In the two post from last week, and through much of this blog, I’ve shared a lot of stuff I don’t like about myself and the struggles to leave behind that person. It wasn’t an easy process to get to this point. A lot of self-reflection has been done over the last few years, which accumulated into these post.
It’s time to start shedding this negative cacoon.
I mentioned that Pocket Change Stories is a new beginning, and I’ll explain why with another trip down memory lane.
My original major at DeVry was gaming and simulation programming. After the first few months of struggling through most of my classes and passing with D’s for my core classes, I was debating on dropping out. My mind couldn’t wrap around the complex equations and logic required for programming. A teacher recommended I attend GDC before making my decision. At the time, GDC was still in Austin and relatively affordable. There I learned about the occupation I would spend the next four years obsessing over, Game Writer. Actual people wrote the story for some of the best games out there and were sharing their experiences on developing narratives for games. It blew my mind that such a position existed and lit another path for telling stories.
That day, at my first GDC, I latched onto Game Writing. I thought it was my golden ticket to sharing stories because everyone played games. From that moment on, I attended just about every writer’s talk at GDC and followed the writers to San Fransico when Austin GDC was shut down. After awhile, I could talk the talk with the best of them, but I couldn’t walk like them. The rest you know, I fell pretty hard into self-pity and fled the scene.
Last year, 2016, I asked myself a question: Game Writer or Storyteller? There is one undeniable fact about me that has persisted throughout everything,
I’m obsessed with telling stories.
Thinking back to that first GDC, and even before that, my end goal has always been to share stories by any means possible. When I told people I wanted to be a writer or a Novelist, they always seemed to say the same thing.
“That’s nice, but I don’t like reading.”
It was discouraging, to say the least. So I clung to the one avenue I thought was viable and lost sight of my original purpose for embarking on this game writer journey. Pocket Change Stories and this blog is a return to the original road and a chance for me to explore my first passion. That isn’t to say I’ve given up on game writing or narrative design. If an opportunity should ever present itself, I will jump on it. Same for if someone requested a movie or animation script. I want to tell and share stories by any means possible, but to do that I have to stop thinking of the two as different sides. Game writing is storytelling in its most basic form, which means,
