Hey there folks, and welcome to Text Boxes - a brand new blog dedicated to exploring storytelling in video games. Before we properly get underway, I'd like to take some time to establish what Text Boxes is, who I am, and what I hope to achieve through this endeavour. What is Text Boxes?As I said above, Text Boxes is a blog founded upon the analysis and critique of storytelling and information conveyance within the medium of video games. In layman's terms, it's a space where I plan to explore the techniques that games employ to tell their stories and teach their mechanics to players. Each new entry will dive deep into one aspect of a specific game, series or genre, putting it under the microscope to try and establish what makes it successful (or, in some cases, unsuccessful). While most of the content on Text Boxes will gravitate towards analysing stories and storytelling techniques, I'll also be looking at things like game mechanics and visual presentation when I find them particularly interesting or noteworthy. As time progresses, I hope to cover a wide range of topics including voice acting, animation, dialogue trees/wheels, environmental storytelling, ludo-narrative dissonance, everything in between and plenty more besides. What's your schedule?Right now I don't have a strict schedule outlined for Text Boxes. In terms of how often I'll be updating this blog, the honest (if vague) answer is, "as often as I can". In practice, the frequency of posts will be dictated by how quickly I'm able to make it through the games I intend to talk about, but I'm tentatively going to say that new entries should arrive about once every two weeks on average. I don't currently have an agenda regarding which games I intend to cover in this space, either, although I do have some entries already in the bank and ideas for others starting to take shape. In these early stages, Text Boxes will simply be informed by the games I choose to play in my spare time, and the things I notice while playing them. That's not to say I don't have ideas in terms of continuity or long-form serial content, but for now I'm happy to let circumstance dictate my direction and see where it takes me. Who are you?My name is Dan Kempster. I'm a writer and video game enthusiast based in the United Kingdom. Consequently I have a great deal of interest in both video games and storytelling, and for some time have been looking for an opportunity to explore the place where the circles of that particular Venn diagram overlap. As a student I studied English Language and Literature at the University of Essex, graduating with a BA (Hons) First Class in 2011, giving me an established (albeit slightly rusty!) background in literary analysis. Prior to Text Boxes I maintained a user's blog at popular video game website Giant Bomb. I'll be archiving the most meaningful content from that blog by copying to Text Boxes over the coming months, but for now you can access my old posts by clicking this link. Why write a blog?This is perhaps the hardest of these questions for me to answer. In the modern age, when almost all video game criticism has moved into the audio-visual space by way of podcasts and YouTube videos, it's incredibly difficult to measure the long-term viability of the written word. Personally, I believe that long-form essays and written criticism justify their existence by providing a carefully curated alternative to the often lackadaisical spontaneity of unscripted, stream-of-consciousness audio-visual content such as podcasts and Let's Plays. While I attempted to carve out a space for written content through my Giant Bomb blog, I came to realise that the site's userbase wasn't interested in the kind of content I sought to provide. That realisation led me to establish Text Boxes as a blog dedicated to written articles, in the hope that it might reach out to like-minded individuals and forge its own identity within the landscape of video game criticism and analysis. I hope I've shed a little light on what I hope to achieve with Text Boxes, and I'd be really excited to know if you're planning to come along for the ride - please leave me a shout in the comments if there's anything in particular you think I should be focusing on at this early stage. I'm currently hard at work preparing the inaugural entries for a January 2020 launch, but until then, please feel free to explore and familiarise yourself with the site. Be sure to pin Text Boxes to your browser's list of Bookmarks, or subscribe to new posts via the RSS feed if that's more your sort of thing. Thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around. Dan Kempster
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AuthorHey there folks, and welcome to Text Boxes. I'm Dan, a writer and video game enthusiast with a passion for storytelling. Text Boxes is a blog dedicated to games, their stories, and the techniques they use to convey them to the player. Archives
February 2020
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