Games writing never has and never will exist in a vacuum unto itself, in spite of how cloistered it felt throughout the early decades of what is now a massively popular industry.

This confirms what you and many other writers already know: games writing exists within a larger history of genres and modes of communication. They recalled the history of the after-action report, a genre of writing that serves as the soft tissue between strategy games as entertainment software, strategy games as military simulation, and strategy games as historical fetish. It’s easy to write off Francis’ war diaries as funny goofs, but they demonstrated what can happen if you stretch a game’s mechanics to their breaking point, and how those mechanics can also reveal fissures in the original design (or in Francis’ case, how 4X games, for all their attempts at rendering the complexities of cultural and diplomatic systems, still leave the path of the genocidal despot as the path of least resistance).įrancis’ war diaries demonstrated the promise of writing about games in a way that is not married to the review or preview. GalCiv2 not only captured my imagination but inspired Tom Francis to write one of the most incisive, engaging, and hilarious pieces of games writing I read in 2007. I came back to play Galactic Civilizations II.

I had to leave my Starcraft and HoMM III discs in the care of a close friend so that I’d actually graduate.Īfter graduation, when I came back, it was for strategy games: Dawn of War and Crusader Kings and AI War and Civilization IV (and Civ IV ’s countless mods). When I was young, my friends and I were a dorky carbuncle fastened to a desktop computer, hotseating our way through the demo for Heroes of Might & Magic, hollering as Gandhi nuked us in Civilization, fiddling with our dial-up modems to silence the squelch so we could play covert games of Command & Conquer after we were supposed be in bed, and skipping classes in university to play Just One More Match of Starcraft. He studies interactive fiction and roguelikes and is hard at work on DernRL, a traditional roguelike based on the career of Laura Dern. He somehow managed to write this piece while grappling with a debilitating Stellaris addiction. Rob is about to graduate from the University of Waterloo with a Masters in Experimental Digital Media.

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