It’s leap day. Today happens only once every four years. And I woke up with a stomach bug. The heck.
On the upside, the stomachache has subsided thanks to my Mom’s astonishingly simple-yet-effective Jell-O water cure. Essentially, you take a box of Jell-O gelatin and dump it into a pitcher full of water, and then you sip it. The slightly gelatinous mixture has incredible healing effects on upset stomachs, both soothing the liner wall and cutting down on the amount of acid bubbling about in there. It sounds weird, but it works.
Since it is leap day, and since I am sick, I am continuing my resolution from yesterday to do no major work whatsoever. I’ve been working so furiously these last two weeks that I’ve actually been dreaming about code and Photoshop – something that happens to me every so often and is usually a dead giveaway that I need a vacation. I have therefore turned to my other nascent career as a storyteller this weekend, designing some characters and sketching out some plotlines. I may be abandoning one old idea for a newer, more exciting, more, um, TV-friendly one. We’ll see.
One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the types of storytelling available to us as a culture. I’ve always wanted to be an author, but I’m beginning to suspect that my strong visual streak might be a sign that I should do comics or movies or television or video games. You know, something more multimedia. I believe that video games truly are the next big “Hollywood industry,” as my generation and Generation Y age and start raising our kids with new systems and games. For a huge chunk of my generation, we’re not outgrowing video games the way we outgrew our other toys. They’re growing right along with us. And that’s funny, because there’s not a ton of games out there that have really fantastic stories. There are some, like, the Final Fantasy games and the Metal Gear Solid series, but for the most part there’s all these RPGs out there that at the end of the day are little more than electronic AD&D campaigns with the same staid stereotypical characters. I’ve done enough roleplaying (full disclosure: I used to LARP with my friends in the College of Wooster Vampire: The Masquerade group for a while back in high school) to know that you can create some kick-ass stories using those systems, but after a while you get this feeling of, “Yeah, yeah, zombie, giant spider, Beholder, zombie, giant spider, Beholder…” It gets old.
So I’m going to spend a good part of the remainder of leap day here in bed, with my Jell-O water at hand, sketching out a videogame story. I have an idea. Let’s see if we can make it fly. And, hey – neat story ideas aren’t constricted to one medium. If I can’t make it work as a videogame, maybe I can turn it into a graphic novel or something. Geeky hope springs eternal.