Video Game Influence

Hey y'all.  So I was watching a video by Peanut Butter Gamer on Youtube, and in this video, "I Dream of Dreamcast Part 2", he makes a joke about a video game influencing him to go paint graffiti.  That got me thinking.  How much do video games actually influence people?  There are so many opinions floating around that it's really hard to pin down something that's actually concrete and scientific.  I mean, how exactly would Mythbusters tackle an idea like this?


I took a personality test recently, and apparently I'm an INTP, which means that I see logical inconsistencies faster than most, and I like to think.  No real surprises there.  So, due to this nature, I want to create a scientific means for deciding whether or not video games can influence people.

Write Club -- How to Doom a Sequel

Hey y'all.  So I was thinking about it, and there are things that moviemakers do either by accident or by well-intentioned mistake.  It generally doesn't happen as often with books, particularly considering that it takes so long to write a book and publishers seem to care a whole lot more than producers whether or not their product is good.  Considering that movie makers can get away with a lot dumber choices and still make money...well, yeah.

Maybe this is just a personal vendetta from a writer type, but it seems to me that movie people should be punished by lower sales when they make dumb stuff.  Unfortunately, even things like "Jack and Jill" and "Zookeeper" seem to make a crap ton of money, probably because people are bored and movies are there.  Fortunately, making fun of bad movies is entertaining.  A win-win situation, I guess.

Anyway, I just want to illustrate a few things that illustrate what can make a sequel turn bad.  Everybody's aware of sequelitis, where a sequel just doesn't measure up.  Sometimes it's just a matter of not being quite as good, but still being well-made and watchable.  Other times....well, not so much.

Write Club: Respect Characters

Hey y'all.  So I was critiquing somebody's writing online, and the thing I noticed about this particular work they wrote was that it was missing an integral part of all good stories: the love of characters.  The sample I read was a prologue, and it was quite obvious that the characters in it were mere tools to get on to the first chapter.  None of the characters were particularly interesting.  They were merely there to serve a purpose, and then they were gone.

This is not the way a character is to be treated.  A character is not merely a tool, but a little person living in the fictitious world that you made for them.  They are little organisms, based on yourself and people you know.  They are given life by your perceptions, and become more deep the better you perceive.

The trouble is, there are errors with people's perceptions.  Most of the problems with the above writer's sample was the fault of one such error.  He combined.