This is an old sketch I did several years ago for a game thread over at OtakuBoards, back when I was still only a few semesters into college and still wrote proliferously. Wasn't even part of the main thread, either. It was a sign-up.
I remember deciding to write it like this, vice following the traditional data-sheet format, because I was tired of doing the same thing over and over again, and wanted to test myself, to see if I could still include all the necessary/required information without having to use a list. Basically, the requested "writing sample" expanded and enveloped the entire sign-up, and produced what you see here.
Came back to it this week because I've been helping a coworker—who we shall for now call a fledgling writer—work through things like how to build characters, how to explain parts of their personalities and traits, how to give them motivations, how to set up their backgrounds, and how to do so without coming off as trite and uninspired. Or worse, plagiaristic. But he seemed to keep bouncing back and forth between ideas, and so I decided to go back and look at a few of my things to try and show him some of my approach.
Finding the pieces was easy enough. The real work was reformatting them back from HTML and/or BBCode and making them presentable in Word. That, of course, turned into full re-reads and some edits and revisions for spit-and-polish, since I always find bits and pieces with which I am less than fully satisfied.
And then I remembered how much I enjoyed doing this creating, and how I very rarely share what I do with other people. So here we are.
* * *
The world for This Is Earth was one of the many brilliant creations of Vicky, one of my favorite people from OB and one of the two writers in my time there who genuinely made me feel inadequate—although she would immediately dismiss the claim as rubbish. Her games were typically extraordinarily detailed, and since she was also a fairly talented graphic artist, she knew how to present them well.
But what always got me were her concepts. She was very good with mythology, enjoyed excursions into the supernatural as well as the paranormal, and had a decent touch for science fiction, with which I will always have a moderate love-affair. But what invariably drew me in was the innate sense of real-ness that always pervaded her designs. She didn't want to always play around with little made-up gods and be invincible against everything and always win the day. She wanted wounds, flaws, imperfections. She wanted to portray the fantastic as if it was reality.
She wanted everything to still be human.
So it was typically her games that challenged me most as a storyteller. Now, I wasn't the most prolific contributor, ever, by far. At the time, I was still somewhat focused on making sure I accomplished my education, and hadn't yet allowed my laziness to overtake me. So although I probably could have posted an entry per day, I could never justify to myself the six hours I needed to devote solely to post-writing, and thus my participation was generally somewhat slower than that of my counterparts. But I like to think that I was one of the strongest—and I know that the few times I felt compelled to refuse her invitation, Vicky always seemed remarkably put out. So that boosted my ego somewhat.
This particular game was, as you may have inferred upon reading, sort of a dystopian future. Mankind had pushed its technological prowess to the absolute limit and almost paid the price, only averting the cultural implosion by sending all of its failures and embarrassments to be locked in a nation-jail named Septu, which was basically the entirety of China, sans the more urban western section.
So everything nasty had been stuck there, and the intent of the game was to stick a lid on it, make it like a pressure cooker, and see what came out. Unfortunate that the game never made it past the first page, but such is the life of an OtakuBoards Theatre game.
But I was so taken with her idea, and so fond of the result of my attempt to buck the trend, that I kept my sign-up and added in the necessary details from the thread that the original post lacked.
If you're reading this, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I.
