Elizabeth Drakes's Site

Fantasy Romance

video games

Why Romance Writers Shouldn’t Be Gamers

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As you may or may not know, in addition to writing, I enjoy playing video games.

We played World of Warcraft back when it was vanilla. I remember when Burning Crusades was released…yeah, I just aged myself. We decided online games were not for us. We explored other games, and fell in love with many fan favorites: Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed etc.

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Not even going to confess how many hours we spent on this game.

My disappointment that many of these games abandoned decent writing in a desperate attempt to create a MMO (looking at you Mass Effect) aside, you will note that many of these are open worlds. Giant sandboxes to play in with little or no plot. Why? Because as Assassin’s Creed taught me when they killed the main protagonist (Desmond Miles, not Ezio or the various other past lives you jump into), the concept of story is not something most gaming companies do well.

So give me Fallout where I roam the wastes to find my father and basically get to explore, find cool stuff, and the like. Which, incidentally, is another game where their story-telling was SO bad they had to patch the ending. The game is so old I won’t consider this a spoiler, but literally most of your companions could complete the ending quest of walking into the radioactive room without being harmed (robots) or actually being healed (super mutant – which yes, I was such a goody-two-shoes I had one as my companion), but nope, you had to do it and die…for reasons… Yeah, they had to patch that. Not even their core gamer population was swallowing that.

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And you know I have every one of these.

 

Fallout is not kid friendly. Especially not the way we play with the one shot, one kill mentality. Yes, we like to play snipers in our house. As we play through Skyrim and find ourselves already able to sneak without penalty in our full daedric armor before ever find the Nightingale quest line…

But we have not yet figured out a way to turn off the graphic violence of a head shot in these games, and the heads on pikes in Fallout are not for children. So kids has meant we turned to many old favorites that are family friendly, like the Legend of Zelda and Mario Kart.

As part of this, we bought Super Smash Brothers mostly to get a chance to play the characters from a whole slew of different games.

Because my daughter desperately wanted to play Zelda.

Sad that Zelda was not even a favorite in the game…But there was this whole slew of characters I had never seen before that intrigued me. So, I started checking into their games, figuring they would be more games I could share with my kids as they were all Nintendo…

 

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Fire Emblem Fates

Ummm, yeah. I got sucked into the Fire Emblem series in 2019 through Super Smash Brothers as so many got sucked into it over two decades ago when Smash Brother came out on the Nintendo 64. The only reason Nintendo even brought Fire Emblem to the US was how many people wanted it after playing Smash Brothers back then.

Fire Emblem. A strategy game, with crazy characters that I build relationships with so I can marry them off then recruit their kids to my team?!? This exists? And no one told me?

I discovered my ultimate gamer catnip.

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Or so I thought.

Then I learned the hard way. The Fire Emblem series doesn’t believe in happily ever after.

 

4 Reasons Why My WIP Isn’t Done

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I was supposed to have the first draft of my current WIP with Sir Gabriel done last week. It isn’t.

Why, you ask?

4 Reasons Why My WIP Isn’t Done

 

1. Technical Issues

I updated my computer to the latest update in Windows 10. At that point, all bets were off. When I tried to open the Word App, the computer decided to type 4 repeatedly so I couldn’t access any apps. Then, the cursor decided to move backwards one letter at a time. Good times.

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Real footage.

How did I solve it? I still don’t know. Which means if it comes back, I don’t know how to fix it.

 

2. We Decided Child 1’s Room Looked So Great, Let’s Tackle Child 2’s!

I wish I was joking. We have taken out all of the furniture and are painting the trim. We bought the paint for the walls today.  Seriously, I don’t know what’s wrong with us.

 

3. Dance Recital

No, I did not take up dance. But let me tell you how much time a dance recital your child is in consumes. You must take them in for pictures and final costume touch-ups. Then comes dress rehearsal, wherein you will spend 45 minutes in the car, after leaving work early, to pick them up and cart them two towns over to the auditorium at which they’ll perform. Then, you get to spend another 45 minutes in the car going home. All for them to have 5 minutes on stage.

This does not include attending the recital itself. It was over 4 hours last year. Enough parents fussed that they added another show and reduced the run time to 3 hours. Yeah. 3 hours. My kid’s dance was 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

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All the dads.

3. Planning for Vacation

We’re taking a family vacation. That means I have to get done all of the work I would during the time I’m taking off before I leave. Because that’s what vacation means, right?

 

4. New Video Game

It’s sad to admit, but we got a new video game. It’s really just hack and slash, but we’re playing it as a family and having fun. It’s hard to be the odd-one-out when the whole family is cheering and playing.

 

Yes, I am serious about publishing that book in September. And yes, I am serious about 3 books next year. Just a little more paint on the wall. Or another round of Hyrule Warriors. Promise!

Adulting. It’s Hard.

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For those of us late Gen-Xers or millennials, we’ve learned that adulting is hard.

Putting aside the Great Recession and the resulting under-employment for many new college grads, there are a lot of other reasons why our lawns look the way they do. Besides many of us not wanting to use weed killer on the same grass our kids play on.

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Here are the top four reasons I came up with for why adulting is so hard.

 

  1. Video Games –  Pick your flavor. Whether you play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, console games like Skyrim or Fallout 4, or Angry Birds on your phone, this is not an option that even existed for my dad when I was a kid. The Nintendo came out when I was in elementary school. I didn’t think much of it. We eventually got one, and while I loved Tetris and Super Mario Brothers, it was really easy to put down. I didn’t fully understand the possibility of the system until Legend of Zelda. Now, you have the option for a fun little time-waster like Candy Crush while you wait in line at the grocery store to the black hole of time games like World of Warcraft and Fallout 4 are.

 

  1. Wanna Watch Some TV? – When I was a kid, there were three television stations. Even if you were lucky and your parents sprang for cable, there was still less than thirty stations. You actually had to be sitting in front of the TV at a designated time (7pm Monday nights for MacGyver!) to get to watch a show. You couldn’t just watch whatever you want whenever you were feeling lazy or like procrastinating. I remember on certain nights the only thing on was bowling. Going out and “leveling up” your lawn or cleaning out the towel closet was infinitely more fun than that. I have no idea how many thousand channels are even available now (we gave up cable in 2009), but I do know you can stream TV shows through Amazon and Netflix. You can binge-watch an entire series on a Saturday.

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  1. Movies – We had a VHS player when I was a kid, but movies were expensive (like $75 in 1980s money). Most of the time, we rented them. It took forever for new movies to come out, and then there was a long wait until your name came up and you could rent the “new” releases. Going to the movies was an expensive endeavor with kids, and frankly, my parents didn’t want to pay theater prices for them to sit bored through a kid’s movie. Not only are dvds relatively inexpensive today, you expect them to come out within six months or so of the movie. You no longer go to the VHS aisle of your local grocery store and hope they have something decent. Now, there’s On Demand, Redbox, Netflix, and Amazon. The video rental places of my youth are all gone. Of course they are. Why would they exist when I can own anything in Amazon’s vast army of movies with two clicks? There were some benefits to a VHS, though.

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  1. The Internet – Whether surfing it, using social media, watching YouTube, or buying your groceries, the internet has changed the way we spend our time. Sure, some call it a time waster, and it can be, but it’s also become a vehicle of our leisure time. Why would you be chasing dandelions off your lawn when you could be watching funny cat videos? Reading blogs? Or literally doing anything else?

 

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How about you? Do think today’s plethora of entertainment options has made it harder to be an adult? Or at least acting like the adults of the past? Do you find it harder to do lawn work or other boring chores when there are so many other fun things to do? Anything I missed that you find to be a distraction to the work of adulthood?