Wednesday, October 21, 2015

How to Win at Ultravision: Signal-Boost

I'm very probably going to submit something to this collection, which is being edited by Bradley Sands and published by Eraserhead -- and maybe you should too.

How to Win at Ultravision: A Strategy Guide for Video Games. They're looking for "mini-strategy guides for games of your own invention. They must be in the range of 1000 words to 5000 words long," and submissions are still open.

Fwiw. In some ways, it feels like a risky time to be writing fiction which is thoroughly woven into the great digital gaming megatext? On the one hand, it offers zero novelty factor and low-to-zero bravery brownie points, but on the other, it isn't yet a well-enough-established genre territory that there are tropes and other dynamics which can be performed consummately / subverted / evolved. I also wonder if fiction which intersects so intricately with gaming might suffer a little from the currently somewhat under-theorized relationship between stories and games: game design theory being mostly something that happens at the fringes of economics, mathematics and positivist psychology, with surprisingly thin connectivity to literary studies or philosophy? A few things about this Ultravision clarion feel really promising to me, like Sands's mention of Borges as a precedent, and the way the remit leaves it open to tell absolutely any kind of story -- hopefully stories unlike those usually told in actual games! -- and the fact that one or two bare good writers I know have already expressed some interest. So we'll see ^_^

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Earlier: Martin Amis's 1982 video games strategy guide. What is he even saying about women, I don't even really get it.

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