Ignoring the more boring academic meaning, in practice free writing is an act of brainstorming that involves vomiting words onto a page without really stopping much to think on them. In fact this whole post is a free write. It will be sloppy, error ridden, disastrous, and have sudden changes in topic.
Why? Am I lazy, yes; am I trying to teach something, yes; am I just throwing ideas out there, yes. Look, I really don't give a shit about how many people see this Blog simply because I have no advertisements up yet to generate money, so I can just ramble. The 1800+ views I do have is certainly nice though, and I hope someone out there had an enjoyable read of my amateur blog work.
Speaking of bad transitions, have you ever just wondered why you are drawn to table-top games? There are probably an uncountable number of known and unknown variables at play, but a major reason. Is it simply to socialize, to express creativity, to try something new, to take part in a story, or other? I have found myself considering certain aspects of table-tops, and I have honed in on this aspect of agency, which is just having options.
I know from courses I've taken on game design and usability that agency is very important. People like options, being forced to do something upsets us in games. Why is that though, is it derived from evolutionary aspect of survival somehow, is it from environmental conditioning to have options, is it just us not liking to be told no? A good part of it could be tied with the idea people like immersion in game, yet immersion in a game is different from immersion in a book.
In a book you have no agency, no options, no nothing, except arguably whether or not to turn the page. In a game, players are the character. It dosen't' matter if they are simply a "You" word in a text based game, a vertical bar in a Pong, a character in a point and click adventure, or even a character in an RPG [table-top or otherwise]. By simply being the character, the player takes on immense amounts of immersion for they now have a role to play in the story. That simply could be why so many people dislike cutscenes or anything that "breaks" immersion, because the immersion in a game is tied to agency. While in other media, audience agency isn't necessary.
Well I'm bored with that speculation. Let's look into some other ideas bubbling in my head. First is that I've really wondered if I could just take older experiences from the game or even play through Ruination of Bran and have either a webcomic, though my artistic skills suck, or short story excerpts of play sessions. I know the best thing to do with it would simply be to have it be very fictional with some meta jokes. The more interesting thing to do would be to have both players and fictional characters involved in the story.
It would be very difficult as one would need the players themselves to stand out and also their characters or sloth out and have there be no real role play in terms of personality between the players and their characters. The webcomic idea is simply because I'm curious if I could manage that. My favorite artistic style is realism, make everything realistic looking because that shows immense skill. My skill is not like that, so I would most likely appear an Order of the Stick mimicker.
In either case the stories wouldn't have weekly updates, maybe monthly, simply due to my own time constraints. The best way to go aobut it is to make several posts set up ahead of time, and then do what you can to keep yourself ahead, with an initial backlog of two months of posts. I don't know, just thinking out loud because it's a freewrite.
Anyway we'll see in a week or more what the next stage of the writing process is. Yes there will be more of this, but far less rambling because brainstorming is over!
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