www.morpheustales.com you often have to throw a lot of information at players, but you have to find ways to communicate things very efficiently. So it’s a really good training ground for learning how to entertain while informing.
writing? It definitely affected how I think about structure, dialogue, and world-building. Games really excel at giving us access to new worlds, so I think working in games expanded a lot of how I thought about the Duskwalker world, and helped me get comfortable with the idea of carrying a whole world around in my head.
What are your other influences? I try to read a fair amount of non-fiction, though I don’t necessarily focus on a particular topic of study. Really anything that gives an account of human nature is ultimately helpful in creative writing, so whether it’s military history, or behavioural economics, or philosophy, or psychology, or survival guides, all of those things are interesting to me. I’m also just kind of a naturally curious guy. Which I think drives my wife nuts, because I have a huge stack of books on my nightstand, and any time she suggests I put something on a shelf I tell her I can’t because I’m reading it. It’s not unusual for me to be reading five or six books at the same time, depending on what I feel like any given night.
Video games also are kind of fractal in their storytelling; for example, you can have a twelvehour long story, broken down into three-hour long arcs, which are each broken into one-hour long sequences, each broken into tenminute game loops. Working in an environment where you’re constantly looking for ways to make a five- to twentyminute scenario feel like its own microstory while still being consistent and meaningful with a larger framework has a lot of similarities to plotting a long-form work like a novel. And though I really think screenwriting was the most effective teacher for me in terms of dialogue-writing, games present their own challenge on that front. In writing for games,
Where do you get your inspiration? 9