James Cavin Writes

A quick and simple rundown of the power of "player fantasy" in narrative design - OR - Narrative happens everywhere all the time on every single screen. This is a super simple narrative design trick that I've used on basically every project that I've worked on for the last decade. (I suppose that it actually dabbles a little bit in the fabled User Experience Design, for those of you who might be interested in such things.) Before I get any further, I should make it clear that I don't mean "narrative" here as character dialogue and text logs and big cinematic cut scenes. I mean narrative at its most primal: THEME and DREAM. I mean… (*Cue drumroll and/or epic eunuch choir chanting*) THE PLAYER FANTASY I use the term "player fantasy" a lot when I'm talking to clients, and I almost always have to stop and define it really quick. It's a weird sounding term, but the idea is actually incredibly simple:...

In all its rugged splendor. This is a brilliant book, and you should buy it. I was reading Gene Wolfe's Castle of the Otter (a collection of essays and advice named after a humorous misreporting of the title of his book Citadel of Autarch ), and two pieces of advice really stuck out to me: 1) Write a story every day. 2) Buy the New York Times Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, & Mispronounced Words – it's really cheap.   Also an $8 find. I thought, "Okay, but he wrote that back in the 80s. I bet this book is a collectors' item now." Then, I looked it up on Thrift Books. It's only eight dollars! 8! That's, like, half a latte. You could buy three and juggle them! One, it's awesome if you're reading Gene Wolfe, because when he uses a word you don't know (approximately every other sentence), you have the dictionary that he was using right here in your hand. Secondly, you now possess a normal-book sized dictionary with readable size text tha...