This one is going to be weird. I’m writing this on a whim, due to some thoughts I had while playing Warframe. And what got me thinking is a specific mission and all the things that can happen during it.

Let’s talk Derelict Sabotage and why I think this is an excellent example of randomly generated content.

So I’m here making a game with sex in it, and yet I don’t play porn games at all. That might seem a bit strange, and I’ve been asked about it a lot. So how did this happen exactly?

Well, it’s not that I don’t want to play porn games, I like both sex and games, considering everything I’ve written on this blog should give a good indication that’s the case. But I don’t engage in that. And the reason why is simple, they are boring.

For the second instalment of this series, I decided to speak a bit more about personal experiences, specifically about a condition called depersonalisation. Due to the reaction to my previous article on this series, I urge you not to read if you don’t want to have a bad time. Nothing I will say in what follows is pleasant.

With the whole interpretation and death of the author bit out of the way I feel it’s finally time to move onto something very close to my heart. Co-authoring. And this isn’t what thing where you write something with at least one other person.

What I’m interested in is co-authoring as something that happens between the artist and the audience. Something few mediums can accomplish easily, but which always stood to me one the forefront of the potential video games has as an art form.

Apart from a few sparse posts, I’ve mostly focused on the writer’s end of the creative stick. But this has two ends, and we’re going to take a look at things from the other side now — the audience side. And we’ll talk about interpretation and a few things all authors should be aware in regards to their work.

Oh man, getting back to this series? I feel bad when I seemingly abandon a series I still had more to say about. In truth, I just have very limited time.

But enough of that, let’s get to the topic at hand. Previously I talked a lot about remembering and little tips on how to make use of characters remembering things in a video game. Today I’d like to talk about something a little bit different and a little bit more conceptual. In fact, I’m not entirely sure this has any direct mechanical use in a game… but I think it’s something important to consider. I’m going to talk about forgetting and the obnoxiously fiddly nature of human memory.

What exactly is the point of using words to express something? It’s conveying information to someone else, right? Well, it can be, but it definitely can be seen in a slightly different light.

Sure, narration can serve to convey information. Information can express a story, but there are also qualia, which works somewhat differently and compliment purely informative forms of expression. They are different tools serving in different approaches to storytelling. And while they are not in some conflict, there are places where one works better than the other.

Let’s talk about suffering, yay! Today I’ll be tackling something close to my heart, various concepts relating to prolonged human suffering. And while I considered starting with something more relevant to myself, something maybe to do with neuropathy or fatigue, I decided to instead turn to a ubiquitous trope.

So this is going to be a several part series, and we’ll start with a case study of the “coughing up blood” trope and some general tips on describing any medical conditions in fiction.

I might as well write this, as the topic has popped up in several different discussions I had with people over the last few days. Representation of… whatever really. I guess recently the hot issues are things like women, LGBT individuals, people of colour. Yeah, let’s take a whack at all of them but especially at the first two categories. Since, you know, that’s relevant to what I am. Though of course, the relevance to who I am is very much up in the air.