Category: Storytelling

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June 3, 2017

Storytelling

Mythic Storytelling, and the Everyday Hero


As an author with a brand new superhero book coming out, I’m finding myself acutely aware of any and all references to superheroes and comics. Which, let’s be honest, is so many—and I love it. I love the obsession with larger-than-life heroes, I love the spectacle, I love the hype. I am so annoyed that my schedule doesn’t work out for me to see Wonder Woman until Wednesday.

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February 20, 2017

Storytelling, What I’m Reading

Gameplay, Storytelling, and the Choices We Make


Recently I downloaded a new game to my phone: Choices, by a company called Pixelberry.

I did this in part because I skimmed an interview with one of the Pixelberry team members, and it caught my attention, but mostly I downloaded it because I am a sucker for choose-your-owns. I cannot even count how many I’ve played through. Fantasy games, mostly, because that’s obviously where the storytelling method really became popularized, so I guess another thing that drew me to Choices was that a lot of their stories WEREN’T. They had one fantasy “book” (and it’s accompanying sequel) in their app, yes, but there were also several mysteries, and a number of romances. And hey, I like seeing how storytelling methods apply to genres they aren’t usually used for, you know? And it was nice to see a normally male-centric game type being marketed toward a distinctly female audience. Overall, I was really predisposed to like this app.

I’m not even going to use this space to get into my game-level disappointments with it. Things like the micropayment system it uses and how it uses it, or the fact that these really aren’t so much choose-your-own stories as… slightly tailor a predefined narrative arc to your preference. Instead, I’m going to talk about the one “book” that I played all of the way through, all 17 game “chapters” worth, a romance called The Freshman. Because, um. Wow. Buckle up, folks, this is going to get feminist-ranty.

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