Stop looking at me like I’m trying to justify myself and you’re not believing a word of it.

The truth is that the novel has become a bit of a grind lately, as most novels do at some point in the writing I’m sure. There are some really exciting bits on the horizon, and even some exciting bits to write right now, but I think my brain is calling out for a break. I’m still writing six days a week, though.

So I need a creative side project. Short stories are out because that’s just more prose writing and that’s what I need a break from. TV and video games are fun, but I can only play them so much before I start to feel icky and unproductive. Providentially, the chance for a great side project has presented itself in the form of the CoolMiniOrNot Expo that just happens to be taking place next month only minutes from my house and right next door to where I work.

How is this a chance to be both creative and productive? I have, in my closet, a prototype for a dice and card game that my brother and I cam up with about a year ago. The best way I can explain its premise is with this handy visual:

How could anybody resist that, right?

Because that isn’t enough, Daniel and I have started working on an even more complicated game that looks something like this:

So, best case scenario we show off our games to some industry big shots and sell them for a majillion dollars. If not, we’ve having an awful lot of fun doing it and I think it’s just the creative break my mind needs right now.

Ever since I discovered that my school library had a small stock of Choose Your Own Adventure books, I have craved the experience of interactive adventures.

Stephen King has expressed his belief that writing is a form of telepathy. That he can think something, write it down, and that you can read it and hear his words a million miles away or a hundred years after he’s dead. As an enthusiastic writer and reader of fiction, I’ve always appreciated this view and cherished  how the written word has changed my life for the better.

When this sort of mental collaboration, this sharing of ideas and thoughts, takes place in real time, the experience gets even better. When I fully discovered pen and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, I melded the real time storytelling with my experiences in improv theater. Ever since, my very favorite pastime has always been a good roleplaying game with friends old or new. There’s always something wildly unpredictable about it, a sense of freedom that can’t be found anywhere else. Many of these shared story experiences have stayed with me and affected me as deeply as any book of fiction I’ve ever read.

But sometimes you want to experience a story on your own terms. You want to experience that telepathy in solitude, but perhaps you still long for that interactivity, the ability to influence the story. Computer and video game RPGs seemed like the perfect marriage of experiencing a story at your own pace and still having a hand in its outcome.

I positively loved the RPGs I played in high school. I still remember some of the adventures I had in Baldur’s Gate II and Knights of the Old Republic. I didn’t just listen to the stories and interact with characters, I explored worlds and took risks that were my choice to take. Years later I convinced my wife to try Knights of the Old Republic and she loved it.

In recent years, however, the gaming industry has consistently let me down. More and more RPG properties have moved to the Massively Multiplayer Online model of gaming, something that doesn’t interest me at all because I find the stories bland and impersonal, not to mention the business model sickens me (that’s an entirely different article). In the middle of this blizzard of MMOs, the developers of my two favorite RPG games announced a new title: Dragon Age: Origins. Early articles discussed the game’s breakthrough story lines, gameplay, and choices. I was really excited about that game.

The first official trailer I came across for Dragon Age was titled :”Sex and Violence.”

Unnecessarily Cutting Me Out with Breasts and Blood

I was crushed. As I grew older and matured, so did the genre of video games that I loved, and not in a good way. As the 2000s rolled on and the video game generation grew up, the battle cry of developers became, “Video games aren’t just for kids anymore.” In my opinion, they seem to have painfully over-corrected into forgetting that there’s a whole population of people who want to enjoy games that aren’t all bright colors and kid’s pop, but also don’t want to jump straight into the seething cesspit of adult content. “Gritty” became the byword of the day.

In 2004 I stopped playing games rated M for Mature. I was working at blockbuster and every week, every week, someone came in with their pre-teen child to rent Grand Theft Auto, a series that teaches the player that if you make your character sleep with a prostitute, you can get your money back by killing her afterward. This was the same summer that the Playboy video game came out, tramp stamped with that little M in the corner. I decided to boycott M games from that time on, five years before I even had a child of my own to worry about.

In recent years, I sat despondent as a cavalcade of blockbuster games went by: Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Skyrim, BioShock. I could experience their critically acclaimed stories and expansive worlds only if I was willing to wade knee-deep in gore, get flashed with pixelated nudity, and have my ears warmed with the kind of prurient bad language I wish I had left behind in high school. Sex and violence have always existed in fiction but they don’t have a place in every story and I’m still dismayed that developers and marketers somehow find them so necessary in the stories they want to tell.

Now comes BioShock Infinite and finally I feel like my own opinions are being echoed in the
mainstream. I’ve always known there were others who shared my opinion, maybe even the silent majority of gamers, but arguments against excessive violence and the sexual objectification of women seem to have always been shrugged off or marginalized with arguments that, “We know our audience and that’s who we’re making games for.”

I don’t know if I can call it an outcry, but there are certainly a lot of people talking about the violence in BioShock Infinite and how it detracts from the beauty of the world and the emotional poignancy of the story. People who love the game are asking, “Do I really need to make all of these heads explode while I try to discover the truth about my characters and the world?”

While I’ve read that there isn’t an incredible amount of explicit sexual content in BioShock Infinite, the creator’s response to early online reaction about the game’s artwork is illuminating. One of the main characters, an attractive young woman named Elizabeth, is depicted in a corset-like dress with a low cut top. Much of the early chatter about the game centered on this character’s breasts. Creator Kevin Levine expressed dismay over this focus on relegating his painstakingly nuanced character to sexual object status. He laments about how much time he spent getting the emotion in her eyes just right and how he hardly gave a thought to the low cut top.

Exactly.

He didn’t think about how distracting it would be to have an attractive woman in a low cut top. He couldn’t believe how focused people were on it, either in praise or complaint. I guess this proves he doesn’t know his audience as well as he thought. This latter story highlights my question: If something distracts from the main elements of the game, why include it? Does anyone recommend a game to a friend based on how much cleavage it contains? If people do, they have to be just a tiny slice of the buying population that is in some inexplicable way being catered to. It’s mind boggling.

So I’ll stick BioShock Infinite up on my mental shelf of stories I would love to have experienced, if only game creators hadn’t cut me out by unnecessarily narrowing their audience.

I find online interactions rewarding and I’m constantly grateful to live in an age where technology allows me to reconnect with family and old friends, as well as providing a legitimate way to make new friendships. I’m afraid though, that my online socializing reflects the amount of socializing I get to do in the real world all too well, only on a far grander scale.

In the real world, when I get the rare opportunity to hang out with someone while I’m not working, writing, raising two boys, or spending time with my wife (sleeping counts as quality time, right?), I have to choose between dozens of people in my pool of friends and family. The reality of my online life is that during the course of my week, when I sit down to a computer, I am supposed to be:

A: working as a paralegal

or

B: writing fiction

It would be preposterous of me to pretend, when I am ostensibly doing one of these things, that I don’t occasionally peek at social media, look at pictures of things wrapped in bacon (usually as a result of peeking at social media), or play Torchlight 2.

When I get that chance to look at my social media feeds, I’m often utterly overwhelmed by the new information that gets uploaded by the minute. Maybe it’s a bit of an excuse to say I’ve been on social media less than a year and a half, but it’s still pretty daunting to me.

When the hierarchy of needs comes calling, things I want to do suffer unevenly and at different times. If you take a quick look at the two posts previous to this one, you can tell that my blog has suffered from this hierarchy of needs.

Other than the needs of work and family, the thing that has been eating most of my time is a new novel I’ve started. I wrote a novel a couple of years ago and then decided it was a glorious first attempt and I promptly trunked it to work on short stories for a while. Since January 1st, however, I’ve been back at the grindstone hard and I’ve already got 40k new words to show for it. Also, also, we joined the YMCA and really enjoying some healthy exercise.

In short, I’m still here, but busier than ever.

This happened while searching for something to eat on a recent trip to Ellijay, Georgia.

The reviews were not as hilarious as I had hoped. Click for a larger screenshot.

Me: Daniel, because you are my brother and my friend I will share some of my pumpkin pie with you.

Daniel:…Oh, okay. Thanks.

Me: You do like pumpkin pie, don’t you?

Daniel: I mean, it’s okay.

Me: I have decided you may not have any. I hope you understand.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s okay. You’ll probably enjoy it more.

Me: Undoubtedly. Good day, sir.

My Kickstarter for The Tome of Ideas for Writers and Roleplayers was unsuccessful. It was, of course, painful in many ways but in many more it has been a wonderfully positive experience.

I tried something daring, I received critical praise from a host of talented professionals and interested individuals and most of all I learned a lot about myself. The pressures I handle well and those I don’t. The things I like to do and things I hope I never have to do again.

What went wrong? It could have been any number of things, many unknowable. There’s a big difference between an idea that people think is great and an idea that they want to spend money on. I personally think that the greatest failing of the project was something that I originally thought was one of its greatest strengths. The audience was unclear.

I made the assumption that because I am both a writer and a roleplayer than there would be many, many people like me, and I’m sure there are, but that thought lacked a crucial component. What about people who were one or the other? I think it’s likely that many writers looked at Tome of Ideas and said, “Cool, but it looks like it’s more for roleplaying.” My theory is that most roleplayers had the same thought in reverse. I could be wrong and it could be something else entirely.

Whatever the reason, Tome of Ideas needs some more work before it sees the light of day. I couldn’t be more grateful for an experience that didn’t pan out, but left me encouraged and excited to move on, both with this idea and with the many others that I have.

You haven’t seen the last of me. Not by a long shot.

With the advent of our very own Nerdi Gras, I thought it’d be fun to look back a year ago with some audio of a panel I wriggled my way onto.

Mormonism in Sci Fi Panel (Click on the right side to download)

I’m not on any panels this year, but it’s more of a relief. There’s enough crazy scheduling at a convention that not worrying about having to be at a certain place at a certain time can be nice.

Such is the case with this list of 22 Story Telling Tips from Pixar that I found the other day. Like any writing rules, they can be taken with a grain of salt and, as Barbossa would say it, “more what you’d call ‘guidelines.’”

I didn’t want to rely on my shaky knowledge of space though, so I asked a friend who works in the space industry and he steered me toward this article on Gizmodo.

Good information, even if it did ruin my joke.