I sat down here, an hour or so ago, with the intention of playing a game. I have a couple of new games I have been trying out, but I didn’t end up playing any of those. I played old games.

I had been writing a different thing about games for this post, but I thought instead that I would say this. My story Birds, Vibrant and Wild, published in Kaleidotrope’s winter 2025 issue, received a nice review and recommendation in Locus.

Best Games - Grand Theft Auto If you made a pie chart of the entire video game industry, every property and title broken out into its own set of wedges, there would be a very slim few that would be instantly identifiable. Pokémon, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto.

I haven’t written about it here, because it didn’t seem relevant to what I write, or draw, or model, or whatever, but I do have some thoughts about generative AI. Some of them are even good.

I just prepped one story to send out (it will probably be in the hands of a publisher by the time I post this), and I am getting another one ready (again, it might be ready by the time you read this). It’s been a hot minute since I sent out a story. I’d almost forgotten how to format a story. Almost, but not quite. There is no single way to format a story for submission to an outlet. There is a standard, but there are usually unique requirements for each outlet. Just simple things. Specific fonts, ways to organize the header. Nothing onerous, but it does meant that you can’t just send things out on autopilot, you need to actually make the effort to figure out how an outlet likes to operate. And while you are there, maybe read some of the stories they publish and figure out if they are a good fit for what you are writing. I will likely get back a quick rejection or two, but I have to say, I sort of missed it. Maybe I should keep fixing up the many other stories that I have sitting on the back burner. At least one of them has to be good, right? That’s just normal odds.

I am redesigning some of the assets for my game, because a few of them didn’t fit the gameplay and level designs. I tried to make the airship work, but it just didn’t. So now the airship is a lifter and the ambulance is a regular ground type vehicle. I really wanted the player to be able to fly around, but creating obstacles in the air felt false and arbitrary. I know that 90s arcade games could be arbitrary, but false always feels bad.

Best Games - The Operative: No One Lives Forever Looking, and sounding, like the full color mod-styled version of Emma Peel, Kate Archer is the sort of protagonist that would be surprising and eye catching today. In the year 2000, she absolutely stood alone.

Many months ago I started making the switch from using a lot of cloud services to backup and host files to a mostly self hosted setup. It hasn’t been entirely without issues, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how well a lot of these solutions work.

At the end of these story competitions it is customary to write a summary of all of your stories and how you arrived at them. While I do enjoy reading other writers summaries, I really don’t like writing them myself.

Well, I wrapped up the last story for this short story competition thing. The results aren’t all in, but I did… fine. A lot of my stories ended up somewhere in the middle of the list, but they got some decent comments. The thing with this competition is, it’s not really a competition at all. Really it’s a good way to get a lot of other writers, some of whom are very good, to look over a first draft of your work and offer a lot of opinions and advice.

Best Games - Red Baron Anyone who played arcade games in the 80s remembers Battlezone. Battlezone was that tank game made up of vector lines and blocky shapes. It was in first person, felt fully three dimensional, and it was unlike any other game in the arcade at the time.

If you read these, you’re probably getting as tired of reading about writing as I am about writing about writing. I just finished editing and submitting a story, so I’m low on words at the moment. I think I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe next week I’ll write about a game!

The Global Game Jam was this past weekend. And I didn’t participate. Because I was doing this writing jam. A jam is a jam though. One of the major parts of a jam is that you are given a prompt, or a bunch of prompts and what you make from those prompts will be anyone’s guess. I have done a lot of jams by now and I have a few rules for dealing with prompts. It turns out, for me at least, the rules are the same if I am jamming on a game or jamming on some writing. I’ll drop some of them here.

The writing competition I am in adheres to a very strict, very tight, word count. It’s pretty easy to blow past that limit and have to walk everything back, one word at a time. I managed to wrestle it down. This time. I have found this practice of hitting certain word counts really supercharges my editing. When you are looking for more concise ways to word things, you also find better ways to make an impact. Better ways to get to a certain feeling or vibe. You can’t count on long, flowery, descriptions. You need to get to the heart of what you are trying to say, quickly and efficiently. I have found that this practice had the effect of making me more aggressive when editing, even when I didn’t need to hit a specific limit. My current stories are more compact. I don’t know that this will work for everyone, but just like doing a lot of reps can strengthen your muscles, a lot of editing makes you better at editing. If you are looking to improve your writing, I fully recommend joining a similar competition or jam.

I’m doing another one of those writing contest things. Writing very short stories every weekend for at least a little while. I’ve only just started, so I don’t really have much to say about it yet.