I think when I get down to it I’m here on this earth to write or die. Or something like that that isn’t so cliche. My name is Ian, I’m a college freshman. I’m an English major (for the moment at least, I hope it stays that way) and I enjoy playing guitar, tabletop games, video games, being out in nature, rainy days and all that sort of stuff.
My goal with my classes and with my life in general at the moment is to become a better writer, by both learning new techniques and ways of thinking about writing and so on and by writing at every living moment possible. I’m hoping at a certain point I’ll be able to write a poem or a short story or a tabletop campaign and be proud of all of it and do it as easily as breathing.
Doing that is probably going to be a pretty unpleasant process. I’m a pretty anxious guy sometimes, and no matter how proud I am of something I write, having someone else read it or reading aloud makes my skin crawl in a way that few things do. At a certain point though I have to just accept that. C’est la vie and all that. I’m hoping that with this class I can both improve my writing as a whole and get more comfortable sharing my work with other people, while hopefully helping other people do the same.
An Update and Reflection Letter (5/3/2020)
If there is one thing that can be said: I know more about games that I did at the beginning of the semester. If someone had told me at the beginning of the class that I was going to make a Call of Cthulu module that would be played by one of my professors, I would have thought that was insane. But after a semester of learning how we enjoy games and how they’re designed, the ability to create my own tabletop content seems easier than ever.
I’ll be honest, the A.G.E. project is still kind of a big deal to me. I am amazed that I of all people wrote a module, and I am really happy that this class drove me to produce something like that, as well as the C.R.I.T. and D.I.E. projects. Going into this semester I was really anxious about sharing my writing with other people, but doing these sorts of projects has helped me gain confidence in my writing and sharing it.
I wrote in my About Me page at the beginning of the semester that my goal was to become a better writer, and I think this class has helped me with that aspiration a lot. Writing modules, game criticisms, and Twine games all made me think of writing in a different way than just typical prose and poetry, and the aspect of player interaction added a whole new dimension to what I was writing and how I was writing. When writing anything you have to keep your audience in mind, but with writing games that aspect is really amplified. The increased level of audience interaction makes you think of what you’re writing in completely new ways. Instead of just putting a story out there, you’re writing something that’s made to be interacted with, to be dissected and picked apart by a player.
Reading the feedback for the A.G.E. project really made me think of this. When you write a module, you’re writing something that the person running the game will have to take an immense amount of liberty with. No matter how much detail you go into, the GM is going to have to take some liberties and interpretations of their own, and you have to keep that in mind when you’re writing.
If I had to pick out my biggest challenge this semester, I’d say it was coming face to face with my own productivity and procrastination. With the projects given, waiting until the last moment really was never an option. You can’t crank out a youtube video or game like a short story or a poem. You have to plan, you have to work days in advance, and you have to finish in time to give yourself an ample amount of playtesting. It was hard at times, but I really think that throughout the semester I’ve become a more productive and organized person in terms of my schoolwork.
But I’m writing this two hours before the deadline so, who knows really?
All in all, I really enjoyed this class. Even if I don’t think I’ll ever pursue a career in the game industry, simply learning more about some of my favorite hobbies and working on my own craft of home brewing RPG resources was greatly enjoyable, and definitely worth it.
