Rancid Milk

dicksfordinner:

coelasquid:

dicksfordinner:

This is a woman who was hired because she wrote “good fanfiction.”

Which is essentially what any person hired to write characters they did not create is assigned to do.

I dunno, I tried to read her “novel” and if they fired her, Gaider, Mary and uhhh the other guy they could have an actual game studio again rather than a dating sims factory, but that’s just my opinion I guess.

Agreed. In response to previous comments.

She was not hired for writing good fanfiction, she was hired because she previously worked writing for RPG manuals and was also married to someone who already worked at Bioware. She’s said that games should be more like movies and books where you can skip around to the good parts. For a writer to skip sections in movies and novels for what she deems the “good parts”, she can’t be a good writer. She’s assuming people don’t care about growth, development and progress in stories and this is very obvious in how she writes because these are all the things that she neglects in her own writing.

For video games writing and designing characters is entirely different. Designing characters there are basic concepts that are universal because they’re the basics of art: color theory, silhouette, size/shape, etc. You wouldn’t need to play video games to design a good character. You do the same shit for animation, illustration, etc. A visual artist can get away with not playing or liking video games, I don’t think a writer can.

Story telling is entirely different for video games. It’s a medium of presenting a story that has divergent paths and works to assimilate a player into the game, as immersion is important via that tone. Artwork creates a setting, and helps to immerse, but falls apart without good writing. A good writer can do a better job than a bad writer at creating immersion, but obviously they would only reach the fullest potential of narrative and immersion by being familiar with video games. So I think a writer should have that experience, because then you have people like her and a few other writers at bioware that make subpar games.

I don’t know if you know anything about Jennifer Brandes Helper but she wrote and self-published a story that was essentially a fanfic where characters would stop mid dialogue that was essential to the plot to fuck… several times.

Apart from being a bad writer, why would anyone work for something they have no interested in within the realm of creativity? All that’s speaking on writing. But if you adapt a story to illustration, you read the book. If you adapt a comic to a movie, you read the comic. If you adapt a video game to a book you play it. If you draw for comics, you’re expected to be familiar with comics. If you storyboard you’re expected to be familiar with story boarding. If you make concept art or write for video games, you should at least be familiar with the medium, but definitely should for writing.

All games have dialogue and combat (or some “test” that functions as an equivalent). It’s a symbiotic relationship, really. They rely on eachother to present the story to the player. She doesn’t like playing video games and her saying she wants to skip through shows that. But people shouldn’t build video games for people that aren’t gamers. If people aren’t good at video games or have a difficult time learning controls there are difficulty levels. Not to mention her assuming all females can play video games or don’t have interest in them is an old sterotype and kind of sexist, and/or ignorant on her part.

What would bring more women to video games? Content that is more appealing to women probably, stronger female characters, probably. All her responses were what I would say describes a person out of her element or is unintelligent. That gives a bad rep to women who are capable to get into the field and actually have familiarity, so I resent her for that.

 She and her writing has in generally poorly affected Bioware’s games (ie. Dragon Age 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, a choice of a regular, story only or combat only scenerio mode for ME3 when it comes out which she referenced on fastforwarding, etc).

 A game where you just click buttons around and skip shit defeats the purpose as of video games as a medium. If people actually want to press buttons there are tons of text rpgs, facebook apps and iphone apps.

http://i.imgur.com/295Cx.png ( did not make this, but it’s a screencap I found, sorry for the cancer insults, etc.)

(Source: smktty)