80 days

Happy New Year! This month we've got Duncan (writer on Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Neo Cab, In the Valley of Gods, and the co-creator and writer of the Something True podcast) and Jon (writer, narrative designer and co-founder of Inkle, and has worked on games including 80 Days, Sorcery!, Heaven’s Vault, and Over the Alps) in to talk about being a writer without a writing degree, blank canvas vs well-defined main characters, research, hot air balloons, Lovecraft forums, when to stop researching, underappreciated game moments, player agency, the sweet spot between satisfying and frustrating, the role of writers in pre-production, and more. 

Our Guests on the Internet

Duncan's Website and Twitter.

Jon's Twitter, Inkle's Website and Twitter.

Stuff We Talked About

Idle Thumbs

Centralia, PA

Leliana's Song DLC

Rameses by Stephen Bond

Spider and Web by Andrew Plotkin

Pyst

Our theme music was created by Isabella Ness, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.

We're captivated by our guests this week, as Meg (creator of Samsara, lead writer on 80 Days, and contributor on Sunless Sea) and Richard (game designer on Gex, Pandemonium, the Soul Reaver series, lead game designer on Jak X and the first three Uncharted games, and Associate Professor in the Interactive Media and Games Division at USC) talk about the cultural influences of tabletop, LARPing and interactive theatre on games, the woes of being a freelance writer, finding work-life balance, the importance and need for editors, the propensity for systemic thinking, unfairness in games, following the rules of fiction vs the rules of games, systemizing choice, the structure of 80 Days, research giving safety to the player, whether genres are useful, the generic influences of The Velvet Underground and The Doors, games confident enough to not explode all over your face when you start them up, and taking responsibility for the stories and games we put out into the world.

Our Guests on the Internet

Meg's Twitter and Website.

Richard's Twitter and Website.

Stuff We Talked About

The Art of Fiction #2: Meg Jayanth by Duncan Fyfe

The Masque of the Red Death

Sleep No More

The Meadow

EA_Spouse

Henry Miller’s 11 Commandments of Writing

Meg's GDC 2015 talk - Leading Players Astray : 80 Days & Unexpected Stories

Dogme 95

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows

Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener

Meg's PRACTICE 2015 talk on Unfairness in Games

The Year of the Crush: How the Radically Unfair Candy Crush Saga Took Over Our Lives by Tevis Thompson

Donkeyspace by Frank Lantz

Towards a Steampunk Without Steam by Amal El-Mohtar

Wheels of Aurelia

Our theme music was composed by 2Mello, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.