writing

The Four Changes That Reshaped Me As a Person

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Today’s me is different from yesterday’s me. Noon’s me is a far flung thing from morning’s me. We’re all shaped by a million little variables. Did I sleep well? Did I drink coffee? Am I sore? Am I hungry?

Each variable nudges my personality in a different direction. But at my core, I’m essentially the same person.

The further back I look, the less recognizable my core becomes. Being a teen changed me, being a young adult changed me, leaving college and entering the workforce certainly changed me. But those changes weren’t intentional. They were all externally driven. I was reacting to new environments.

When I compare the me of today against the me of fifteen years ago, there are four changes that stand out. Each was intentional, each took practice, and each redefined who I am.

Step up to the challenge

I used to be a volunteer for a non-profit that simulated star-trek missions. Being a volunteer was easy. A director told you what costume to put on, which kind of phaser to hold, and what you were supposed to say to the crew. I liked the work and I liked the feeling of contributing.

When I turned sixteen, there was an opportunity to climb from volunteer to Flight Director. For the first time in my life, I’d be paid for my work. Instead of taking orders, I’d be giving them. Instead of being part of the show, I’d be running it. From my young teen perspective, becoming a flight director represented the peak of my career.

I shadowed a dozen flight directors in preparation. I took in their methods and storytelling techniques. Each approached flight directing with their own philosophy, their own priorities, and their own wisdom.

But study only takes you so far. To really know how to direct a flight requires doing it yourself. Before officially being hired, I had to run a test flight with a real crew.

The thought scared the daylights out of me.

I put it off. I studied and shadowed and volunteered week after week. An anxiety grew in my guts. One day, after a full shift of volunteer work, I went home and cried. I couldn’t run away from my opportunity any longer. Either I was going to step up and learn to fly a ship properly, or I wasn’t. My body begged me to give up and run away. The thought of sending a polite resignation to the program director was comfortable and alluring. A quick farewell to my dream and I’d feel good again.

But my mind insisted otherwise. It demanded that before I send my resignation, I write down my reasons why. There was only one. I was afraid. It was sobering. I was ready to give up my dream because I was a little scared.

The next day, I visited the program director and scheduled my test flight.

Fear of trying something new is natural. The best way to overcome it is by facing the challenge head on. From that day forward, I set out a policy for myself. If I was afraid of doing something simply because I hadn’t done it before, I was obligated to do it.

I extend that attitude into my writing, too. I like to write a lot of different stuff, but from time to time, I come across a project that feels beyond me. Maybe the story is in an unfamiliar genre or the concept is too ambitious. But once I feel that fear inside me, I make room in my schedule and work through it.

It’s okay to put thoughts down

There was a time when I used to be an existentialist. I was desperate to find ‘the meaning of life’. I studied heaps of philosophy. My theory was that if I learned enough and wrote enough, eventually there would be an answer.

Turns out if you spend most of your time thinking on existential questions, you’re not gonna be a super happy person. Even when I was trying not to think of philosophy, the questions bubbled back into my brain and I felt obligated to ponder. Maybe if I chipped away long enough, eventually the answer would come to me.

It didn’t. The solution that improved my life turned out to be a hundred times easier.

Put the question down.

It was a simple technique. I’d imagine my obsession as a piece of paper in my hands, then I’d put that piece of paper down on a table. This wasn’t a method to run away from my worries. I wasn’t stuffing the paper in a box or ripping it to pieces, I was putting it aside for later.

What I really learned was a tool for control over my own thoughts. The existentialism faded in a month or two, and the technique turned out to be useful in plenty of other places. After a full day of engineering work, I had the tools to store my thoughts for tomorrow. When relationship troubles hounded my head and sent me into a tizzy, I could table them until they became relevant again.

Sometimes our minds feel wild and irrepressible. They throw thoughts at us and demand we consider them. But the mind can be tamed. Ever since getting control of my thoughts, I’ve been able to focus on my interests without being distracted by depressing existentialities like the meaning of life.

See the good first

Cynicism is a terrible ailment. It takes the beauty of the world and warps it through a funhouse mirror until all you can see are flaws, mistakes, and malicious intentions. I was a cynic for a long time. I called it ‘being analytical’. What I didn’t see was the way ‘being analytical’ was stripping the joy from my day-to-day life.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t trying to cure myself of cynicism.

When I first entered the writing sphere, I realized something about myself. Each time I watched a big-budget movie, or read a well-received book, or saw a local play, I never liked them. There would always be a flaw that ruined the piece. I’d watch a two hour movie of wondrous scenes and exciting plots, but then there’d be ‘that one scene’ where the tension dropped, and suddenly the whole movie was ruined.

This was a problem for me. I was just starting my journey to become a writer, which meant most pieces I read and most pieces I wrote were going to have flaws. If I didn’t want to be a jerk, I needed to find a way to celebrate the good.

So I invented a new policy. Each time I finished seeing a play or watching a movie or reading a book, I’d list every element of the experience that I enjoyed. Did I like a certain scene? Was there an actor that did an exceptional job? Did the plot draw me in?

After I listed all the positives, I’d allow myself to review the negatives as a treat. The funny thing was, when I listed all the negatives, they were never as long as the list of positives. When I weighed the two sides against each other, I’d find that on the whole, I found the experience to be quite good.

It was never my intention to stop being a cynic. If you asked me back then, I would have said being a cynic kept me sharp. But almost by accident, over the course of a few months of weighing the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ of various shows and books, I was finding I enjoyed every piece of art I experienced.

It was transformational.

I extended my little game beyond art. Suddenly that trip to the local diner was a little brighter than before. Friends who used to be deeply-flawed people were suddenly good and well-intended people.

I even took a tally of my life as a whole. By the end of the tally, I found myself smiling because there were so many reasons to be happy.

Put people first

People used to be a means to an end. When I interacted with them, I was respectful, but hurried. They were the obstacle to my goals. Worrying about their lives seemed like a distraction better suited for their family and close friends.

I learned my lesson on this the hard way. Think Ebeneezer Scrooge in Christmas Carol.

After some hard times, I realized the joy of life was sharing it with others. And the only way to share life with others was to value the people around you.

My exercise here was simple: Whenever I had a task that required dealing with someone, the task was secondary, the person was primary. Let’s say I was at my job visiting IT to get my computer reset. It already took 5 minutes to walk down, so I might as well make some chat with the team at the desk. I’d ask about their life, how they were feeling, opinions on movies, whatever. No matter what, I wanted the person I was chatting with to know that they mattered more than the errand.

The more I took an interest in other’s lives, the more they took an interest in mine. A conversation or two and I’d have a new friend. Even in high stress situations I didn’t have to worry, my priority was the person on the other side of the table. The task would eventually sort itself out.

Over a couple years of practice, my little change in priorities has reshaped my world. People used to be competition and obstacles. Now they were the reason to go out and get the task done. Errands became a delight, conversations reached deeper depths, and the more I talked, the more I found people working through the same challenges and the same issues as myself.

Conclusion

Each time I changed who I was, that change was in reaction to external circumstances. I think that’s natural. It’s hard to voluntarily change yourself if you feel your life is already working. The world naturally comes along every once in a while and punches us all in the face. The important thing is what we do afterwards.

When I got scared of trying something new, I could have retreated. When I was overwhelmed by existentialism, I could have embraced nihilism. When I struggled with people, I could have started avoiding them.

I’m really glad the first of my changes was a willingness to take on challenges. Changing yourself is a big challenge. It requires acknowledging that the way you interact with the world is flawed, and that you need to explicitly adjust your behavior in ways that don’t feel natural.

But the great thing is, when you change your behavior in the right way, you can feel it. In time, and with enough practice, what was unnatural becomes the most natural thing in the world.

My Book Has Been Honored! (And Thoughts on Ambition)

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I don’t enjoy competition. Paradoxically, I do enjoy competing. When you’re competing, you push yourself and push yourself and watch as your skills improve. It’s the stuff that comes after the skill building that sucks. A competition pits you against your friends and peers. Instead of celebrating successes, you become adversaries, rooting for one another’s failure. It’s unnecessary conflict, and it’s the reason I don’t submit my writing to local competitions.

Back in February, a friend of mine convinced me to take a moon shot. The Utah Book Awards. It was such a large competition that I wouldn’t recognize the names of the majority of my opponents. And what were the chances I’d be chosen, anyway?

It’s my first ever writing honor. The Human Countermove has been selected as one of Utah’s Five Notable Reads in Speculative Fiction for 2026 and is in competition to win the grand prize. I was wrong about not knowing my competitors, too. My work is up against some of the biggest names in Utah. Brandon Sanderson, Bryan Young, CK Turner, and Robyn Dabney.

A Healthy Ambition

When I heard the news, I got so excited I forgot to reply to the email. It’s been torture keeping this secret to myself. But ever since the announcement was made, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future.

I used to struggle with ambition. I was a high-performing student and a high-performing employee. If there was a grade to earn or a task to be done, I insisted on being the one to do it. But after years of striving, I realized something. My work didn’t satisfy. When I look back, the cause is clear. I wasn’t just ambitious, I was insatiable. I wanted an indefinable ‘more’ for more’s sake, and nothing less than more would do. Some might call it FOMO. At one point, a boss of mine was projecting my future earnings. He told me my salary would cap at more than double the rate I was being paid. When he asked if it was enough, I couldn’t answer him. How could I? A salary cap was anathema to my ‘more, more, more’ philosophy.

That period of my life has thankfully passed. These days, I find myself content. There’s plenty of happiness in the little moments. When I’m eating a bowl of oatmeal in a sunbeam, I’m at peace. When I’m on a walk around the park, I’m happy. ‘More’ doesn’t come into it. The present satisfies me just fine.

That said, a part of me loves the journey of self-growth. You could call it ambition if you wanted. Sometimes I think it’s just our in-built desire to make use of the precious time we’ve been given. If I’m of sound mind and strong body, then what’s there to do but work hard and contribute to the common good?

So I’m ambitious again. Not for myself, not for ‘more’, but to keep busy and contribute to the world. I still find those moments of contentment, but I also find joy in the pride of a job well done and a day’s work writing to the best of my ability.

Climbing The Writing Ladder

When you release a book, it’s hard to tell if it’s any good. It took me four months to gain any confidence in mine. The biggest signal of the book’s quality was that half of my friends and most of my extended family had read it from cover-to-cover. When they came to talk to me about it, they were excited, engaged, and eager to discuss. One of my best friends has now read The Human Countermove three times. I’m told that’s a rarity.

Since publishing, I’ve written a couple more unreleased books and submitted a few short stories for local anthologies. But every once in a while, I write a story that crackles. It feels fresh in a way totally unlike my past writing, and I start to wonder. Should I be saving those ‘crackling’ stories for a more competitive contest? This award has confirmed my suspicions.

I’ve always imagined the skill of writing as a pyramid. The better you get, the higher you climb on the pyramids tiers and the better your peers become. I organize the pyramid in the same manner as sports teams and performing clubs. City -> County -> State -> Region -> National -> International.

I use this system not to compare myself to others, but because I want to improve as a writer. The best way to grow is to surround yourself with people at, or slightly above your own skill level. What better way is there to learn than to lose against a more practiced peer?

Room to Grow

My old approach to short story submissions was scattered. I’d submit to a few local contests a year based on word of mouth. I’m now pivoting to a higher competition level. My targets are the contests with hundreds of submitters and long histories. I’m pushing my writing to its limit. Art is always subjective, but technique can be sharpened to a point.

I’m experimenting, too. Every story I write is pulled from a different era of the novel writing movement. Often I don’t even know if the story will make sense until it’s on the page.

For me, ambition in writing isn’t about accolades, it’s about testing new ideas on the page and offering those experiments to the contest judges for honest feedback. I don’t have a goal in mind, I’m sharpening my craft because I enjoy the process of sharpening.

The Present

Whenever a friend reads about my award, they send me a text along the lines of, “YOU’RE UP AGAINST BRANDON SANDERSON??!?”

In a faux-macho voice, I respond, “Dude’s washed. I’m sending him home.”

It’s all in jest. For me, being included on a list with people as talented as Brandon Sanderson, or Bryan Young, an author I know personally and hugely respect, is a bigger achievement than I could have imagined receiving at this stage of my career. I’m treating it like a step forward into something new.

Thank you to all my readers for following my journey so far. There’s a long way to go, and so much more for me to learn. I promise you now that I’m nowhere near done learning, and nowhere near done writing.

In a nation ruled by AI Minds, productivity is everything, even play.

Once a legend in the world of strategy games, Zouk Solinsen is just another burnout in a society obsessed with efficiency. But when the Minds announce a high-stakes tournament, with a seat on the ruling council as the prize, Zouk is drawn back into the fray, determined to reshape the future.

With help from the enigmatic Torrez Institute, Zouk racks up early victories against the Minds. But when Maya Torrez reveals the cost of her support, a violent coup against the Minds, he rejects it and strikes out alone.

Now, with no allies, dwindling resources, and a nation on the brink, Zouk faces the biggest game of his life, and a final, impossible choice: reform the system from within, or burn it all down.

The Human Countermove

Oh, I’m A Creative

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Seven years writing, and I’ve only just realized that I’m in the arts.

The Professional

I began my writing career in a very peculiar place. I wrote star-trek style simulations for students. The stories were fit to purpose. We identified a target curriculum, then produced a story that drew in those elements to challenge a student’s understanding of the material. “Oh no, one of the six volcanoes in this area is going to explode! Collect evidence and determine which volcano is active so we can evacuate the local area.”

It wasn’t art, it was instructive. The creative elements were a delivery system for the educational applications. Sure, a graphics team created 3D videos and voice actors performed the dialog, but all that stuff felt more like a factory than an art studio. In a day, I’d spend an hour writing stories, and another seven discussing logistics, scheduling actors, receiving story feedback, providing graphical feedback, and reviewing classroom use. The team’s biggest concern wasn’t quality, but profitability.

The Playwright

The first thing I did when I left my job was write a stage play. Whenever I talked about the project, I called it ‘a piece of candy’. It was a silly story about a group of young adults who stole a priceless painting with no plan on how to sell it. It was a farce, it couldn’t possibly be art! That was how I justified it to myself. After the staged reading, I left the script to rot. To me, it wasn’t art, it was a fun way to entertain people.

The Genre Writer

A year ago I published my first book, The Human Countermove. You’d think physically selling the product of my own creative labor would be enough for me to recognize myself as an artist. It wasn’t. 

First, my novel was a science fiction, a genre piece, not art. It was inspired by my love of chess, how could something with a gaming origin be artistic? If the story resonated with audiences, it just meant I was doing my job. It  was the mechanical process of pulling the levers of human emotion. 

Breaking A Mental Block

It could be that I associated ‘art’ with awards, and I associated awards with the elites, and when I imagined my writing, I didn’t see myself as writing for elites. I even attended an event called ‘arts in the park’ and didn’t put it together.

Regardless, it was something benign that finally shattered the glass.

I filed my taxes.

In past years, I’ve always been able to list my job as ‘Software Engineer’. It was a useful box to put myself in. I was a coder with a fiction writing hobby.

This year that wasn’t an option. At the top of my 1040, I was forced to mark the option labelled ‘self-employed’. One line down, those damn taxmen forced me to identify myself as what I am. A novelist. I was a novelist.

A couple weeks later I was talking to one of my engineering friends. He asked me about my latest novel, the fool. As I described it, I made two realizations. One, it was super weird. And two, the message was core to the material. Market appeal hadn’t even occurred to me. I was writing the story because I wanted to tell it, because I wanted to see it in the world. I couldn’t escape the label anymore. I was making art.

Looking back, I had been making art from the start. My novel wasn’t just a sci-fi dystopia, it was a discussion about our relationship with technology and the modern world’s instinct to strip fulfillment from our lives. My ‘piece of candy’ stageplay explored the way a single painting could mean seven things to seven people. Even my old starship ed-tech stuff explored themes of overconsumption, greed, and good and evil.

Regardless of how I felt about the quality of my work, everything I had done was creative and contributed to society’s conversation of life and philosophy.

Capitalism Ruins Everything

As I look back on my avoidance of the ’artistic’ label, there’s one particular mental block that was harder to overcome than the rest. Every time I finished writing a story, I had to sell it.

If you ever ask an author how to sell a book, they’ll always tell you the same thing, “Push your writer brain out of the room and bring in the business brain”. In order to survive, I had to sell my work, and in order to sell my work, I had to reduce it to its most basic components. Content Type: Book, Genre: Dystopian Sci-fi, Audience: Fans of Chess, etc. etc.

When I write, I write from the heart. The day my writer brain finishes his writing, the business brain cuts the mental umbilical cord and sees the work through the eyes of a capitalist. Stories become content. Content becomes products. I wasn’t a writer, I was a content creator. I wasn’t a novelist, I just wrote books.

It’s only in the last few months that I’ve realized what I’ve been doing the whole time. The reason I pick the stories I pick is not because of their market appeal, it’s because I resonate with the message. I dabble and practice and experiment, not to produce a more appealing product, but to tell better stories.

Conclusion

If you’re in the creative field, you’re an artist. It’s easy to gatekeep. The capitalist world is eager to tell you that you aren’t artistic until you can make money from your work. The inherent danger in that attitude is that you reduce your work to its success financially, and what makes a bestseller is different from what makes a resonant story.

The topic of profitability is a regular guest at my writer’s group. I suspect the same is true of every writer’s group in the country. By limiting ourselves to a particular view of success, by refusing to allow ourselves the label of ‘artist’, we cut off what may be our most personal and most meaningful works.

Every writer I’ve ever met has been, to some degree, trying to express themselves through their storytelling. They are all artists. No one goes into it for the money. So how do we keep getting tricked into dropping the label and defining ourselves by the singularly reductive metric of ‘total sales’?

New Writers Are Learning With AI Training Wheels

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I’ve been a part of my local writing chapter for a little over 5 years. It wasn’t long after I started that ChatGPT was released into the world. Being the tech person I am, I fiddled with it. I learned how to use it for work, then shared what I learned with my fellow writers. At the time, it was a novelty. There was a sense of looming doom whenever we discussed it, but that looming doom was in the distant future.

Boy the distant future came up quick.

An AI Priest

I don’t use AI in my writing. I don’t use it in my editing. Unfortunately, as a young person that wants to be able to maintain a career ten years from now, I am forced to regularly experiment with the new AI models and learn how they work. The knowledge that experimentation has given me made me the tech expert in every writer’s room. That expertise turned me into something I didn’t expect, a priest of sorts.

Last month, during one of my chapter’s write-ins, someone came up to me to discuss their own experiments with AI. They spoke in a hushed voice, slid the work to me like it was contraband, then asked my opinion on what it all meant. I felt like I was a priest in a confessional, giving absolution to the sinner. “No, you don’t have to be ashamed of a test.”, “Yes, your AI story is disqualified from the contest”, “I wouldn’t trust an AI on opinions of taste, but that’s just me.”

In the writing world, there’s a deep shame associated with using AI. The community, without saying it out loud, has quietly endorsed a system of exile for the AI writer. I understand the instinct. I learned how to write without AI, all the best writers in my chapter learned without AI. How could anyone using AI become a ‘real’ writer?

After five or six confessionals, I realized something. It wasn’t the experienced writers that were dabbling with AI. It was the rookies.

The Next Generation of Writers

Do you remember when you first started writing?

I remember it was really hard. My mind was brimming with ideas, but when my fingers reached the keyboard, I had to push my wondrous scenes through the meat grinder of the page. Everything got all messed up, it was never as beautiful as I envisioned, and sometimes the product was incomprehensible. I ended up shoving an entire novel through that meatgrinder, now I hide that novel away. Things only started working when I brought in a professional to guide me.

In games, they call it a difficulty curve. When the game is really hard, they call it a difficulty cliff. Learning to write well is a steep, steep mountain. Most of us that scaled that mountain have forgotten what it was like.

My step-father picked up writing last year. He had never written a story before that. He’s a very tech-savvy guy, so rather than climb the cliffs of storytelling, he wrote his stories using a tool. Novelmaker. In one week, the AI wrote six books.

You might recoil reading that number. Six books in one week. I would have too, except that I knew he’d never try to publish them. It wasn’t about the money, it wasn’t about the fame, it was an expression of his creativity. He wanted to see his ideas play out on the page.

He took a break after the sixth book. Since then he’s spoken to me about writing more, and about writing better. He’s taken an interest in the craft and he’s started to see the weaknesses of AI writing. In time, he might even write a few stories of his own. I think it’s wonderful.

Last year, I presented on AI again to my writing group. I warned them that five or six years from now, new writers would learn to write not by trying and failing, but by using AI to generate their first stories. My estimate was wrong. It wasn’t five or six years, it was twelve months.

Half the new writers in my writing group have dabbled with AI. Some have asked for ChatGPT’s opinion on their work. Some have generated entire stories using it. I’m not talking about seventeen year olds that were raised on AI, either. These are adults entering the writing space using AI from the get-go.

The difficulty cliff in writing is too steep for newcomers. AI has softened the experience. On the one hand, it means there’s a glut of terrible writing. On the other hand, it means more writers are discovering their voice than ever before.

Gatekeeping Will Kill Communities

Every person is entitled to their opinion, especially on a topic as controversial as AI. It’s a values-based decision, and each of us has their own set of values. Some people think using AI for anything at all means you’ve violated some unspoken code of conduct. Some people think generating a book that’s a paraphrased copy of a different book is good business. The truth has to lie somewhere in between.

It’s okay for each person to draw personal boundaries. Personally, I’d never use AI to generate or edit my works. I think we get into trouble when we start drawing lines for others. New writers don’t ask for feedback on a one-page story that’s horribly written anymore. They show up with a ten-page story that’s bloated with filler words and ChatGPT cliches. It won’t be long before all prospective writers begin their journey using AI. As a community, we can’t just show those people the door.

That doesn’t mean we start allowing AI-generated stories to be submitted to our anthologies. It doesn’t mean we don’t point out that a story was AI-assisted. It just means we must continue to be welcoming to newcomers, no matter how they got into the art. When it becomes hard to empathize, I imagine a teen posting a forum: All the stories I’ve ever written were created with AI, I don’t feel like I’m a real writer. How do I get better?

Compassion and patience are the answers. From what I’ve seen as an accidental Writer-Priest, AI writing is like training wheels. Once a rookie learns to pedal, they’ll be eager to go without.

First Contact Transcript, Species-215

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

First Contact, Species-215 (Colloquially known as The Scourge)

Notes have been added to provide expert context.

S-215 Transcript #1 (First Contact):

BEEP BEEP

BEEP BEEP BEEP

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

*Fibonacci sequence continued until 13.*

Earth Station B, operator 6, Mark Simmons responds: 

Clear. Identify.

FRIEND*

*Message received in direct english

*Word in S-215 lexicon carries second meaning of TOOL

Hello friend. Location?

*S215 responds with coordinates of Ross 248, located approximately ten light-years from Earth.

You are Rumbigeals?

*Rumbigeals (S11) are the known residents of Ross 248 and were originally contacts twenty-three years prior to S215.

NOT RUMBIGEALS. FRIEND.

What is your species name?

*Pause in responses lasts thirty-one minutes.

MOURNERS. WE ARE THE MOURNERS. YOU ARE HUMANS.

Hello mourners, humanity welcomes you.

WE ARE GLEEFUL TO MEET YOU.

Your english is excellent. What is your business?

*First contact conversation ends here. Operator Mark Simmons noted the high lingual capacity of this alien species and speculated that they had analyzed humanity’s early interplanetary broadcasts.

S-11 Transcript #18,216 (Initiated approximately five hours later):

MS: Good meetings Rumbigeals, which operator am I speaking to?

Operator two of fifteen.

*Mark Simmons notes that fifteen is the total number of operators, not the number currently on shift. This is against protocol.

MS: Zorle! This is Mark. How are the new spawnlings?

Challenging but rewarding. Thank you for inquiring.

MS: Good, that’s how they’re supposed to be! Just a moment.

*It is here that Mark Simmons is joined by Earth Station B’s director. The two discuss Zorle’s unusually curt responses for nine minutes, forty-three seconds.

Mark? Are you there Mark?

MS: I’m here Zorle. Just wanted to check on you. Is everything okay?

I am good Mark. We are good.

MS: I’m glad.

Thank you for checking in. I have to go.

MS: Have you heard of a species called the mourners?

No.

MS: Okay. Thanks anyway.

*Six minutes pass

Wait. Yes. I know the mourners.

*Mark Simmons notes that all his messages from here on were subject to approval from the station director.

MS: What do you know about them?

Nomads. Travellers. Rovers. Wayfarers. Peaceful drifters. Not a problem.

MS: They sound like a nice group of people.

If you are lucky they will pass through your system and trade with your species.

MS: Yeah, I’ll cross my fingers. Be well, Zorle.

*Be well in Rumbigean is considered a permanent form of goodbye.

I wait for our next hello Mark.

*On completion of this conversation, Earth ceased communication to S-9. No messages were ever again received from the Rumbigeals.

S-215 Transcript #2:

*All messages to S-215 from this point forward were prepared, reviewed, and submitted from within Earth Station A’s situation room. Mark Simmons was brought in to type the messages and to retain communicative continuity.

Hello. Mourners are you there?

WE ARE HERE MARK. WE ARE CLOSER NOW.

Closer to Earth, you mean?

YES, WE ARE CLOSER. WE HAVE MUCH TO SHARE.

How much closer are you?

*Coordinates list unoccupied solar system Lalande 21185, approximately 8.31 lightyears from Earth.

*Chief of Security Lorne Richards types the next message.

How fast are you able to travel?

*No response after thirty minutes. The keyboard is returned to Mark Simmons.

Can you tell us anything about what you intend to share with us?

WE CANNOT RUIN THE SURPRISE.

Is it information?

IT IS A NEW WAY TO LIVE.

*Additional messages were forwarded to S-215, but no response was recieved.

Final notes:

Approximately 48 hours after this conversation, Earth’s governmental bodies approved an additional $12.9 trillion dollars in starship development and $4.5 trillion in weapons research. 9 additional species ceased all communication in the coming months. For further information, review documents on The Scourge, The Abandonment of Earth’s Southwestern Hemisphere, and Policies Regarding Encounters with Half-Dead.

The Amazing Digital Circus Mixes Marketing and Story

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Sometimes I watch a little more Youtube than I should. My algorithm consists mostly of video essays on the economy, tournament footage, and random gaming clips. Well one day I was whiling the hours away watching a bit of nonsense, and the algorithm recommended the pilot to a new cartoon series. The Amazing Digital Circus. I did a cursory search and discovered this random pilot is the start of a mega-successful series with a massive fanbase, all based on an old sci-fi horror called I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

This week the finale was released and I binged the entire back half of the series in one night. It’s a fun and tense series for teens and young adults that was well worth the watch. But the thing that caught my eye was how Glitch Productions blurred the line between new episodes, new merch, and marketing.

Plot

The Amazing Digital Circus tells the story of a group of unfortunates trapped inside an old 1990’s videogame. No one remembers their name, and everyone has taken on the form of an avatar appropriate for the circus atmosphere of the game. Kinger is a king chess piece, Jax is a prankster rabbit, and the protagonist Pomni is a sad little jester with very expressive eyes.

Running the world is an AI named Caine. Caine has godlike power in the simulation and a primary mission of keeping his trapped human guests engaged with his various adventures. If you’re familiar with the original Harlan Ellison story there may be some alarms going off in your head here. Thankfully instead of behaving like the malevolent AM of the original story, Caine brings an energy that’s a mix of circus barker and the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin (best captured during his show-stopping song in the eight episode).

Caine’s adventures inevitably go off the tracks in a dangerous and psychologically tormenting direction, and the plot of the show focuses on its human cast’s efforts to endure Caine’s accidental tortures while seeking a way out of their digital prison. It might sound like a horrific story, but the cartoony characters, comedic tone, and wacky settings take most of the edge off the physical horror, leaving only the existential.

An Exploration of Psychological Conditions

Since death is off the table, the worst-case scenario for our band of plucky characters is called ‘abstraction’. Years spent trapped in a simulation take their toll. If a character loses their grip on reality too much, they ‘abstract’, which means turning into a horrible monster that Caine makes sure to store permanently in the basement.

Keeping each other sane and healthy becomes the day-to-day focus of our characters. Each character has to fight their own inner-demons. To add insult to injury, the avatars in the game are specifically designed as physical representation of each person’s psychological struggles. Gangle carries a collection of masks and can only express the emotion on the mask she wears. Zooble’s body is an assortment of components she can mix and match, representing her own body dysmorphia. Ragatha is a raggedy ann doll that’s desperate for other’s approval. As the series goes on, we see each character’s deal with their own psychological turmoil. As you can imagine, there’s a heavy theme of self-acceptance that runs through the story.

Marketing Blurring Into Story

The entire series of The Amazing Digital Circus (TADS) was released directly to Youtube, rather than through some streaming service. From an accessibility standpoint, this allowed the show to reach a massive teen and young adult audience. From a financial standpoint, this meant Glitch Productions had to get creative.

If you’ve already seen every episode of TADS, you’ve actually only seen about 75% of the content related to the story. When a company advertises their upcoming episode, it’s a cut up of clips from the episode. Not here. Every preview TADS is entirely unique content. The AI Caine speaks directly to the audience, and often reveals elements of his character that weren’t visible inside the story.

One particularly meta moment comes when Caine advertises the series by practicing knife throwing on poor Pomni. Then in one of the later episodes, Pomni is blinked out of existence while eating a sandwich, and when she returns, she has a bunch of knives sticking into her jester avatar. The commercials are literally canon to the series.

But it doesn’t just extend to previews. Merchandising is a key element of funding TADS, so one of Caine’s favorite gimmicks in the youtube shorts is to punish his players by taking their avatars and turning them into the plushies that are sold online and forcing them to sing songs or engage in various harrowing challenges. After watching the whole series, the best thing to do is go to Glitch Production’s Youtube channel and watch all the advertisements. They even hid some key lore related to one of the ‘abstracted’ characters that isn’t present in the main series while advertising pins and plushies.

Conclusion

The story is a great modernizing of a sci-fi classic with modern, psychological sensibility. But the greatest innovation of this series comes in the marketing. Glitch Productions didn’t just make a great story, it produced an online experience. The voice actors are regularly invited to play games with one another online, they’re brought out to cons, the fanbase is constantly speculating on tiny aspects of the lore, they even got the finale into theaters (with a sing-a-long of Caine’s song that you can see online).

We’re getting to a place in the modern age where tv advertising and big posters aren’t the way to get butts in seats. Rather than following the cinema model, Glitch Productions followed the model set by the game series Five Nights at Freddy’s. Make a ton of content, add enough deep lore to get the fanbase buzzing, and produce tiers of content. The end result is that no matter what kind of fan you are, you’ll always leave satiated.

How A Writer Reads Their Client’s Mind

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I used to write for an ed-tech company. We produced these magic schoolbus-like simulations where students in a computer lab used their curriculum to solve various crises and dilemmas. From time to time, organizations would commission us to create custom experiences. I got to write for 4H, Hill Air Force Base, US Synthetic, and a couple others.

The one I remember best was for Colorado State’s Veterinary College. We called the mission ‘Do No Harm’. It started with a sick sheep. The crew would shrink down, fly in, and over the course of a thirty minute adventure, cure the sheep of its ills.

But it was one particular meeting that still sticks with me. My team had finished the product and we were demoing it to the head of the program. We walked him through the whole experience. When it was over, he had an odd look in his eye. He scratched his chin, leaned into the camera, then asked how it was I had managed to read his mind. We laughed, but he was serious. He had no notes on the simulation, no items to change, it was ready to ship.

I didn’t tell him, but I had read his mind. It happened on our very first call. He didn’t spell it out or anything, but the program director told me everything I needed to know.

The Strategy Interview

When I jumped into that first ‘get to know you’ call, my primary concern wasn’t the story I’d tell, it was understanding my client’s goals and strategy. He regaled me with his vision of a thrilling adventure fighting off parasites with spaceship weapons. When he was finished, I asked him a couple big questions.

Where will this experience take place?
Who is the audience?
What are your goals?

Every question was open-ended by design. The more the client gave, the better the result.

His early responses told me the tone of the project. It was meant for middle-grade students, so I tuned the dialog to be a little more mature. It would be flown in a single computer lab as a part of a tour, so I book-ended the experience with tour shoutouts. His goal was for students to be excited about the work of veterinary medicine, so I made sure the experience was loving towards animals and ended on an upbeat note.

The most important element of the strategy interview was that I didn’t try to project my own idea onto the project until I understood the client’s goals. His answer shaped the foundation of the project. If I came in with my own pitch, prepackaged and ready-to-go, the idea wouldn’t fit. The age-range would be wrong or the tone would be too dark or the story wouldn’t emphasize the medical aspects.

The big-picture answers set the frame of the project.

The Personal Interview

Once I had an understanding of the shape and texture of the story, I shifted to more personal questions.

What made my client love veterinary medicine?
What moments were they most excited to see in the program?
Which animal did they want to treat?
What kind of challenges did my client encounter in the day-to-day of veterinary medicine?

These were the answers that gave the story authenticity. My client’s focus was farmwork, so putting an elephant or a giraffe onto the operating table would have been a big miss. 

As they told me more about their own experiences and their love of their work, I pivoted my plans. My client didn’t know it, but they wanted to see their lived experiences reflected back at them in the art. When they told me about curing a horse’s case of colic, I made sure to include it. When their eyes lit up telling me about the four compartments of a sheep’s stomach, you better believe those four compartments had to be scanned during the mission.

By the time we were done, the story wasn’t just a story, it was an interpretation of the client’s passion for his work. The personal interview gave the simulation those moments of delight and specificity that connected the client to the product.

Writing as a Product

We writers like to look at our works as art, and art alone. When we imagine ten million people reading our masterpiece, it’s all about the message being conveyed, or the emotions being evoked, or the characters that sweep them away.

This is the biggest difference between clients and writers. A client asks for a story in service of a purpose. The story, with all its themes, characters, twists-and-turns, is at the end of the day, a product. If you talk to the big executives at Amazon and Netflix, they don’t even call tv shows stories, they call them ‘content’. And if content fails to further a client’s goals, then it’s a bad product.

If your goal is to read your client’s mind and pluck an image from their brain, start by seeing the story from their point of view. Look at it like a product. What is that product doing? How will it serve the client’s goals? Starting with the right restrictions and expectations will save weeks down the road.

Once the restrictions are set, you can bring in the artist to turn the story into delight and wonder.

Learning From The Business Side

I used to see my books exclusively through the lens of the artist. Then I self-published. A week in and I found myself neck-deep in entrepreneurism.

My first misstep was the title. Everyone said the title wasn’t good enough. I didn’t understand why. I was the artist, and it was an interesting title, Mind’s Bane.

It was only when I looked at the title through the lens of a businessman that I realized my mistake. Mind’s Bane was a very interesting title for a dark fantasy book. Unfortunately, I was trying to sell a dystopian sci-fi. It was a title that failed to connect my book to its audience, a fundamentally commercial problem.

So I kicked the artist out of the room and found a more appropriate name. One that captured the concepts of sci-fi, dystopia, strategy, and ai. The Human Countermove.

Every conference I go to has a bunch of presentations on ‘how to make a good protagonist’ or ‘how to keep up the pacing of the story’. I used to think limiting your art that way was a mistake. I wanted the story to tell itself.

As I write my third and fourth books, I’ve come to understand the wisdom of those presentations. For an audience to enjoy a story, they have to like the protagonist. For them to stay engaged, the story needs good pacing. It’s good business, and it makes better art.

When we as writers and artists speak to our clients, it’s easy to see ourselves as the expert in the room. But everyone has their own set of skills to bring to the table. The client understands their goals and strategy. We understand how to produce the art.

There’s no telepathy in commissions. It’s all about understanding. When my client saw the simulation we had created, he loved it because it was the product he had been looking for. From the business side, it served his goals. From the art side, it resonated with his life experiences. All I needed was a couple conversations.

When Time Slows Down: Enjoying Conventions

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

My friend and I attended FanX this year. It was our first time. There were rooms filled with cosplayers, a massive vendor hall, and tons of celebrities (my favorite was Henry Winkler, who stood in front of his signing table shaking hands and hugging visitors). But at some point, wandering around staring at people and spending money got tiresome, so we attended a presentation. Something Star Wars related, he’s a big fan of the franchise.

When we sat down, he was on the edge of his seat. Sat up, attentive, and eager to learn. I was slouched in my chair. About ten minutes into the presentation his stance slackened. By half an hour he was holding his head up with his hands.

Then I pieced together what was happening.

This was his first conference. He had come expecting a content dense presentation, an action-packed lecture stuffed to the brim with anecdotes and stories from the extended universe. What he got was plodding, a gently paced lecture suited for resting rather than for learning. My friend was operating at a different time scale. The wrong time scale.

I couldn’t blame him, when I attended my first writer’s conference I had to make the same adjustment. When we’re young, schools are our conferences. Conferences where every minute is tracked and recorded, where learning is expected, and where education has no choice but to run at a breakneck pace. Your average presenter isn’t like that. They take their time, lose track of their thoughts, answer audience questions, and take the scenic route.There’s no test at the end of the lesson and the presenters aren’t trained educators. 

I didn’t recognize it until that moment with my friend at the Star Wars presentation, but time at conferences is slower. And to have a good time, you have to slow down with it.`

Appreciating the Present

My expectations for my first Writer’s Conference were way too high, and way too self-centered. I was hunting for the ‘most’ educational classes, searching for subjects that would maximize my education. Truth is, if your entire goal is to sponge up information on a subject, five hours on youtube watching carefully edited videos will deliver way more reliably than a conference. That’s not what conferences are for.

Conferences are for being present. They’re for stopping, looking around, and finding yourself surrounded by like-minded people from a million different backgrounds. They’re for conversation with your peers, sharing your experiences and learning from others. The poorly-kept secret of conferences is that the best event of every conference takes place after it ends, Bar Con. Having a couple drinks and conversation with someone you’ve never met with a similar interest often teaches you more than any presentation could ever hope to. 

This isn’t to say I don’t attend classes, nor do I ignore the content of the lectures, it’s a major consideration, but it isn’t the only consideration. Going down the calendar of a conference, I search for presentations from people I look up to, friends I’m there to support, or experts far above my level. And every one of these presentations gives me something different. 

From those who are a few years ahead of me in my career, I pick up advice for my immediate future. From friends, I take tips on how to give engaging presentations of my own. And from experts, I discover just how much I still don’t know. Even if the content of the presentation isn’t tuned to my skill-level or interests, the person giving the presentation still brings their own perspective to the world, and that new angle is always worth seeing.


In short, being present at a conference means seeing the people around you and hearing what they have to say. We spend so much of our lives focussed on ourselves, there’s something healing in listening to others.

Maximize Your Enjoyment, Not Your Day

I don’t fill my schedule. There may be classes from 10am to 7pm, but chances are I’ll only attend 2/3rds of those. The second you find yourself rushing from class to class, you’re missing the point of the conference. Often after a class, I find myself in a conversation with a peer, or maybe run into someone sitting on a couch in the hotel hallway, and that conversation will last as long as a class. Sometimes a group of us leave the event to get a long lunch. We’ve left the conference, but it’s those moments of spontaneity that stand out in my memory.

When I’m tired, I take a nap. When I’m hungry, I get lunch. When I’m tired of seeing hundreds of people, I find somewhere quiet and work on a project of my own.

Slowing down means being aware of yourself. No one’s getting grades for their attendance. You could spend the whole event sitting on a couch chatting with anybody passing by and you’re still enjoying the conference. Just because there’s a schedule doesn’t mean you need to shape yourself around it.

It Takes Practice

I’ve found a lot of people don’t enjoy their first conference. By the end, they’re underwhelmed by the lecture content, overwhelmed by the crowds, or just plain lost. Inaccurate expectations and self-imposed pressures make a conference something it isn’t.

Then they attend a second time. There’s a few more familiar faces, they skip a couple classes, and they go to bar con. By their third conference, they love it.

I think my friend would enjoy FanX a lot more the second time around. We’d show up in costume, learn technique from the other cosplayers, spend a while chatting with friends, and when we attend a presentation, slouch a little in our chairs.

That Time A Space Simulation Turned Into a Spy Hunt

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Readers of my blog know I used to simulate star-trek style spaceships. It was my entry-point to the world of writing, storytelling, theater, and tech all at once. A part of the reason I studied computer science was to make sense of the one part of the simulator I didn’t understand. My first written stories were simulations written to fill a story vacuum. As a flight director, I was lucky enough to not only write the stories, but perform them.

I told hundreds of stories in my five years simulating starships. Mostly I stuck to my biggest hits. Occasionally we’d test a new story and fiddle with it to make things more exciting. But this flight wasn’t like that. It was supposed to be a nice, normal mission. Instead it ended up being my most memorable flight in a half-decade of incredible stories.

Setting the Scene

The nine crew members each donned their uniform, a felt poncho modified with starship colors and branding. It was a birthday party, every kid was in second or third grade. A bit young, but me and my team had dealt with worse.

One side a school, one side a spaceship.

To reach the ship, they needed to pass through the ‘teleporter’, an old photography dark room door, the revolving kind. They’d step in two at a time. I’d remind them not to touch the side lest they be lost to space, then spin the door 180 degrees.

Pitch black for half a second, then the bridge of a starship. Even when you knew the trick, it still felt like magic. The UCS Everest was a large vessel, suited to handle parties of 10-15. There was a main viewscreen at the front and tiered seating at the back. A staff member would ask the arriving crew their job position, then direct them to their seat.

Once everyone was seated, I would teleport in behind them and the epic boarding music would fade away. Safety instructions were always boring, but from the very first second I could tell this crew was different. Eyes wandered, kids whispered. I talk quick, but this crew had no interest in any of it.

When the safety briefing was done, I had a single instruction for my staff. “Get through the training as fast as you can.”

We had a set of junior controls for young crews. Instead of everyone having a distinct job, they were all prompted to do the same activities together and drive the ship as a single unit. For groups younger than 4th grade, it was really the only way to keep them from being overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the most recent windows update had broken the juniors controls, so all we had were the advanced systems.

The Flight

The crew was both overwhelmed and not particularly invested in the story of the mission. They were supposed to fly to an endangered planet and help evacuate the citizens. For crews like this, we like to put a ‘doctor’ on the bridge to help them out. Whenever I came on over the speakers as the main engineer and told them they needed to ‘undock’ or ‘set course’, the doctor secretly made sure the task got done.

In this case, the doctor was basically flying the ship on their own.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, I could tell things weren’t working. I was quietly telling my staff to get ready to ‘board the ship’ as various alien intruders and wacky characters, but while that was being prepared, I needed the story to continue.

The Breakthrough

There was a political situation surrounding the endangered planet. I was on the speakers as a Texan ship captain warning them of the dangers. None of it was clicking, the whole mission was feeling like a bust. Then I said the words that changed the course of the mission. “The mayor of that planet is a crafty fella– he’s got people everywhere. Keep an eye out, you may have a spy on board.”

On the cameras, I could see kids’ heads popping up and glancing around. Their security officer, just eight years old, jumped out of his seat with a toy phaser in hand. There was still conversation being picked up by the microphones, but they weren’t talking about a party. They were talking about the spy.

Not yet realizing what had happened, I had the ‘ship doctor’ get back to the bridge to help them navigate the upcoming asteroids.

The second he teleported in, every kid in the room was out of their seat and yelling at the top of their lungs. They all made different accusations, but there was only one message: The Doctor was a spy.

My first reaction was frustration. Everyone had left their computers, which meant no one was driving the ship, which meant the mission was frozen in place. But these kids had never cared about the mission in the first place. As I watched the doctor get forced into the brig at phaser-point, I saw what I had been looking for since the start. A crew that cared about the mission. Not the space theater or the advance controls or the working together. They only cared about hunting for spies.

If the flight had been a field trip arranged by a school, I would have paused here. The crew would have gone back to their seats and we would have discussed what their priorities needed to be. But this was a birthday party, and when you’re flying a birthday party, it’s best to reserve the lectures for the really bad behavior.

A small brig for 6 suspects

So the mission changed. I ordered a volunteer dressed as a security guard to go up and help the kids interrogate the doctor. But their blind hunger for spies was worse than I thought. The security guard ended up in the brig right next to the doctor.

I was down to two volunteers. The next one I sent up with no costume at all and specifically told the kids that this person was not a part of the story. Just a staff member there to guide their experience. They reluctantly agreed not to stuff her into the brig, but there were plenty of murmurs that she was ‘secretly a spy’ anyways.

Now that I knew what kind of story we were telling, I knew what kind of tools we should use. We planted a device in a tunnel under their seats and set off the alarms until they found it. We played crazy ‘hacking’ noises over the speakers and flicked the lights from red-alert to green-alert to a bunch of other colors while they flipped switches on a panel. Whenever there was downtime, I didn’t even have to fill in the blanks, the crew would sprint right back to the brig and resume their interrogations of the prisoners.

Then came the masterstroke. An away mission to the lower decks. It’s a funny thing, kids love getting onto the starship, but once they’re on the ship, all they want to do is leave. There was a second starship right across the hall. We redirected that ship’s camera feed to the main view-screen. I told my last volunteer to go in there and stand around.

When the kids saw the footage of a person in a uniform doing nothing, they went wild. Never had they seen a more guilty figure in their lives. The staff member led them on the away mission and they caught the ‘spy’ with ease. They were thrilled for an excuse to use the phasers.

On their way back to the ship, the crew bumped into two unfortunate staff members who were returning from a lunch break. They were dragged to the brig like everyone else.

The Finish

With the end of the mission closing in, I decided it was time for a trial. We gave each student a seat and made them all a part of the jury. One by one we brought out the suspects. I wish I could tell you they were thorough in their questioning. I wish I could say they even listened to what each prospective spy had to say. But they didn’t. It was closer to a witch hunt than any form of judicial process.

At the end, they decided it was the doctor who was the spy. Of course it was, he was the first suspicious figure on the bridge and the only one they all remembered capturing. I told them they were right and that they had successfully completed the mission.

They cheered and ran off with their parents to eat cake. Great reviews all around, although I’m guessing that dying planet from the start of the mission would have a few complaints.

When we finished restoring the bridge from the child hurricane that had ripped through, I sat back and took a breath. One of the other staff members walked over to me with wide eyes. “That was amazing! I’ve never seen a mission like that before. You should write it down and fly it more often!”

I smiled and shook my head. We had improvised 2 and a half hours of nonsense. A playful nothing to distract a bunch of ten-year-olds. It was none of the magic that had drawn me to the program in the first place, and used none of the tools that made the simulator cool. Just one long string of chaos, and we were lucky the kids had liked it.

Something Changes When Story Moves From A Book To A Game

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I didn’t start my writing journey with books. It wasn’t short stories or fan-fiction either. My original medium of storytelling was a bit more improvised. 

Star Trek Simulations.

It sounds a little silly, but for the first five years of my storytelling journey, I was a game master. Crews of birthday parties and corporate events would show up, I would give them a mission, put them on their ship, and send them on their flight. Whenever they spoke to the computer or the main engineer or an alien, it was usually me. When the ship took damage and smoke rolled in near the security terminal, I was flipping the switches.

It’s where I cut my teeth. It’s where I learned how to make the big moments of a story pop. And when my time flying starships came to an end and I made the move to telling stories in books, I discovered how unprepared I was.

Telling a story in a book is one thing. Telling a story in a game is something entirely different.

First and Third Person POV

Realistically, it isn’t just a split between games and books. It’s a split between interactive media and non-interactive media. When a reader reads a book, they expect to be told a story. When a player starts a game, they expect to be the story.

In a book, the main character is the main character. In a game, even if there is a main character, the real protagonist isn’t inside the game, it’s the person holding the controls. For a game to feel engaging, it needs to engage not just with the moving avatar on the screen, but with the human being that’s driving the decisions.

Much like in books, games have two main pov styles. First-person and third-person. Note these are different from where the camera is. Those familiar with books and movies will probably understand gaming’s third-person approach to storytelling. There’s a character on screen with a history, traits, and a connection to the world. 

A game like God of War tells the story of Kratos trying to raise his son in a cruel world controlled by the gods. When things happen, they happen to Kratos and Kratos reacts to them. He changes as the story goes on. This makes sense. This is close to traditional storytelling.

For games, first-person perspective storytelling is a complete 180.

A book uses first person to connect more deeply with the protagonist. We’re closer to the main character than ever. We can see their thoughts and how they decide how to act in the world. Games do the opposite. In the first-person perspective, the main character is washed away, made into nothing but a vessel for the player to control. It’s an effort to place the player directly into the story. Now when bad things happen, they don’t just happen to the character, they happen to the person playing. 

In DOOM, the players inhabit a character only known as Doomslayer as they defeat demon hordes. In Legend of Zelda, the players play Link, a character who never speaks and simply reacts to the world. Even though Link is shown as a real person in the game, he has no distinct attributes, only the ones a player projects onto him.

The Gameplay is the Story

When I first began simulating starships, I found the moments that were most story intense were the least engaging for participants. They didn’t care about two other characters arguing between one another to decide the fate of a planet. They didn’t care about the lore that set up the story. 

In a game, cutscenes are skipped. There’s a reason for this: The main character doesn’t need development, after all, the player is the true main character. And if the main character doesn’t need development, then the only kind of story events that matter are the ones that change the gameplay.

In games, a story is what happens to the main character and what they do in response. If something changes in the world, it has to be at least in part triggered by the player’s actions. And when something happens in the story, it can’t just have emotional weight, it has to mean something for the gameplay.

I used to play a typing game. You were in a cage descending into the depths and sharks would emerge from the darkness with words written on their belly. I’d type the words and the sharks would go away. It was fun, but the story wasn’t exactly engaging. In fact, the setting could have been replaced by a hundred other settings and I wouldn’t have even noticed.

This is the trouble with splitting story from gameplay. If halfway down, the operator radios in to tell me they’ve been in love with me for years, it doesn’t mean anything. The operator isn’t real, the love isn’t real. But if they radio in to tell me all our shark research has allowed us to slow the shark’s attacks, that does mean something. It changes how the game plays, so I become invested in that element of the story.

It’s hard to accept. The story of a game is only as good as how it affects the gameplay. This is where the phrase ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ comes from. If the gameplay and the story aren’t telling the same experience, the player disconnects from the half they don’t care about.

In the world of starship simulation, cutscenes between characters became a no-go. If I had something important to share, it needed to be delivered directly to the crew, and it had to change how they approached the mission.

Interactive Storytelling Workarounds

There’s a certain selfishness to a player’s approach to the story. They only care about what affects them. So how do you tell a story about complicated characters and nuanced situations in a way that makes the player pay attention?

I’ve found three ways:

Optional stories, passive stories, and mysteries.

Optional stories are exactly what they sound like. If 50% of players don’t want the lore, don’t force it down their throats. Sidequests are great, but some people are in a hurry. You leave the B-tier material in the game, but as optional content. Games are a bit like a walk down a buffet line. Everyone gets an entree, most people get the sides, and some people pick up a dessert at the end. In books, everybody gets the same experience. In interactive media, we don’t have the same luxury. It’s up to us to meet each player where they are instead of demanding they enjoy things they don’t like.

The idea behind passive storytelling is finding a way to sneak details into the experience without bogging down the gameplay. Gameplay is king. But if we can find a way to deliver a few lines of dialog without interrupting anything, then there’s no harm in it. This is how God of War told a character driven story, they’d give the player a level to traverse and the characters would talk amongst one another on the way. It’s like playing a podcast while working out. The player’s unrelenting drive to do things is fed, but the context of the story sneaks in with it.

Mystery is exactly what it sounds like. Players enter an area, make observations, and form their own conclusions about the situation. If anything, I think mysteries actually are better suited to interactive media than books. My most successful Star Trek story was one where the crew was coming to save a trapped squadron. When they arrived, they’d discover the squadron was gone. After a brief investigation, they’d discover a wormhole leading to who-knows-where. Without telling the crew a single aspect of the story, they figured it all out, and within a minute or two, they’d inevitably enter the wormhole with no plan on how to get home.

Conclusion

Games come with entirely different expectations. A reader expects a story. A player expects an experience. This post didn’t even discuss handling player freedom, needless to say that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

I had to make some adjustments when I switched from interactive media to direct storytelling. I imagine a lot of D&D Dungeon Masters go through a similar experience. They realize the main character can’t just be a vessel anymore, they need personality, background, and a particular view on the world. Every character can’t just talk to the protagonist anymore, they need to be living, breathing parts of the world with their own motivations.

Both mediums are difficult. Both mediums highlight different strengths. For games, accomplishment is the greatest payoff. For books, it’s usually something a little more philosophical.

If you get a chance, consider writing a story for a game someday. Nothing captures the difference in formats quite as much as watching your audience glaze over the moment you force them into a cutscene.

Logan Sidwell is a sci-fi and fantasy writer from Utah. He started as a writer and director in Ed-Tech, he now strives to marry his background in Computer Science and his years of storytelling to create fun, compelling ideas that explore new ground in technological and fantastical settings.


Check out my debut novel: The Human Countermove