Talk:Game Writers SIG/Initiatives/Essay compilation

International Game Developers Association

While I'm at it, I'd like to propose a limited number of chapter editors based on the following comment from above...

"One thing I want to avoid is a book that consists of disparate essays"

While structure helps prevent this, a constrained group of editors helps here as well, it helps to keep structure, focus and tone in-line chapter to chapter. We'll need to think about voice and how important it is to us for voice to be consistent throughout. How and why are we choosing to use many different authors (other than to share the load)? It's clear we'll get different perspectives and experience from using different authors, how far do we want to go to avoid appearing like a book of "Disparate Essays" or how close to a textbook?

Just grist for the mill :-)

I'm still interested in the basics of narrative chapter (since as a prof with lots of narrative and interactive teaching credits and no professional game credits its the one I can do on this project :-) ) but I'm also interested in helping with editing at the chapter or volume level. Been a technical editor for several Java and Web books. -- roc-66-66-2-149.rochester.rr.com (2004-09-06 09:29:31)

Another chapter idea... Something covering how-to's or guidelines for "meta-text" writing, the kind of invisible stuff that end-users rarely see but which can aid developers in fashioning the gameworld - character biogs/sketches, world building and "colour", story premises etc. And by the way, I'd like to put my vote in for "Of Mice and Pen" as a title. Smashing!

I'd love to contribute to this: I've just written a sort of academic book for the Italian publisher Ludologica on the GTA series. I'm doing a lot of story design work at the moment - plotting, basically, so a chapter concerned with that would appeal to me. I'm also working on a project utilising some textual dialogues a la Eliza, whereby the player can "talk" to characters, which also might make for an interesting section (in fact, a section on dialogue generally might be a good idea).