Writer's Block Daily

I got accepted into a college's young writers' workshop!

I'm going to spend about two weeks creating stories and pieces on a campus, and I hope it'll help a lot with my craft.

I am doing research on Japanese Folklore for a game I am making. Can anyone tell me about the onryo ghost for me please?

Idly wondering what steps a sentient AI playing a major MMO (implicitly EVE Online or something like it by the income they're making off it) would have to take to avoid being either pegged as such or, far more likely, being semi-correctly pegged as a crook or hacker of some breed. And what sort of evidence it would take for people to start taking the first theory seriously. Especially since they have ways of making "in-person" appearances.

edited 31st Mar '15 6:18:06 AM by KillerClowns

@chihuahua0: Congrats!

@Killer Clowns: Specifically a sentient AI? The most obvious indication to me would be the ability to do things that no human could do- like play several games simultaneously from the same ISP address, that sort of thing. Also, there are certain games where, if you can calculate the algorithm the game computer is using, you can predict what the NPC's are going to do and how to achieve the victory conditions. Most strategy games are like that (not to mention chess).

I reckon all it'd need would be to play a very balanced game - just barely on the "profit" side of the profit margin. It wouldn't stand out as being a phenomenally good player, but it would make money the way casinos do, with the odds tilted very very slightly in their favour.

And maybe that won't stand out as much, but even if it copies human win/loss patterns, the AI might be a little too regular in its play. Anyway, MMO players are paranoid as hell. When I used to play Metin lots of people got accused of hacking simply because of how fast they got to level 70; some of them probably were, but still...

edited 31st Mar '15 10:40:47 AM by LongLiveHumour

I honestly think today's Webcomicry is the best article I've ever written.

Opinions?

I've noticed that quite a few of my protagonists are varying degrees of fat.

Funny username/avatar/post correlation.

It might be partly because I want to see overweight characters as something other than comic relief.

Pretty much all of the main characters in my story are varying degrees of "unhealthily skinny".

That's the same reason the main character of my webcomic is fat.

...One of them. The other is that she's a Composite Character of three people I know who look like her.

edited 31st Mar '15 1:14:43 PM by Wheezy

@Killer Clowns: Probably not as much as you think. They could be an alliance-runner, one of the big personality-based ones like ATLAS was with Bobby Atlas (or Black Legion currently is with Elo Knight); since they are an AI, the problem of inevitable burnout is lessened, and because they are acting through human intermediaries constantly to do things for them in actually leading the fleets and running the alliance, they'd be less detectable.

@Whezzy: Nice article. I agree with your four main points. I would add another: 5. The "Bad Thing" looks unstoppable.

Find myself looking up alternate verses of The Revel.

Also learning it's not by Bartholomew Dowling.

Do stop stealing my thoughts, Night.

Although it's probably a case of convergence: it's one of the most memorable songs to be associated with aviation, which appears to be a running theme in both our writings. One of my favorite alternate verses is the one that goes:

edited 31st Mar '15 9:12:16 PM by SabresEdge

Came up with a potential activity for winged adrenaline junkies: skyscraper surfing. Basically, they go to the top of a skyscraper, then drop down one side, staying as close as possible to the building. As they do, they try to put their feet on the wall and angle their wings so they don't go flying away, sliding down the wall. The riskier ones wait as long as possible before flying away from the building so they don't splat on the ground.

That seems insanely dangerous, but most adrenaline junkie things do to me.

It's basically contact BASE jumping. BASE sliding?

@De Marquis: I disagree. Plenty of horror stories have been about things that would be easily stoppable in the right circumstances: Monster, The Fly, Saw, and Five Nights At Freddys jump straight to mind. It's just that the protagonist is placed in a position where they can't stop it from where they are at the moment, they're too dumb to figure out how, or they choose not to because it's against their principles.

Making the monster seem unstoppable is optional: it's just one out of many ways the writer can ensure the story goes on longer than it would take to pull a trigger.

edited 1st Apr '15 2:23:54 PM by Wheezy

I like it when you have a horror story with something that is killable, it makes dynamic interesting (the survivor have only one gun, and they must seek the murderer, or lure him, to get him), instead of some random butchering of teens.

edited 1st Apr '15 2:16:31 PM by Bolded1

Just finished another redraft of the first two chapters of a Wi P.

Anyone interested in having a look at it? It's fairly long (12.5 k words) and still a bit rough, but it's readable.

The best horror story ever written, to my mind, was Aliens. This is because it was written about a group of heavily-armed and at least theoretically competent people rather than random idiots who do everything possible to connive at their own deaths.

edited 1st Apr '15 4:46:52 PM by Night

@Whezzy: "Plenty of horror stories have been about things that would be easily stoppable in the right circumstances"

Sure, but those circumstances never occur, until, of course, the very end of the movie.

But at the same time, you don't want the thing to be too unstoppable, or else your audience will lose any interest due to the problem seeming that insurmountable and, should it be defeated, its defeat will most likely feel like a cheap shot.

(Incidentally, this is one of the problems I had with film!Smaug in The Hobbit. In the book, he recognizes his soft underbelly as a weakness and coats it with jewels for makeshift armor, missing one spot by accident. When he attacks Laketown, Bard wastes almost all his arrows futilely trying to shoot him, until he sees Smaug's weakness and shoots him out of the air. In short, the death of Smaug was difficult but reasonable. In the film, dragons are only vulnerable to black arrows, there's only a single one left in Laketown, and his scales are thick all around barring one spot where a scale was knocked out. When he attacks Laketown, he sits and waits in one spot for no real reason for like a full minute for Bard to line up the arrow for his One Shot and gets killed for his trouble. In short, he had to gloat to give the good guys a chance and promptly went down like a bitch. But that's not horror and I digress.)

I once read a fascinating article about how the writer could only get scared in horror video games if they were armed. Basically, in run-and-hide games like Amnesia and Outlast, there have to be places for the player to hide and be safe from the enemies. In horror games with weapons, such as Silent Hill, System Shock 2, or Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, being able to hide isn't a certainty. You might be faced with no course of action except to attack a monster, even if your only method of attack is a revolver with four bullets left. Will those four bullets be enough to kill? Or will a Deep One soon be gnawing your face off? And if they are just enough to kill, what happens if there's another Deep One right behind the first?

Weapons robbed him of certainty, and that uncertainty created the paranoiac atmosphere Wheezy talked about in his article. Yes, you can stop the Bad Thing. But just because you can doesn't mean you will.

That's not unique to horror, though. Basically, what you just said is that the problem can't be solved until the end of the story. And that's just storytelling. If the problem is solved at the beginning of the story, the characters are left just sitting around staring at each other for a while.

I think I mentioned in the article that it doesn't actually matter whether or not the worst-case scenario comes true, although that certainly is the scariest outcome and a lot of writers use it solely for that reason. Same goes for unstopppability: as long as there's sufficient conflict, it doesn't matter how "stoppable" it is, although making it look unstoppable is scarier.

Although re: the weapons thing: I don't have time to read the whole article at the moment, but I never thought of it that way. That's really interesting, since I've always heard it was the opposite: most people (myself included) say that guns make a horror game less scary, since it gives them the option of just shooting 'em up the American way - which is why the Left 4 Dead series never spooked me, personally. But I guess, the more uncertainty you can create about how the game works and your chances of survival, the better.

—-

Finally... I met all of Swans after their concert in St. Petersburg today, I volunteered to help them load their gear, and Michael Gira agreed to let me interview him if I can reach him via Facebook later.

Yeah, that was one of the more surreal moments of my life. It still hasn't sunk in.

edited 2nd Apr '15 12:16:43 AM by Wheezy

I think horror games in general benefit greatly from their medium in comparison to movies and film: you can't just flip through pages or close your eyes until the scary part is over. And being the main character instead of just rooting for the main character gives a whole different levels of immersion.

The general consensus seems to be that if you don't have a gun with you and hence are less able to defend yourself makes a game scarier. I agree with that, but then again, I get plenty of suspense just from the Ravenholm chapter of Half Life 2.

However, the worst is probably when you're given no option to fight nor flight. That's what made the first Five Nights At Freddys so effective. Yes, it resorts to cheap jump scares, but the fact that you very limited options for how to protect yourself from them, and how you cannot attack or hide from the monsters makes it much more terrifying.

edited 1st Apr '15 11:41:03 PM by Xeroop