I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.
Richard K. Morgan
I came quite late to gaming: I didn't start playing until 2002.
Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile. Travel abroad and learn to live in other cultures. That's one of the things about teaching abroad.
Most women I've ever met either already have or at some point want kids, but there are still significant numbers who don't, or at least don't right now. But those variations are beside the point - the real point is that among all those women, having or wanting kids or not, I never met a single one who didn't want the choice.
In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.
'Syndicate' is technically the first game I worked on.
The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.
Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.
Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.
I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.
Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.
I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.
I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.
Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.
I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.
There's a lot of young authors out there, and people do seem to forget: in order to write well, you do need to have some experience.
Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.
A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.
As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children, or you read books for adults.
I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.
Strong, smart, self-reliant women who don't need men to define them only crop up in the human myth-base in one guise - the Wicked Witch.
I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access something dark and true in us that other modes of fiction are often a bit prissy about touching. But the key to making it work as time and culture moves on is to use the elasticity, not just the power.
As to the differences between game work and novel writing, well, obviously the former is a lot less lonely - you're in and out of meetings all the time, bouncing stuff back and forth with the level designers, the art department, the animation team, so forth.
With a game, you're only one part of a team, and what emerges at launch is very much the culmination of the whole team's efforts. You can be proud of playing your part, but it doesn't ever belong to you.
For me, some of the most intense creativity comes when something has to change for technical or design reasons, and you're trying to find a way to make it fit the fiction.
I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn't presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.
I've come to regard the superior end of HBO drama as, above all, novelistic.
I've seen 'True Detective' end-to-end at least three times; I'll probably see it again. It is a work of dark brilliance. But if the phone goes fifteen minutes from the end of that last episode, I'll likely turn it off and go make coffee when I'm done with the call.
