Paper 1 Remix

Remix Assignment 1 - Evolution of writing:

My remix for my first paper goes with the theme of my blog, and shows how my paper is relevant to the topic of video games.


As a kid, my writing wasn't exactly Shakespeare material. I was sloppy, often didn't make sense, and had grammar that was equivalent to the length of a toothpick. That didn't stop me from writing though, for one very important reason - I was learning.

I started out not knowing a thing and different teachers throughout my elementary years taught me more complex forms of reading and writing. Maybe my writing would have been bad if i was a grown man turning in those types of words - but i was a child, and my writing was very much in its infancy. Over time, it evolved heavily to become what it is today. Now I use grammar, write full sentences (heh) and use correct sentence structure, and I can place coherent thoughts down on paper without any trouble.

This is very much akin to video games. From when they started all the way up to the nineties, video games had writing that was very weak. Sure, there were some stand outs, but most of them were "kill the evil nazis!" or "a portal to hell has opened", and it was more of a basic idea to give you a starting point for the gameplay. Quake's story was basically that there were some military experiments with teleportation that went wrong and opened gateways into other dimensions instead of just the destination, where monsters started pouring out of. It gets the job done, but it's a bare bones minimum.

Games like Diablo, and Half-Life, in the late nineties were really the turning point where game stories started to be more then just kill some monsters. These weren't the pinnacles of story telling, but they were some of the first to use the story as a very big part of the gameplay itself, rather then just a background you read about once and then forget about while you play.

Current games have much more intricate plots and standards, where it has come to the point where the standards are high enough that previously complex plots have become generic, and a game really has to go deep to stand out. It's kind of the same way with my writing - the pinnacle of my stuff 3 years ago is way worse then the best of my stuff now. If i was to write the same quality that I wrote then, I would read it and think it belonged in the trash.