Booklife

Allen Varney is a freelance writer and designer living in Texas.  He’s worked on everything from Dungeons & Dragons (TSR) supplements in the 80s to Paranoia (Mongoose) in the OOs.  His Executive Challenge simulation game is still used at the University of Texas McCombs Business School.  Role-playing games, boardgames, computer games, Varney’s done it all and below he talks about some of what games have taught him about writing.
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Emiliano Sciarra is an Italian game designer best known for BANG!, a spaghetti western themed card game.

“When a man with a pistol meets a man with a Winchester,” reads the BANG! tagline, “you might say that the one with the pistol is a dead man… unless his pistol is a Volcanic!”  That is either a spaghetti koan or PR copy for a very cool card game.  Or both.
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Greg Stolze is a fiction writer and game designer best known for designing Unknown Armies, Meatbot Massacre, and Reign.  He developed the One-Roll Engine (a streamlined game mechanic using a pool of 10-sided dice) and pioneered the Ransom Model for funding his designs through patron support.  For more on Stolze (and if the previous sentence baffled you and piqued your interest), check out “Tea Leaves! Rat People!  Odin!” over at Kobold Quarterly.
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David Millians is an elementary school teacher at the Paideia School in Atlanta, GA.  He has been playing role-playing games (RPGs), such as Dungeons & Dragons and Runequest, since the sixth grade.  These days, in addition to playing RPGs, uses them as teaching tools.  He gives seminars on the subject of games and education at conventions around the country. He also coordinates the gaming and education group for the Game Manufacturer’s Association.

Over the years, Millians has spoken widely and often about the value of role-playing and other games for teaching math, social skills, collaboration, history, and just about everything else in a non-competitive, interdisciplinary manner.  Here, he focuses on what RPGs have taught him (and, of course, his students) about writing.

David Millians contributed Appendix A: Games & Education to Family Games: The 100 Best.

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David Millians: Games have fundamentally affected the way I experience writing. I began playing and reading games in an active conscious way at around the age of ten and have continued to do so ever since. All games have a narrative, and pair and group games create stories, shared for the moment or for many years. I remain fascinated by these narratives and they ways they are experienced, recorded, and recalled.

My favorite kind of game is role-playing in a group. I am often the person running the game, so my interest in oral storytelling has grown over the years. This leads to considerations of plot, character, and such, but it also considers pacing and the live, ongoing response of the other participants. I have always been a reader. Some of these are easier than others to translate into games, depending on the goals of the games and the interests of the players. We all see this sort of thing when a favorite book is made into a movie. Often the result is disappointing, but sometimes there is a new, exciting creation. There are so many kinds of writers. Some prefer to work alone, but for those with collaborative inclinations, playing a role-playing game would be an interesting and valuable experience.

In the 1970s, when I was first playing role-playing games, the production value of published games was low. The same was true to a slightly lesser extent of some science fiction and fantasy books of the time. These various readings and my mother’s instructive grammatical comments effected a Darwinian improvement in my own writing mechanics. I wanted to understand these games and books, and the effort required actually improved my sense of quality writing, which I found more and more. I don’t know that I write any better, but I have benefited from countless encounters with excellent writers and their commendable editors.

Any sort of collaborative activity reveals new ideas to its various participants, and their interactions can lead to novel products none of them could have imagined on their own. This is one of the most enjoyable aspects of games for me. Through their play, I continue to learn and expand the possibilities I can see.

Monica Valentinelli is a freelance writer and game designer with an abiding interest in mythology, archaeology, and philosophy. You’ll see these influences in her e-book Queen of Crows, which is available from DriveThruHorror.com.

Valentinelli contributed an essay on Gloom to Family Games: The 100 Best. For more from Valentinelli, check out an interview I did with her over at Flamesrising a while back. Below, she talks about what gaming and writing have taught her.

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What has playing games taught you about writing (of any sort)?

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Monica Valentinelli: Whenever I play a game, I immerse myself in another world either through its visual aspects, like a video game, or through collaborative storytelling. Those aspects of the games I’ve played taught me how to value a story for its setting, the mood that has been created, and the story (or goal) that’s being represented.

Now, when I’m writing a story or designing a game, I ask myself how the reader will respond to what I’m working on. Can they experience a particular mood in that same, intimate way? Do they enjoy the story’s world? Can the story integrate these pieces without overwhelming the reader? These sorts of questions are important to me when I’m writing.

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Is there a game every writer should try?

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Monica Valentinelli: In Family Games: The 100 Best, I had written about a game called Gloom. This game is a stellar example of how a dark mood or story can be presented in a way that’s still funny without being tripe or obnoxious. Playing the game also allows a writer to hear the voices of these bizarre characters and their families out loud. In my mind, the design of the game offers writers a chance to see what great writing is all about. Exceptional characterization, good storytelling, and never a dull moment.

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In what ways does playing games enhance your creativity?

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Monica Valentinelli: My tendency is to be drawn to things that are visual or audial in order to find inspiration for what I’m writing. If I can’t use my senses – then a story doesn’t turn out the way that I want it to because I can’t “hear” the characters in my head or “see” what they’re going through. Playing games allows me to tap into a different aspect of creativity because it allows me to enter a character’s world from their eyes. That ability has proven to be invaluable to my writing in many ways.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.  He is the staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly.  He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.