Writing fields

I've been a gamer for pretty much my entire life, and it has its advantages and disadvantages. I get to experience stories in a way that no book, tv show, or move could ever convey them. But games also take significantly longer to tell their stories, and so I don't get to experience as many. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. I've learned to pick the games that I know I'll enjoy, and I've found key ways of telling early on the quality of a game's story. I'd try to explain them, but it's really more of a feeling kind of thing than anything else. Sorry about that.

When I was younger, I thought for a while about making my own games. I even went to a camp that taught you how to make them. Turns out, I'm really bad at game design. So I kinda stopped thinking about that, and I turned to books, which I had always enjoyed, and had even tried to write my own. I approached them with more concentration, more focus.

But I've found with time that my connection to games is too heavy. I want to write my books with the aspects of some of the things from games that make my love them so much. This is especially true when it comes to fight scenes, which is one of my more favorable scenes. It can be difficult to portray what exactly is going on without visuals. I want certain things to happen, and being able to see them makes that easy. But being constrained by words makes it significantly more challenging. It's not that it's not possible, it's just that I have trouble finding the words. They say a picture's worth a thousand words, after all, and in some cases you simply have to agree.

Every once in a while, my mind drifts back to that childhood concept of making games. As I've grown older, I've started realizing that I'm not actually interested in making the game itself. Rather, I want to tell a game's story. I would love to write the script for a game, have an input on how things happen, and why. The problem with that is that I've spent all of my life focusing my writing on a novel style. There's nothing wrong with that, and I love writing books. But it does make that concept of writing for a game, which has been part of me for a long time, difficult to attain.

I don't know if that is ever something that I would truly pursue. Would I love for it to? Certainly. The thought of my story being translated into picture, and then further into something that a person actively has to take part in, is amazing and enticing. However, if it were going to happen, it would be much more likely to be dependent on a book I write being made into a movie, and then that movie being made into a game. And if you've ever seen something like that happen, you know it isn't pretty. There's just so much that can be, and is, lost in translation. You lose so much meaning as you try to move from one medium to another.

Sometimes I imagine being the person that makes it work. It's not like it hasn't before. The Lord of the Ring is an excellent example. Sure, not all of the games made for that series are great, or even good, but there are some stand out titles. I don't think that I could ever reach the heights of Lord of the Ring, nor do I particularly want to. But thinking that I could write something that could go down that path is invigorating.

It takes a lot of time and effort and skill to be able to write, regardless of what field you are writing in. And those fields aren't necessarily going to be able to cross over in to each other. It's unfortunate, but it's true. I'd love to work with people who write in different fields, see their thought processes, try to understand what their goals are and how they're attaining them. I feel like I could learn a lot from them, and hopefully they could learn from me. And maybe then we could take what we've learned, and each be able to make our own writings stronger. I think that would be pretty cool.