Gaming Musingings, Possible Employement, NaNoWriMo Update
First the short bit: the NaNoWriMo update. The poll results are in and the audience overwhelmingly demands science fiction. I only hope I'm up to it, as I felt that was the weaker of the two ideas, not having had as much time to germinate and I was dubious of it's abilities to support a novel-length story.
However! I attended MileHiCon 41 this past weekend, having purchased my registration at MHC 40 last October. MileHiCon is a convention about science fiction, mostly focused on writing. I attended several panels on writing, space flight, the new moon program, and met several professional writers. This year's toastmaster was Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy author chosen to write the last two books in the Wheel of Time series. I may have to start that series before long...
I returned home Sunday, exhausted, but woke up on Monday excited about writing science fiction and The Sky Calls To Us has been moved forward to the front burners of my mind; hopefully it will reach a boil by Nov 1.
I had an interview today at a local-ish bookstore. It's a national chain, with the store in a mall not too terribly far from my house. I think it went well, but then I almost always think interviews go well. I spoke briefly with a couple of other employees on my way out of the store, and they bade me good luck. I should know more in a few days.
I also had $1.42 store credit at that store that would evaporate on Nov 1, so I decided to spend it toward an audio book. I do so love audio books, and Small Favor: A Novel of the Dresden Files was on a markdown shelf. Other Dresden Files audio books were upwards of $30 or $40, but this one was $10. I could find no explanation other than some cosmetic damage to the packaging, mostly to the shrink-wrap. The cashier applied a 30% coupon to the purchase as well, taking the price down to $6.99. All told I paid $5.99, including tax, for a 12 CD audio book by an author I find compelling, read by James Marsters (most notably Spike from the Buffy-verse).
On my way home, I mused about how little I remembered from the phone message and subsequent phone call that precipitated the interview. On Saturday one of the managers called me. My cellphone had run down its battery and I'd left my charger at home when packing for the con, so my phone was off until Sunday night. I got the message and called them back Monday morning and set the interview for Tuesday afternoon. I thought about how I'd heard the manager's name in the phone message, but hadn't really bothered to remember it because it was stored in voice mail if I needed it.
That thought lead me down a path thinking about video games, as most things do, role playing games specifically and Fallout 2 and 3 in particular. Treating the interview as a quest to be completed, the analogs are obvious; The message starts off the quest chain, and if I need details later I can review it. The manager I spoke to on the phone is a Non-Player Character (NPC) related to the quest; he gave me more details and a next step. All I wrote down was the time and place, not the manager's name, so when I got to the store (the next quest location) and asked the cashier for a manager (interacting with the next NPC in the quest chain) I had to try to remember the manager's name. Now almost all of that information can be forgotten again as I wait for an NPC to contact me with further quest instructions.
I wondered if I would have been more diligent in writing down and remembering names if video games hadn't trained me to mostly ignore NPC text/speech, trusting that relevant details would be recorded in my Quest Log if I needed them. Now that I think about it, the Diablo games World of Warcraft reinforced that pretty well too; in Diablo, the quests usually amounted to "go here, kill everything, maybe bring some item back," and in World of Warcraft the complete text of the speech the quest-giving NPC is recorded in the player's quest log, with bullet point summary at the top (also generally amounting to "go here, kill things, bring back some number of items.")
Remember in The Legend of Zelda how the game didn't record those things for you? If you met the guy that told you how to get out of the Lost Woods, but didn't write his directions down or didn't remember them when you were in the Lost Woods, you wandered through the same screen for hours? To this day I know you have to go North, West, South, West and it's never been useful except on that one screen. That knowledge also increased the humor in some jokes, but not many.
Perhaps I've put too much though in to this...
However! I attended MileHiCon 41 this past weekend, having purchased my registration at MHC 40 last October. MileHiCon is a convention about science fiction, mostly focused on writing. I attended several panels on writing, space flight, the new moon program, and met several professional writers. This year's toastmaster was Brandon Sanderson, the fantasy author chosen to write the last two books in the Wheel of Time series. I may have to start that series before long...
I returned home Sunday, exhausted, but woke up on Monday excited about writing science fiction and The Sky Calls To Us has been moved forward to the front burners of my mind; hopefully it will reach a boil by Nov 1.
I had an interview today at a local-ish bookstore. It's a national chain, with the store in a mall not too terribly far from my house. I think it went well, but then I almost always think interviews go well. I spoke briefly with a couple of other employees on my way out of the store, and they bade me good luck. I should know more in a few days.
I also had $1.42 store credit at that store that would evaporate on Nov 1, so I decided to spend it toward an audio book. I do so love audio books, and Small Favor: A Novel of the Dresden Files was on a markdown shelf. Other Dresden Files audio books were upwards of $30 or $40, but this one was $10. I could find no explanation other than some cosmetic damage to the packaging, mostly to the shrink-wrap. The cashier applied a 30% coupon to the purchase as well, taking the price down to $6.99. All told I paid $5.99, including tax, for a 12 CD audio book by an author I find compelling, read by James Marsters (most notably Spike from the Buffy-verse).
On my way home, I mused about how little I remembered from the phone message and subsequent phone call that precipitated the interview. On Saturday one of the managers called me. My cellphone had run down its battery and I'd left my charger at home when packing for the con, so my phone was off until Sunday night. I got the message and called them back Monday morning and set the interview for Tuesday afternoon. I thought about how I'd heard the manager's name in the phone message, but hadn't really bothered to remember it because it was stored in voice mail if I needed it.
That thought lead me down a path thinking about video games, as most things do, role playing games specifically and Fallout 2 and 3 in particular. Treating the interview as a quest to be completed, the analogs are obvious; The message starts off the quest chain, and if I need details later I can review it. The manager I spoke to on the phone is a Non-Player Character (NPC) related to the quest; he gave me more details and a next step. All I wrote down was the time and place, not the manager's name, so when I got to the store (the next quest location) and asked the cashier for a manager (interacting with the next NPC in the quest chain) I had to try to remember the manager's name. Now almost all of that information can be forgotten again as I wait for an NPC to contact me with further quest instructions.
I wondered if I would have been more diligent in writing down and remembering names if video games hadn't trained me to mostly ignore NPC text/speech, trusting that relevant details would be recorded in my Quest Log if I needed them. Now that I think about it, the Diablo games World of Warcraft reinforced that pretty well too; in Diablo, the quests usually amounted to "go here, kill everything, maybe bring some item back," and in World of Warcraft the complete text of the speech the quest-giving NPC is recorded in the player's quest log, with bullet point summary at the top (also generally amounting to "go here, kill things, bring back some number of items.")
Remember in The Legend of Zelda how the game didn't record those things for you? If you met the guy that told you how to get out of the Lost Woods, but didn't write his directions down or didn't remember them when you were in the Lost Woods, you wandered through the same screen for hours? To this day I know you have to go North, West, South, West and it's never been useful except on that one screen. That knowledge also increased the humor in some jokes, but not many.
Perhaps I've put too much though in to this...