Upcoming: Freelance Writing Success Summit

Excited to be speaking at the Freelance Writing Success Summit next week! Learn everything a freelance writer needs for success. There are sessions about all aspects of running a freelance business - from bookkeeping to personal branding to finding clients.

Register for free at: Freelance Writing Success Summit sponsored by ProWritingAid.

During the summit, ProWritingAid will be offering every participant 50% off their software.


I'll be doing a Live Q&A at 9 AM on July 2 in the FFWS - Premium Access Facebook group and my session, "Blogging for Self-Promotion and Business," is on at 2 PM EDT that day.

Sande Chen is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform. As a serious games consultant, she helps companies harness the power of video games for non-entertainment purposes. Her career as a writer, producer, and game designer has spanned over 15 years. Her game credits include 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award in Videogame Writing. She has spoken at conferences around the globe, including the Game Developers Conference, Serious Play Conference, and Games For Change. 

Creating Emotional Touchstones in Emergent Narrative

In this panel, Matthew Farber, Sande Chen, Kimberly Unger, and Juliana Loh discuss the importance of emotional touchstones in emergent narrative and how it's done in different types of games.

Many thanks to Fellow Traveller Games for organizing a great program of panels on narrative games! The panels are on YouTube, including ours on emergent narrative.

LudoNarraCon 2020
Panel: Creating Emotional Touchstones in Emergent Narrative

Games have a unique ability to establish empathy between a player and a world and characters, but game players don’t always follow the path the narrative lays out for them. This panel discusses how designers and storytellers can build in empathic elements that can be found and engaged with even when the larger narrative gets delivered out of order.

This panel originally aired during LudoNarraCon 2020, digital festival celebrating narrative games, hosted on Steam and organized by Fellow Traveller Games.

Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation and Pedagogy at the University of Northern Colorado. His research is at the intersection of game-based learning and social and emotional learning (SEL). Dr. Farber has been invited to the White House, to keynote for UNESCO, and he has been interviewed about games and learning by NPR, Fox News Radio, EdSurge, The Denver Post, USA TODAY and The Wall Street Journal. Farber's book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning -- Revised Edition (2017) features a foreword from Greg Toppo. His latest book, Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games (2018), has a foreword from James Paul Gee. To learn more, visit: MatthewFarber.com 

Sande Chen is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform. As a serious games consultant, she helps companies harness the power of video games for non-entertainment purposes. Her career as a writer, producer, and game designer has spanned over 15 years. Her game credits include 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award in Videogame Writing. She has spoken at conferences around the globe, including the Game Developers Conference, Serious Play Conference, and Games For Change. 

Kimberly Unger made her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing and after 20+ years as a pro in that industry, the magic still hasn’t faded. Now she sources leading-edge content for Oculus, lectures on the intersection of art and code for UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering, wrangles a monthly column on science-fiction in videogames over at Amazing Stories and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race. Her debut novel, NUCLEATION will be out in November of 2020. You can find her on Twitter at @Ing3nu or on her blog at www.ungerink.com. 

Juliana Loh is an independent Producer/Artist whose background includes branded entertainment, UX and art direction. In addition to developing educational/gaming experiences, she has honed her artistic skills as a concept and gallery-showing artist while pioneering, empowering and supporting grassroots tech meetups and communities. Currently working as an instructor and immersive artist, she is keenly aware of how emerging technology is changing the way we relate to each other. She is currently working on a Pro-Kindess Immersive project that is based on user-centered thinking.

Systemic Racism in Idealized Fiction

In this article, game writer Sande Chen explains how idealized fiction can send an unintended message by ignoring racial injustices.

Earlier this year, I was able to attend a remarkable WGA, East Webinar about the report, "Normalizing Injustice: The Dangerous Misrepresentations That Define Television's Scripted Crime Genre," which explains how racial injustice is still reinforced even though diversity may be represented in these television crime shows.

As was pointed out in the Webinar, it's like racism has been erased in these shows. On the show, it's commonplace for a 65 year-old black woman to be a judge or hold a high-ranking position, but what's concerning is that none of the institutionalized racial injustice is ever addressed. These minority characters are inherent supporters of the system.

I found this line of thought eye-opening and intriguing. Others wondered if viewers or players would want to think about issues of inequality and discrimination while consuming their favorite media.

However, we know that the influence of media is important and as writers, we can and are often asked to depict a more enlightened society. The impetus to show diverse characters in our stories is not only to make things interesting, but also, to break stereotypes. We've seen it in TV remakes like Roswell, where the formerly all-white character list has disappeared. I think the writers did a good job of incorporating the new ethnic and sexual identities and blending them with topically relevant issues like immigration. They didn't do a cut and paste, like I described in the blog post, "Interchangeable He and She," where the hypothetical solution was to simply change pronouns.

My feeling is that replacing a male, white judge character with a 65 year-old black woman can feel like cut and paste. We should want more. We should be curious about her background. What were her struggles to get to where she is now? It's not about harping about social change, but just accepting that this character might have had a harder time than just applying and going to law school.

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

Moving Beyond the Hero's Journey

In this article, game writer Sande Chen delves into the audience shift from the Hero's Journey to the collective journey.

I've just finished listening to the June 3, 2020 StoryFit Webinar, "Character Research for the New Age of Storytelling: Using Data and Media Psychology to Make Meaningful Stories," and I've never been so excited to report on a panel. Many thanks to Juliana Loh for pointing me towards this fascinating story research panel.

I have heard of the collective journey before but the way Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner Entertainment expressed his points made this evolution of storytelling so relevant to today's outlook and environment. Plus, research shows that programming following the collective journey framework has done far better with audiences than narratives based on the Hero's Journey, forcing companies to see how they can retune their story properties.

According to Gomez, audiences are moving away from stories about a singular hero who can save the world. Instead, they care about a collective journey, one that reflects multiple perspectives. The Hero's Journey, already criticized for its masculine leanings and focus on external conflicts, just doesn't reflect modern sensibilities. Nowadays and especially with the ongoing protests, people are more keyed into communities. They don't need to search for a wise, old mentor. They can just reach out and find mentors on social media. In a collective journey, as Gomez says, "No one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves."

What does this mean for our narratives? Instead of thinking of one strand of story, we can think about story worlds, or networked stories. Our game worlds can be and often are story worlds. The collective journey encompasses all of those stories. Gomez pointed to the film Arrival as an excellent example of the collective journey.

The StoryFit panel as a whole provided story research about character networks and explained why character relationships are a crucial component in getting audiences to care about characters.  

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.