Ch. 1: The Loading Screen

Introducing a new series on video game creation from an absolute beginner

Back in the late 2000s, I - or my mom, to be exact - bought my Dad an Xbox 360 for his birthday. It was the first console we ever had, and I remember us setting it up together in the den in the front of the house, plugging it into the tv thicker than the shelving it sat on.

We made our profiles, spent hours designing our avatars: his a man with a graying beard and sunglasses and mine a girl with a brown ponytail who wore all pink. He may have had a moment to himself after setup to play whatever Battlefield was out at the time, but the first game we played together was Halo 3.

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I heard later on that there had been a lengthy discussion about what games I was and was not allowed to play as someone whose age was still in the single digits and in an era where shooter games were the most popular. Finally, they came to this conclusion: I could kill aliens, but not people.

Maybe this was the beginning of my love for science-fiction, maybe it wasn’t. What I can say is that Halo 3 was the beginning of my love for video games. My Dad and I played Halo 3, Halo 4, and Halo: Reach together before I was old enough to finally play actual shooter games, and then it turned to Call of Duty (but not before I became obsessed with games like Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley, and, of course, Fallout 4, among others). He and I still play Gun Game on Modern Warfare II and Warzone together all the time.

With video games being such an integral part of my life, and with so much freedom that comes with the excellent gameplay that game writers and developers work tirelessly to deliver to their players, I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that video game writing was something I could try.

So, with that, I’m here to introduce a Substack series on video game writing from the point of view of an absolute beginner (me!), where I take you along through the process of figuring everything out and also hold myself accountable.

Armed with pure determination, one semester of an illustrated narrative class, and a boyfriend who has a seemingly endless love for coding (and for me, since he’s willing to learn how to actually make the game), I’m taking a leap and dragging you down the rabbit hole with me.

I don’t know what will come next, but I can tell you that from what little I have dipped my toes in that this is going to be so fun!

More soon,

Brooke <3