I had a testers meeting last week. It was a bit impromtu, but such meetings usually are. My little team of testers is only three people these days, and while we do have an obvious senior tester who should be in charge, he’s not really the commanding sort. The next most senior tester, who has a few years in the job at the company on me (but I might have more total years testing thanks to my job before this one) and is the same “rank” as me tends to be the one to call the meetings. Usually because he’s got a lot of work coming up and knows he’ll need some help from someone else because our lab assistant (who usually helps him) won’t be available or because it takes a degree of expertise the lab assistant lacks. It helps him to sit down and talk through all this stuff when he needs more than just one-off help, which is why he calls most of these meetings. My other coworker and I just call on each other as needed and talk through that kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis, but we share a great deal of expertise and can ask each other to do things without worrying about how well it’ll get done. Which, unfortunately, is not something we can expect from this other guy since he has done his best to avoid learning anything about the deeper aspects of our testing over the years whereas all three of us are fairly proficient in most of his testing. Beyond that, we also have status update meetings from time to time, just to get together and talk about what’s going on and what’s coming up, but we haven’t done any of those meetings in a while because it has been pretty much the same stuff going on for over a year at this point.
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Authorial Intent Versus Player Interpretation In Unicorn Overlord’s Support Conversations
Now that I’ve finally cleared Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, I’ve returned to playing through Unicorn Overlord in whatever spare gaming hours I’ve got that aren’t dedicated to playing through the Dragon Age franchise (which have been a lot, lately, since I’ve been too tired to engage with Dragon Age). In fact, I just cleared one of the two major plot beats introduced after the initial setup–forming the rebellion that would make up the core of the game and rescuing the childhood friend who got kidnapped the instant they got off the boat in one of the most infuriating cases of “don’t just stand there, jackass. Do something!” I’ve ever seen–and unlocked a massive slew of support conversations that I’d been sitting on since I realized I could just spend the ample money I earned in the game to increase everyone’s support levels. While the plot doesn’t reflect the writing chops brought to bear on giving voice to the characters, it’s impossible to deny that this game knew what it wanted to provide and provided it: excellent character writing (and voice acting!). As I worked through this bevy of unlocked conversations, I was reminded anew of how much I enjoyed the incredibly unique depictions of each character via their writing and the interesting mix of subtext and text sprinkled into the conversations between all of them. I’m fond of saying that the writer can only bring half of the work to any storytelling and it is up to the reader to provide the other half, but that’s not exactly true. Readers can bring much more, overwhelming the writer’s work, and writers can work in such a way that leaves the reader with little room to interpret. Unicorn Overlord has a bunch of interesting examples of both explicit and implicit information, as some character relationships are defined in fairly clear terms, some are left ambiguous enough for the reader to interpret, and some give so little information that it is almost entirely on the reader to see more than what is shown.
Continue readingMy Voice, My Mode of Speaking, and My Meaning
One of the things I’ve perhaps studied the most as a writer, and I mean as a craftsperson perfecting their art, is what I want to call the mode of speaking. It’s a bit of what most people mean when they talk about “voice,” a bit of word choice, and a bit of style. In long form, it is the way of writing in order to speak directly to your audience. I would call it “accessibility” or “general appeal” except I know I’m not trying to figure out a more broad way of writing things out. What I’m trying to do is find a more narrow one.
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