I know it's been a while since I've posted a new chapter here, and I'm gonna go ahead and blame the concussion for that. I don't have the energy for much more than work and sleep lately. Hard to write about eating brains while I'm working to reassemble my own. Ironic? You betcha. But fear not, loyal readers, because the next chapter in the continuing tale of Kaveh and Lisa is formulating even now. Chapter Nine - Best Wishes for a Speedy Recovery had its title even before I hit my head, but it takes on that much more poignancy now.
Also, writing about zombies as publicly as I do, people tend to contact me whenever anything related comes their way. A while back, my uncle in Croatia sent me this link about the new Resident Evil game, about how "the zombie is a strong character," and I started thinking about video games in general.
See, I'm all about new ways to tell stories, and I gotta say, the video game industry today is looking a lot like the film industry in the 1930s. They've barely gotten sound, and they aren't quite sure what to do with it yet, but the narrative conventions that are emerging now, the stories that people are just starting to be able to tell, will become the benchmarks of the emerging medium for a while, maybe into the next century.
There aren't a lot of rules yet about how to tell stories where the audience is the main character, where the person playing the game is driving the plot and making decisions that affect the story, but there are people out there trying to create them. It could get very exciting. The old Choose Your Own Adventure books, where that was the whole structure, could only anticipate a couple of the choices people might want to make, but people expect more from video games.
Forget it. I'm ranting. I need braaaaains!
