Scrawl of Duty

The Observer takes note of novelists making the jump to writing for video games (side note: My novelization of Dig Dug is going like gangbusters).

From the story...

"You want to write a novel? Who's going to read it? A bunch of people in grad school? Fuck that," Mr. Patrick said. "Everybody plays video games."

Or, at least, enough do to make it a $40 billion-a-year industry. And, as Faulkner and Fitzgerald made their attempts in Hollywood, more and more journalists and fiction writers are making the shift to writing video games. Motivated by money, a passion for the medium or a combination of both, prose writers want in.

"I'd been a journalist for 14 years," said N'Gai Croal over strawberry mojitos at the Hudson Hotel. "I had accomplished most of what I'd wanted to accomplish. I wrote cover stories, I'd written lots of features, I had this blog, I'd been on TV. It felt like there were structural changes affecting journalism, and going to another outlet would be a bit like same shit, different day. I felt like it was time to do something different; it was time to not be a journalist. The main thing to consider was, did I want to try to write games?"