Authors = Developers
During a recent conversation my friend told me that he thought of the Internet (capitalized because it is a place – have you noticed?) as a living, magic realist world. He is a bit complicated sometimes but I know what he meant. Beneath the riddle, what my male friend Pam was talking about was stories.
That is why Pam is my friend: because we both love stories most of all.
We read stories written in all kinds of styles but have a soft spot for sci-fi and magic realism. For imaginative stories, is how I usually put it.
Once upon a time the book was the snazziest communication technology used to tell stories, and authors crafted them on paper. They invented and deconstructed ways of writing stories, and they themselves were authors, working in the age of the book, so they were writers.
But now, means Pam, we are in the digital age – and our equivalents of those old magic realists (such as Borges – Pam’s and lots of folks’ favourite) are not necessarily writers. Nowadays they are either developers or they work with developers.
Lots of people are out there in the real world are developing gamestories for the Internet world. On the one hand there are small, influential companies like FailBetter, who create independent text-y games and advise mainstream gaming Cyclops’ like BioWare (who are the second hand). Then on the third hand there are a hundred thousand bedroom developers coming up with God knows what, and on the fourth hand are interactive fiction writers like Emily Short.
Kindles and other eReaders are very popular, but they are only the beginning of a whole host of rich-texture storybooks that will surely emerge, with animated GIFs as illustrations, like photographs out of Harry Potter (which like Star Trek is a story that was so popular it came true).
"Cinemagraphs" by Keving Burg and Jamie Beck
So I would recommend anyone who takes even a passing interest in stories, technology, people, or interesting things to investigate stories being independently developed because you will find stories told in ways you have not seen before.
>You might like to also try:
>Varytale / Undum/
Dreaming Methods
>There is a world of this out there.
About David Thomas
David is a freelance wordsmith and talented web copy creator. A person of wide interests, his work ranges from corporate writing in industries such as IT and property management, to children's storybooks. You can follow him on twitter @mylast15letters .