I came quite late to gaming: I didn't start playing until 2002.
Most women I've ever met either already have or at some point want kids, but there are still significant numbers who don't, or at least don't right now. But those variations are beside the point - the real point is that among all those women, having or wanting kids or not, I never met a single one who didn't want the choice.
'Syndicate' is technically the first game I worked on.
In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.
Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile. Travel abroad and learn to live in other cultures. That's one of the things about teaching abroad.
The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.
Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.
Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.
I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.
I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.
Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.
I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.
I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.
Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.
I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.
There's a lot of young authors out there, and people do seem to forget: in order to write well, you do need to have some experience.
Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.
A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed.
For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.
