first.

I’m a gamer, so that’s kind of what I know. That’s a big part of my cultural context. As such, it inevitably seeps in when I’m writing stuff. Each Little Universe in particular had a lot of this: characters playing, discussing, and referencing video games (usually ones heavily based on real ones but with the trademarkable info hammered into something I hope I won’t get sued for).

I suspect there’ll be more of this in my future stuff, especially as and when I get back to writing more things set in worlds like our own – rather than playing about in secondary worlds, as I’m currently spending most of my time doing.

WAY THE FIRST-AND-A-HALFTH: Stories about games

So I’ve not really done this much yet (arguably the extended D&D-like sequences in ELU might count? YMMV), but I have some plans for writing stories that are in themselves about games in some way. Y’know, the classic isekai story of a gamer finding themselves inside a game world, that kind of thing.

I’m reading a lot of LitRPG lately, which is very heavily derived from role-playing game elements: you’ll see a lot of, like, explicit mentions of stat increases, levels, and that kind of thing. I’m toying around with an idea for one of my own, so we’ll see if that ever materialises.

I’m lumping this in with the first one because they’re both to do with explicitly mentioning games (either specific games or things particular to gaming as a medium) within fiction.

WAY THE SECOND: Inspiration from stories told by games

Look, all art is theft. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. Or something. We’re all just chucking together stories we’ve internalised and mushing them up into something that’s kind of our own thing but inextricably linked to and derived from stories we’ve heard.

And that’s fine, by the way. Some of my favourite art is absolutely directly referential: take Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu, about which I’m sure I saw someone quoted as saying something along the lines of ‘this is Chopin telling us what he hears when he listens to the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata’. By the way, if you’ve only ever heard the first and most famous movement of that sonata, go listen to the whole thing. It’s great.

Anyway, we can’t help but be influenced and inspired by the stories that have wormed their way into our own heads. For me, a lot of those stories were told in games. So, yeah, in the same way that I definitely find both big themes and small details from books I’ve read creeping into what I write, I find the stories of the games I’ve played inevitably making little appearances too. Maybe it’s a character inspired by one I liked, or a big epic scene that harkens back to a battle I loved playing, or something more subtle like a thematic point inspired by a game.

WAY THE THIRD: Perspective on storytelling as a Thing

This is the biggest and weirdest one, and also the one with which I’ve probably done the least, but it’s something I think about a lot.

I think the best stories are those that can only really be told in their specific medium. I’ve written about that before, I’m pretty sure. It feels particularly relevant for games because games are uniquely interactive and therefore probably the medium that’s least directly translatable. It’s hard to do multiple endings (or smaller differentiations based on player/reader/audience-whatever behaviour) in any other media.

Now, I haven’t written a game. (Yet.) But I do often find myself thinking about this principle, which in my mind is most heavily informed by and linked to gaming. Whatever I’m making, I try to think about whether it works best in the medium I want to do it in. If it doesn’t… well, depending on technical limitations and my ability to do things in other media, I might have to compromise, or tweak it. Or give up. Y’know, that happens. I mean, there are actually one or two stories I’ve just dropped because I do in fact think they’d be more effective at getting their points across if they were interactive, and I simply haven’t got around to figuring out how to make them yet. I want to some day. We’ll see.

Beyond this, I think gaming has also probably affected my perception of the structure of stories. I mean, I think other things have too, and I think whenever I’m writing something I tend to make a conscious choice about the structure it’ll have. Maybe it’ll be a kind of loose not-much-plot with a lot of Theme and Vibes like a lot of the stuff I’ve been reading in translation recently. Maybe it’ll be a tighter, more adventurous three-act sort of thing like the popular fantasy books I used to love (and still do, but no longer as exclusively!). Or maybe it’ll be something that ebbs and flows in the way games often do, giving players (and/or readers) big moments to build up to and then little reprieves to catch their breath.

In Conclusion

I think anyone who makes art of any kind is inevitably going to carry the art they’ve experienced themselves forwards. They’ll reinterpret it, draw from it, respond to it. For anyone who’s played games, I think that means games are going to come out in the things you create.

That might be that you play, say, NieR: Automata and become so enamoured by its soundtrack that you start playing around with your own synths to try to recreate similar effects.

Or maybe you play, I dunno, NieR: Automata and really dig the way it’s structured, so you start sketching out stories that do similar things with time and place and revelation.

Or, perhaps, and bear with me here, but you play NieR: Automata – just as a random example – and can’t stop thinking about the way two particular characters are inextricably intertwined, the one affecting the other in ways that couldn’t be predicted, and just get inspired to write a story with a similar kind of device.

OR MAYBE YOU PLAY NIER: AUTOMATA AND YOU-

OK, so I’ve been playing NieR: Automata and maybe I’m very into it. Should’ve seen that coming, really.

Anyway, the point is that games, just like anything else in life – books, landscapes, journeys, the sight of the sky, a peculiar smell, the sensation of a train leaving motion in its wake as it disappears from the station, a child staring out of the window at a dog, that one bit of toast that looked a bit like January Jones or whatever – can inspire. They can shape how you see things. And then that can come out as your own unique, weird mishmash of all the things you’ve ever experienced, perspective in the things you create.

I think that’s pretty great, really.