Over the course of writing my first few blog posts I struggled with my approach. Initially, I would select a game that seemed interesting, then play it with no interruptions or distractions. I figured that pausing the game every few seconds would interrupt my flow and enjoyment. As such, I would try to make mental notes of key concepts I wished to write about. After feeling I’ve explored enough of the game to write an objective review, while considering my subjective experience, I would sit down and try to recall my experience. Due to this, I encountered a couple of pain points. Firstly, If I wanted to make sure I’m not misremembering something, I would need to stop writing, boot the game up again and attempt to recreate the scenario I’m writing about – this isn’t always easy if the scenario isn’t easily accessible within a few minutes. The same goes for gathering screenshots to include into my posts.
After struggling with this process, I tried to think about other gaming media that I consume and think about how they approach their writing process. I thought about this for some time and realized that most of the gaming media I consume is in the form of video content. Thinking further about this, I realized that these individuals record their gameplay, then write their scripts, record their voice, and overlay onto their edited video game footage. Now, my posts are text based but I realized I could greatly improve my process by recording all my gameplay – this eliminated both problems mentioned above. Once I started doing this, it was easy to go back and review footage of my experience – I could loop back certain portions I wish to examine deeper, and I could pause my recordings at any point to extract a screenshot. Once I started recording all my gameplay, I found it much easier to write about my experiences.
