Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts

Sunday, December 27, 2015

LinkedIn Group: Game Writer Exchange 1,025 members

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2578390

Writers are often THE LAST TO BE CALLED into the game planning and development process, but are expected to pull a gigantic elephant out of the tiny hat.

Just like art graphics and programming code good writing and especially GREAT WRITING needs time to build its understructure and then layer on muscle and flesh.

The more WE WRITERS share and give one another a hand up to get each and every one of us into projects earlier, the better our writing will be and THE BETTER THE GAMES WE WRITE WILL BE, and the sooner we’ll be asked to the party.

No more last minute literary rescues and trying to piecing together plots that makes all the already chosen graphics work. Which can be great—if it works—and disastrous and a blame on the writer when it doesn’t.

Let’s all move ahead, together.

[game writer group, game writers group, writer, games, game, narrative]

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Writing in Games: It’s Much More Than Narrative_Why some of the best writing has nothing to do with character or story. By Tim Biggs

22 Jun 2014  Warning: This feature contains a minor spoiler for The Last of Us: Left Behind.

Writing can make or break a game. It takes many forms - from dialogue to in-game literature, voiceovers or even scripted environmental events - but in almost all cases it aims to move the game along, distil complexity into something meaningful, give justifications for gameplay conceits and keep the player attached to the characters and scenarios through story.

When it comes to pointing out ‘good writing’ in games though, we don’t always look to the examples that do these things best. More often than not we associate ‘good writing’ with well-crafted story content and entertaining text or dialogue, and while this obviously isn’t a negative thing in and of itself, it leaves room for the idea that there are games with great, skilful writing that we don’t think of as such because they aren’t literary or don’t tell a gripping story. So is there a problem with the way we evaluate the quality of writing in games?


With the exception of pure narrative, writing in games must be function first; less to do with crafting a story and more to do with non-literary concerns like player retention and awareness.
 
Often when we talk about writing, we refer to the bits between or on top of the gameplay, where the characters talk to one another or you read some text to gain exposition. Yet while that kind of writing is easier for us to identify and analyse (by looking for the indicators of quality we recognise from literature and other media), the more game-specific, more technical (and depending on the game, more vital) form of writing that takes place during and informs the gameplay can often be overlooked.

With the exception of pure narrative (for example in a cutscene), writing in games must be function first, which is to say it’s less to do with crafting a story and more to do with non-literary concerns like player retention and awareness. Concerns like how does a player know the only way to exit the room is through a ladder in the roof? What does an AI character say to alert the player to incoming danger? How will the game explain to the player that a particular area is off-limits?

Whether these concerns are addressed seamlessly depends almost entirely on the quality of the writing which, like most other art in games, is usually there to build part of the scaffolding as much as part of the pretty façade. For example having a character deliver a “no, this doesn’t go here” or a “just three more to go” or heaven forbid a “hey, listen” serves a gameplay purpose rather than a literary one, and so should be judged on whether that purpose is realised.



Ride as fast as you like, you can't get away from Navi...

Ride as fast as you like, you can't get away from Navi...

Even if an offhand character remark gives you exactly the information you need at the right time to have things click into place and make you feel like a genius or a badass, such writing is unlikely to be called out as ‘good’, and I think it boils down to the fact that this kind of functional writing only really exists in video games.

As a baseline, consider Naughty Dog's Uncharted trilogy and The Last of Us, which are generally very well regarded in terms of writing and storytelling. This can be seen most recently in The Last of Us Left Behind DLC, in which the narrative cleverly negotiates our familiarity with coming-of-age stories. 

Although stories of this type tend to be predictable and hard to pull off owing to the sheer number of times they’ve been told, the characterisation and literary restraint in Left Behind allows an experience that feels exciting and surprising while still managing to convey something deeply universal. Had the characters been written more salaciously or more in line with traditional young love stories, the player would surely have anticipated this and the impact of Left Behind would have been undermined.



Such a believable relationship.

Such a believable relationship.

Stories like these show that video games are just as capable of incredible storytelling as film and literature, but it’s plain to see that the cleverness and skill with which the game’s narrative aspects are handled are satisfying to us in all the ways we recognise from those purely narrative forms. We recognise them as hallmarks of good storytelling. So what about the cleverness and writing skills unique to video games as a form? For an example of that I’m going to jump to a game similar to The Last of Us in many ways, but also very different.

 
The Gears of War games, not always regarded as having ‘good writing’ (“Never thought it would end like this, huh Maria!?”) make an interesting example in my argument that the way we measure writing quality in games might center the discussion mostly on the overtly artistic or narrative kind.

Whether or not the story being told in the latest game - Judgment - was of a high quality in the traditional sense, the writing was exceptional. Take the declassified missions for example, which appeared in each chapter and offered an optional set of parameters to the player, increasing the challenge but also the reward.

The parameters obviously had to be fun from a gameplay point of view, but their in-game justification required scenarios that made sense to that exact part of the narrative, could be left out entirely if the player so chose, and delivered a reasonable explanation for why visibility was suddenly limited or the mission had to be accomplished under a certain time constraint. In addition to this, voiceover had to be written that explained these ludicrous happenings from the perspective of one of the main characters, bringing in their own perspective and personality.

In the end the player has an understanding of the option, the consequences and the story, and they’ve stayed immersed in the artifice of the game throughout. It’s a great (if not very subtle) example of games writing acting as the carpenter’s hammer rather than the novelist’s pen. While none of it hit you in the gut, brought a tear to your eye or made you gasp with an unexpected twist, it was good writing nonetheless.



Turns out DudeBros can also be effective communicators!

Turns out DudeBros can also be effective communicators too.

Zooming in from the overarching scenario-type writing to the minute-to-minute experience kind, you can also see a vital role that’s easy to overlook. We’ve all had experiences where the entirety of what’s happening in a game fails to be communicated to us coherently, either because we haven’t grasped an important mechanic or are just not looking at it the intended way.

Often in fast-paced action-heavy games where that doesn’t happen a lot (like Gears), it’s because your focus and understanding of the scenario is being shaped by mission directives or context-specific character speech. For all its malignment, “RAZOR HAIL” is a pretty stunningly effective thing for a character to scream at you if you need to be told “keep yourself covered from above at all times or you’ll be ripped to shreds”.

Whether a particular game is built around mechanics or a story at its core (or both), the function of this seemingly incidental writing is to connect the player in their limited perspective to their place in the immediate scenario and the wider game world.

A poorly written or communicated aspect of the game will break the player’s ability to experience the game as intended, even as the disruptive and unpredictable tendencies of the player will break any writer’s attempt to focus attention too absolutely or tell a story too linearly. Yet for all this, if the writing of a game is absolutely nailed the player will hardly even notice it’s there while they’re playing.

It’s this unique relationship between players and game designers - each affecting the way the other creates and experiences - that makes the supporting writing in games so largely unlike the writing in any other media, and it’s why that writing is just as worthy and just as deserving of our analysis and attention as the more literary kind we tend to focus on. 
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Tim is a freelance writer based in Sydney. You can catch up with him on Twitter and why not join the whole IGN Australia team on Facebook?

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Adult women are now the largest demographic in gaming By Aja Romano on August 25, 2014

http://www.dailydot.com/geek/adult-women-largest-gaming-demographic/




Congratulations, gamer girls—you're officially at the top of the food chain when it comes to games. A new study released by the Entertainment Software Association has revealed that adult women now occupy the largest demographic in the gaming industry. Women over 18 made up a whopping 36 percent of the gaming population, followed by adult men at 35 percent. 

Teenage boys, who are often stereotyped as the biggest gamers, now lag far behind their older female counterparts, making up just 17 percent of the gaming demographic.

The picture that emerges from the study is one of expansion across the board. More people are playing more games of various genres across more platforms, with social games on mobile and casual games on PCs emerging as huge leaders. 

According to the study, last year saw a significant boom in women over 50—their numbers jumped by a whopping 32 percent between 2012 and 2013. The study also revealed that 59 percent of Americans play games, with gaming consoles present in 51 percent of all U.S. households. 

All of that means that stereotypes are breaking fast in the gaming industry, particularly the longheld stereotype of the adult woman as an outlier who sticks to mobile games and "social" games on Facebook while the more hardcore gamer, the "serious" (male) gamer, goes for console games.

Though this stereotype has long persisted, and even been used as a hiring tactic, the new data suggests there's little if any truth to it—especially not when you consider that the average adult woman has been gaming for 13 years.

Sorry, male gamers of Reddit and 4Chan, but Angry Birds only came out five years ago. 

Unless you want to try to argue that women have just been playing Bejeweled for the last 13 years, the math just doesn't add up. 

And while the total audience for mobile social games is now bigger than ever, the audience for computer and video games is now an even 50-50 split between male and female genders.

Screengrab via The ESA

So what games have women been playing all these years, now that we know they haven't just been wasting time trying to get their Facebook friends to give them free lives on Candy Crush

Casual computer games, mostly. The report ranks online and mobile puzzle games, board games, trivia games, and card games as coming in second to the boom in social games, which more than doubled in popularity between 2012 and 2013.

Meanwhile, action and first-person shooter games continue to be the top sellers in video games, with Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty ranking as the bestselling video games of 2013. For computer games, Starcraft II and The Sims franchise gobbled up the top 10 computer game titles, with Sims titles consuming eight of the top 12 computer game titles sold last year.

The study also took a close look at parental behavior regarding monitoring the gaming activity of their teens and children. The study indicated that parents seemed deeply engaged when it came to monitoring the kinds of games kids played. Additionally, 47 percent of adults who play games with their kids said they do it because they love gaming as much as their child does.

And it's easy to see why. While the study didn't assess the age or gender demographics of specific games, the titles of the bestsellers attest to the diversity of the games themselves: Pokemon XFinal Fantasy XIVNBA 2K14. Bioshock Infinite. World of WarcraftJust Dance 2014.

Whether you play Diablo or Pet Rescue, you can rest assured that you're in good company. 

View the whole study online here.
 
H/T PBS; Photo via Wikimedia Commons; CC BY SA 3.0

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Neale Sourna Search at Google Books / Ebooks

  1. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Journal 1: Neale Sourna's ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0974195049
    Neale Sourna's NCAJ is the compilation of Volumes 1-3 of NCAD (North Coast Academies' Diary) and is Adult Erotic Fetish Fiction of short stories, under the theme of sexual diary/journal entries of an academic community.
  2. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Diary, Volume 2, #1_Ross - ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0979684102
    Sexy middle-aged stepdad, Ross Deever, wakes naked beside his newly deflowered, multiracial stepdaughter, Laila; then vainly tries abstaining from hitting it again.
  3. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Journal 1 (NCAJ1): Neale ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0979684188
    Journal compilation of six (6) hardcore, sexual short stories previously published individually, as "Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Diary" entries.Laila: Cozy With Daddy [7857 words];Yune: Suck My - - - - [3677 words];Ross: Daddy's ...
  4. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Diary, Volume 3, #1_3 Sex ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0979684110
    And gets it.16,337 words all stories totaledNCADv3n1--Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Diary--3 Sex Views: Ross, Laila, and Sascha
  5. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Diary, Volume 1, #1_Laila - ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0974195057
    Neale Sournas NCAD is Adult Erotic Fetish Fiction, usually one short story per issue [i.e., approx. 5000 wds/approx. 15 6.14x9.21 story issue pgs], under the theme of sexual diary/journal entries of an academic community.
  6. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Diary, Volume 1, #2_Yune - ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0974195073
    --Fellatio with voyeuristic exhibition, a humiliation cream facial, and a motherly deepthroat, and yes, gulp, mom swallows. --3677 words --Neale Sourna's NCAD is Adult Erotic Fetish Fiction, usually one short story per issue [i.e., approx. ...
  7. Hobble [An Adult Fiction]

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903080
    Half Native American medical professional BENNET GILLESPIE'S "off track" life dangerously spirals, as his compulsive and sexual, love entanglement with DAY, a "knife-happy" African American "innocent," and her overbearing, elderly British ...
     
  1. Neale Sourna's CuntSinger - Cunnilingus: How to Give Head (Oral ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0979684153
    Cunnilingus: How to Give Head (Oral Sex and Eating Pussy), for Giving Women Orgasms of Cuntlicious Joy!_also titled SexSinger: Cunnilingus [2011]www.cuntsinger.com
  2. Neale Sourna's SexSinger - Cunnilingus: How to Give Head (Oral Sex ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903021
    Neale Sourna - 2011 - No preview - More editions
    Cunnilingus: How to Give Head (Oral Sex and Eating Pussy), for Giving Women Orgasms of Cuntlicious Joy!
  3. Three - By Invitation Only

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903099
    A sexy woman, a nameless man; she picks him up, as her husband watches, then she invites the new man to enjoy sex with them in their wealthy suburban home. Swingers, three-way, and more. _8967+ words
  4. Neale Sourna's North Coast Academies' Journal 1, Neale Sourna's ... - Page 54

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0974195049
    Neale Sourna. This new blade was incredibly sweet, too. Perfect. Balanced. Elegant. Slim yet shapely, and strong. Deadly. A smart blade. A beautiful blade. Just like Laila. I couraged up and, feeling the heat of the shop leaving the sweaty skin ...
  5. Hobble

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0741412845
    Neale Sourna - 2002 - No preview - More editions
  6. Dia's Team Bang (3)

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903145
    Dia's the only cheerleader on the team bus filled with excited, champion ball players, managers, a middle-aged co-coach, and Mr. Dean, the one teacher / coach Dia'd open her lovely thighs wide for, anytime and anywhere, and secretly already ...
  7. Steve's Monkey's Paw & More

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0974195081
    Plus, there is more stories and fascinating excerpts from Neale Sournas award-winning novel, HOBBLE, and other novels soon to come.
  8. All Along the Watchtower - Submerged: A Novel Excerpt

    books.google.com/books?isbn=097968417X
    I had a dream, literally, and it was a wordless, brief scene of great emotion, in which a warrior, in his king's name, had just devastated a people, and that his lover was the leader of those displaced and destroyed people; and, in waking, ...
  9. The Freelancer

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903005
    Annie's new temp, Ryan, with the fascinating ass, is great at his job, even on his very first day; but, he's driving her to distraction and she can't get anything done!When Annie works late and alone, to catch up on work, gorgeous Ryan ...
  1. Dia's Coach (1)

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903056
    Young Dia is a naughty cheerleader, who prefers older men, well, one particular older man.
  2. No Wedding Night

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903072
    A wedding, a reception brawl, and the bride and groom's wedding night will be in jail. Or will it?_866 words Romance
  3. Hesitation

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903102
    A businesswoman's emotional conflict between overthinking versus her erotic needs is tested when she's caught in the rain with the man who keeps her mind and emotions distracted.
  4. Rough-Me Dot Com

    books.google.com/books?isbn=1938903013
    Dot com queen, Lara, runs an internet dating hookup site for "rough sex.
  5. Temple and Silent Tommy - Bedrooms: [A Post Second World War ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=193890303X
    [A Post Second World War (WWII) Love Story/Novel Excerpt] Neale Sourna. Copyright. ©. 2011. by. Neale. Sourna. All rights reserved. No part of this ebook shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, ...
  6. Steve's Monkey's Paw and More

    books.google.com/books?isbn=097419509X
    Neale Sourna. others outside his office, envisioning her strong and well-toned, shapely legs vised around me. And at their center, her dark, humid, triangular arrow of musky lust pointing and directing me . . . . I'll hit that target, if he won't.
  7. Libidinous 1: A Neale Sourna Short Story Collection with ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0974195065
    Neale Sourna - 2010 - No preview
  8. Dez at the Silver Pole

    books.google.com/books?isbn=193890317X
    Dez is a willful, stubborn hottie, the bisexual top stripper and erotic dancer [exotic dancer] at Max's club; independent to the bone, she won't be controlled.
  9. Seduce Her Like Keanu Reeves: 3 Articles: Seduce, 10 Seduction ...

    books.google.com/books?isbn=0979684161
    3 Articles: Seduce, 10 Seduction Secrets, List of Bad Lovers Neale Sourna. Margrave Manor & Margrave Manor 2: The Lost Ship Games Table of Contents 3 Articles: Seduce, 10 Seduction Secrets, List. http://www.inertiasoftware.com/ www.