23 Projects and Game Dissonance
Dear friends,
It's been a while since we sent out a newsletter... not because we haven't been busy, but because we couldn't really talk about anything that we were working on. And we still can't, alas - but I will say this: since January 2020 we've worked on twenty three different videogame projects. That's the most we've ever worked on in a single year, and there's still several months to go!
Game Dissonance
I've been so tied up completing #100Cyborgs, the one hundred part companion serial to The Virtuous Cyborg, that that I've barely written any blog posts about games in the last couple of years (well, except for the twenty instalments of #100Cyborgs that focused on games!). That's all changing now with the start of my first serial in quite a while, Game Dissonance. You can find it over at ihobo.com, and plugged within an inch of its life on Twitter by our new robot that we have adopted to help us with our social media management.
What this three part serial does is reframe Clint Hocking's concept of 'ludonarrative dissonance' in terms of the original concept - cognitive dissonance - and then apply this idea to the aesthetic flaws of videogames, which I've written about before. The result is not only a strong argument against the notion that there is an unavoidable gap between games and stories, but a framework for understanding how and why games cause dissonance in their players. This leads me in the final part to discussing suggestions for how to produce elegant narrative design - which was the purpose of the exercise.
And speaking of 'narrative design...'
Game Writing, Second Edition - Boss Stage
We have reached the boss stage in the battle to get Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames released as a second edition - the page proofs. We've survived the first round, but now the boss has reared up to its full height and the music has become more intense. Can we survive the final onslaught? In just a few weeks we'll know!
We also got our first glimpse of the cover today - but I'm not allowed to share it yet. Hopefully soon!
Let me take this opportunity to once again thank everyone who contributed in even the smallest way to the new volume, and there were a lot of you! Here's an extract from the acknowledgements... look closely, as your name could be in this list if you follow me on Twitter (where much of my odd questions were aired).
Ghost Master Complete Edition
And lastly - since it's October (or probably will be by the time you read this), and thus time for all things spooky to be rammed down your throats from every conceivable commercial venue, a shout out to the wonderful folks at the Ghost Master Complete Edition mod project! They have not only fulfilled my dreams that Ghost Master would eventually get modded, they have undertaken one of the most ambitious modding projects ever conceived, by attempting to bring back all the cut material from the game. I've never heard of anything like this before ever, and it's so cool it just melts my heart to think about it! I can't put a link in here without spam filters mistaking this email for junk, but if you are a Ghost Master fan you probably know where to find them, and if not drop by our Discord server (link on the ihobo website) for a suitable treasure map.
Until next time, take good care of yourselves, your family, and your friends, and remember that weirdness is one of life's great treasures, so don't be afraid to be as weird and wonderful as you are!
Chris.