It’s wild to me to realize that my generation was the first generation to grow up with computer games. I had to remind myself that when I was very young, there were no home computers and no consoles and no arcade games, and then, in my lifetime, that became a thing. I lived through that? I lived through that. And then I lived through the era before online multiplayer games and the internet and internet-enabled games!
Can you imagine a world without games? I can’t, and I was born and gamboled through a large part of my childhood without them. Without even the conception of them. Board games, sure. Card games, yes. Social games like bingo and charades… but nothing involving a screen.
So I grew up with the computer gaming industry. I played the first text adventure games, like Zork; me and my friends played on the first consoles, the Atari and the Intellivision, at one another’s houses; my family gathered around the Apple IIe to watch my father navigate the eerie green line art map of the first installment of what would become the Wizardry franchise. We got to discover the wonder of color computer monitors—I remember loading games on floppy discs that were actually floppy. My engineer father enjoyed technology and science fiction, so as much as possible we got to experience the evolution of gaming and computing and consoles. I had shot ducks in Duck Hunt on the first Nintendo, played wild RPGs like Bard’s Tale, and the first simulation games (SimCity and Caesar I), and on and on, all the way into the internet age where (again!) I wound up playing online text games like Trade Wars and then MUCKs and MUDs, and got sucked into World of Warcraft 2 months after its launch….
It seems strange to realize that I was a gamer before ‘gamer’ was even a term. And a gamer girl, at that!
So to ask myself: ‘why did you decide to write a game’ seems unnecessary. I was a voracious reader growing up… I was also a dedicated game player. The same desire drew me: to be drawn into an experience, into a world that felt real, but stylized in interesting ways. I played all sorts of games, but the ones I enjoyed the most were the ones that allowed me to tinker with a simulated world. The same instinct that makes me want to build universes for my fiction makes me want to build universes for people to interact with, because in the end that’s the thing that I want most: to make worlds. And as awesome as worldbuilding is for fiction, a deft writer is discreet about how the reader interacts with that world, never overwhelming them, and subordinating it to the characters and the story.
But a game! A game can make the worldbuilding the point of the exercise. All the notes you make about the climate and the economy and the social classes, what foods people eat and how they farm and what they use for money and how that’s changed through the course of their history become useful fodder for game mechanics. Very little of it goes to waste. It’s exhilarating.
So, ‘why a game’ from a personal perspective was surprisingly natural: because I grew up playing games. Because I was among the first people to do so, and my memories of games are great ones. I played computer games with my father, with my spouse, with my sister, with my child… with friends who lived near me, and to keep in touch with friends who moved far away. Games are part of the texture of my life.
But that brings me to the other dimension of the question ‘why a game’, because I am a writer and an artist and I have been quietly making money at that gig for two decades now, and you don’t survive that long without being mindful of overall trends. I bought (and still have!) the very first, weirdly shaped slab-sided kindle Amazon ever produced because I said, “This is going to be important.” And the indie revolution that followed launched thousands of authors and made a midlister career possible for a lot of people, me included. Ebooks made reading accessible, easy, and cheap, and books that would never have found their audiences got traction in a marketplace that was still wide open in those early days of the indie revolution. As the market matured, it was harder to reach the income levels of those pioneers, but if you had the guts and the discipline and the ambition, you could still make it.
People have always complained about not getting enough attention, whether it was from tradpub’s marketing department, reviewers and tastemakers, or the algorithm. But lately, the substance of these complaints has shifted from sour grapes to ‘no actually, there is more content out there now than any one human could consume, and it’s harder to be visible in the stew than ever before. So now what?’
Everyone is scrambling for the answer to this question. How do you get discovered? How do you achieve critical mass? Where do you go to find Your People? How do you get people to read you? Talk about you? Recommend you? HOW DO YOU SELL? And that question is going to be answered in the same way ‘how do you build a sustainable career’ was in the past: “everyone’s path is going to be so idiosyncratic it’s going to be nearly impossible to copy.” So as usual, I’m not putting a ton of energy into figuring out how other people are making things work for them. I’m deciding on the gambles I’m willing to take, based on the talents and interests I have.
And I love games, and I build immersive fictional worlds.
Making a game, then, was the obvious next step, not just for me personally, but as a way of branching out into new revenue models.
Why a game, then? Because it’s a novel way to bring my worlds to new eyes. Maybe those people don’t want to read, don’t have the time, or can’t afford it. Maybe those people also love reading and will eventually decide to read my stories. But the Venn diagram of people who game and people who read only somewhat overlaps, and that means the work I’ve already put into making compelling worlds and characters can be put to use in a new way, and maybe lead me to new fans. Bonus: I also draw, and I have a little IT background, so this is an endeavor that uses other talents I already have.
Last October, I thought: “Well… why not dabble a little and see what happens?” And that’s when I started down this crazy road that I hope to tell you more about in future entries of this feature! So stay tuned for the next episode of GameDev Diary, where I tell you how I talked myself into this the same way I talk myself into boarding planes, and how you can use this strategy for yourself to tackle daunting projects. Because contrary to everything this introduction implies, I actually am very skeptical of new things and I’m rarely an early adopter of anything. Until now!
