Great writing…about videogames

I have to say that some of the most interesting and entertaining reading I've been getting lately has been from issues of Kill Screen, a magazine focused on "videogames. Videogames? Videogames!"

Even their writing guidelines are worth a read, with lines like "'Smart' writing doesn't necessarily mean 'academic' writing. (The New Yorker is a great example.) Please make your argument without losing momentum, resorting to academic terminology, or burying us in citations. The word 'mimesis' snuck into our last issue, but we swear it will never happen again."

I'm only an occasional gamer at best — I had my Halo days — but I love how approachable these articles are, even when they deal with games I've never heard of, and especially when they do. (From Grand Theft Auto to Oregon Trail, Big Buck Hunter to Second Life.) Thoughtful analysis about a field that gets too little of it, engagingly presented.

It makes me wonder if there's any topic that I wouldn't be interested in, if only it were written about well enough. Of course, nonfiction has the advantage of often being on a topic that's inherently interesting. With fiction, you have to go and make it all up.

My other great discovery is the Digital Romance Lab, focused on "investigating love + romance in videogames."

Of course, this is all being discovered whilst I'm working not on the branching path story, but on a much plainer fantasy story.