I'm excited for my colleagues who are on great new projects, but I was only ever a contract writer on In the Valley of Gods and won't be moving on to anything else at Valve.
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I want to talk about In the Valley of Gods a little bit, because it's unlikely that I'll work on it again.
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I started working with the Campo Santo team almost six years ago. While they made Firewatch, they gave me a break writing articles for their website about severed toes in cocktails, Pocahontas' grave and depressed mining towns haunted by Silent Hill.https://quarterly.camposanto.com/survival-horror-8e6bff3c0ef2 …
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In many ways that was the best and most empowering job I've ever had. But I knew there'd be a follow-up to Firewatch, and what I really wanted was the chance to write and do research for that. To me, that was a kind of graduation. I got that opportunity and held on to it tight.
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I wanted to make myself invaluable to this game and to an amazing team by becoming a person who knew what it meant to tell a mystery adventure story in 1920s in Egypt.
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I spent so much time with 19th century maps and guidebooks, cartouche diagrams and tomb plans, theses and excavation reports, figuring out creative solutions to narrative problems. Where could a player go, what could they see, what could they do?
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I really wanted the 1929 edition of an Egypt travel guide that Thomas Pynchon used to write V. I found it as a PDF behind the paywall of a private Lovecraft enthusiast forum, & I had to pretend I was a Lovecraft devotee who designed Call of Cthulhu RPG modules in his spare time.
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(If you're making a Lovecraft-inspired video game and you're hiring, I am a devotee of the Lovecraft mythos and I design Call of Cthulhu RPG modules in my spare time.)
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I went to an Egyptologist conference at the British Museum and learned so much about how stories about ancient Egypt can only be told responsibly with acknowledgement of racial and political context.
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And things like how every photograph of Tutankhamun's famous mask exists only because someone in the 20th century cut the head off a dead boy (and then pretended he hadn't done it.)https://photographingtutankhamun.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/tutankhamuns-head/ …
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How, rather than credit the beautiful art and advanced technology of ancient Egypt to a black, African race, the white western world of the 19th and 20th centuries twisted race science to assert that the Egyptians who actually created all that good stuff were themselves white.
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This seemed like an important thing to think about in a game about two black women in a world of white Egyptologists. And I'm not sure, but I think we could have made a video game about it.
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For a while, I thought this game was kind of about what we lose when we die.
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There's what we think will happen, and there's what does, thousands of years later: people forget the basic facts of our existence, and our bodies are ground into fertiliser, displayed naked in a museum, or crushed underfoot in a dash for something pretty in our tomb.
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I also wrote something about a secret society of camel fanciers who convene in the desert at midnight to dress camels up in human clothes and paint their portraits.
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I don't know that any of this would have made it into the game, and it wouldn't have been my call anyway. What is not yours is not yours. Ultimately, I guess it doesn't matter.
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After the Egyptology conference, I went to a drinks reception and hung out by the sarcophagus of Merymose, a viceroy to Amenhotep III, with a glass of red wine. I thought: Technically, this is game development.
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But please do call me about that Lovecraft game. Or get in touch if you need a writer with 2+ years' experience on a mystery adventure game steeped in the culture and politics of 1920s Egyptology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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There's a lot more I could say about In the Valley of Gods, but in the end - and for me, at least, this is the end - there's really only one thing you need to say.
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Wydaje się, że ładowanie zajmuje dużo czasu.
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