Our Princess Is In Another Castle!

Ah, videogames, how my childhood would have been so different without you.  Like, I could've been all bronze and tanned instead of being pasty and pale.  Thankfully, I grew up in the 80's when arcades were still a predominant fixture in shopping malls, and Nintendo and Atari were just starting to show up in homes across America.  I remember receiving an original NES when I was about 6 years old because I had been a good boy.  Santa was kind enough to give me something that was on my wishlist.  Nintendo was second on that list, but in retrospect, that's perfectly acceptable.  A pet T-Rex would have been too much hassle to take care of.  I don't think they make appropriate sized pooper-scoopers.

Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt were my first experiences in gaming.  While Duck Hunt was fun (give little kids a gun to shoot animals... brilliant idea), the laughing dog made losing almost unbearable.  I ended spending most of my time playing SMB, stomping on turtles and eating mushrooms.  Too bad this game didn't come out in the 60's.  I think the hippies would've been all over it.  The controls were simple enough to understand, but the gameplay got more and more challenging as you progressed through the levels.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle to playing SMB, however, were my own parents.  I used to fight with them over who got to play with the Nintendo first.  I even caught the two of them playing late into the evening, which they deny to this very day.  After getting through all obstacles (both virtual and parental), whenever I reached a castle and defeated Bowser, I inevitably received this message:

Just when you thought it was all over, stupid Toad had to give you the bad news.  This went on for a while until you find the actual Princess.  Apparently, Bowser had no problem abducting half of Mushroom Kingdom on his way to storming the palace.

Looking back at Super Mario Bros. and comparing it to more modern videogames, such as Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed, one can see the vast changes that have occurred throughout the history of gaming: graphics, music, voice acting, etc.  One of those much-improved areas is the amount of story and writing that now goes into modern videogames.  In the 70's, games had very little text, some none at all (anyone for a game of Pong?).  But in the 80's, you start getting more scenes like the one above.  It has now gotten to the point that videogames require a lot of text in order to tell a story, and because of that, game companies have made it a standard to have a team of writers tackling just one game.  Think about RPGs that utilize a ton of text.  In addition to the important scenes that impact the main story, you also have lots of NPCs that someone has to write dialogue for.  Even a character that says "Welcome to BlahBlah Town, the biggest town shaped like a thistle!" has to have a writer behind him.  In this golden age of gaming, being a "game writer" is now a legit career.  The Writers Guild Of America just began to recognize the achievements of writers in the gaming world by including videogames in their annual awards ceremony.  Last year, Amy Hennig took home the award for "Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing" for the brilliant action/adventure title, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception.

Writing is a very universal skill that can be applied to so many different media.  For those who wonder "what can I do as a writer?", I implore to you to delve past the usual forms of writing we're accustomed to.  Aside from novels, movies, and television, writers also work in the fields of videogames, medicine, science, sports, and even instruction manuals.  That's right.  Someone wrote that piece of paper that taught you how to set up your DVD player.  It may not always be clear ("Engrish" is pretty much its own language these days), but someone spent time to type all of that up for you.

Now, since it's Friday, I'll leave you all on a funny note (fans of Mass Effect may appreciate this more):

Please note: This scene is not in the actual game.  It's just a meme that someone put together for the lulz.

Happy Friday!