Writing Portfolio

In addition to my experience with and love for games and game design, I also have a background in and love for writing. From amateur work in high school, to a dabble in games journalism for sites like The Border House, to game narrative authoring at UC Santa Cruz, I’ve tried my hand at various types of writing, most published pieces in my fairly-distant past. If you’ll forgive my early stumblings into the craft, here are some some pieces from my early forays into writing!

Fiction/Traditional Writing

“In Difference” – A novella that I self-published in high school. The last traditional fiction project I tried in earnest to publish.
Link to Amazon page for In Difference (currently and permanently out of stock!).

“Matches” – A short story that I wrote while in high school, “Matches” is a brief tale that is based on an idea I had that I just wanted to flesh out, illustrating the ephemerality of love and life. Entered this one into a contest and actually got referenced on the site!
Link to “Matches”.

“The Line” – Another short story written during high school. Most of these stories sprung to life based on an idea that I had during high school that I wanted to expand into a story, just to work my writing muscle. This one was the exploration of what a line to nowhere would be like for the people waiting.
Link to “The Line”.

“Fleeing Lilies” – Yet another high school short story. I think I wrote it for an English class.
Link to “Fleeing Lilies”.

“Stationed” – A story that I wrote for a writing contest during high school.
Link to “Stationed”.

“Disturbed” – Another high school short story.
Link to “Disturbed”.

“The Cake Not Meant for Her” Yet another story I wrote in high school; I’m pretty sure I wrote this one for entry into a writing contest. I experimented with quirky, dark humor, inspired by my favorite author at the time Dean Koontz.
Link to “The Cake Not Meant for Her”.

“Haven” – I wrote this story during high school for the Skipping Stones children’s magazine writing contest, and it actually won; it was printed in an issue that was sent to me along with a free 1-year subscription, so that was pretty cool.
Link to “Haven”.

“On Rationale.” - An “essay” I wrote during high school, extrapolating on an idea that was bouncing around in my head at the time. It’s pretty long, and though my style has changed/refined considerably since then, I think I still understand the nugget of insight that I was trying to convey in this piece.
Link to On Rationale.

Guardian of Death – A screenplay that I wrote while I was in high school. Because it is a much longer work, I will not be linking it here. If you’d like to see a copy, just ask!

Game Authoring

Mismanor authoring

Authored a lot of content for the research-oriented game Mismanor, which involved writing a lot of dialogue and crafting character personalities with a dynamic dialogue system. See the Mismanor section of my portfolio for more general information on Mismanor. I wrote about one-third of the dialogue, alongside two other writers on the writing team.

Prom Week Authoring

Prom Week is an award-winning research game that features complex social AI which aims to represent the real-world effects that social actions have on social networks and the interpersonal atmosphere as a whole. As an authoring intern for the IGF and IndieCade finalist, I authored narrative content as well as the effects that player actions had on the game.
[Link to Prom Week website.]

MicroVentures

MicroVentures is a mobile game set in a fictional fantasy world of knights, mages and dragons whose principal mechanic is procedurally generating quests via pre-authored templates and then building levels that coincide with the quests that are generated. As the lead writer on this project, I wrote ~90% of the quest/narrative/story content of the game, and also gave some input on the design of the procedural quest generator.

[Link to MicroVentures website.]

Situating Quests: Design Patterns for Quest and Level Design in Role-Playing Games

I am listed as a co-author for this paper, a conference paper presented during the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2011), in Vancouver, Canada, November 28th – December December 1st, 2011. The paper itself was fully written by UCSC graduate student Gillian Smith, save for an excerpt from the wiki that we used that was written by undergrad Zach Lindblad. My contribution to this paper was filling in the wiki that we used with my quest and level pattern analysis. All of the 4 undergrads on the team contributed to the wiki, and Gillian wrote the paper, so this paper is definitely a product of teamwork.

[Link to publication.]
[Link to wiki.]

Journalistic Writing

Feature Column Writer at The Border House – During the summer of 2013, I wrote a bi-weekly column for the games blog called The Border House, which is "a blog for those who are feminist, queer, disabled, people of color, transgender, poor, gay, lesbian, and others who belong to marginalized groups, as well as allies. [Their] goal is to bring thoughtful analysis to gaming with a feminist viewpoint and up-to-date news on games, virtual worlds, and social media."

I wrote the column "On the Border," a column I co-designed that aims to bring to the forefront the accomplishments of the many talented and accomplished designers, developers, writers, producers, and artists that come from diverse backgrounds in games via compelling and in-depth interviews detailing their work, their history, and their thoughts about relevant subjects. It was published every other Monday, along with its companion article, "The Part of Threes," which I also wrote, that was published on the off Mondays.

[Link to The Border House's Regular Features page. (Note: Now defunct.)]

Director of IT for University Economics Association (UEA) at University of California, Santa Cruz – This may not seem like a journalism-y title, and initially it wasn’t. But when I assumed the new Director of IT position for this organization, I noticed a distinct lack of recording of past events, so I effectively became the historian, documenting all of our events and writing up recaps for the website. So, in updating and maintaining the website, I also took it upon myself to keep regular updates on the events. All writing under “Events” is mine, as is most on the rest of the site. [Note: It was at the time of first writing this, in 2014, but now the site has been completely revamped by my successors in the role.]

Editor for http://www.TheKartel.com – I was a dedicated part-time editorial intern for the gaming news site The Kartel during the last few months of my senior year of high school and throughout the summer after, before college. I was responsible for reviewing gaming-related articles from the website’s group of writers, and giving the okay when they were done or reporting/implementing fixes where needed. Toward the end of my time with The Kartel, I wrote some articles and attended industry events, most of which were pre-release events that required reviews that I was responsible for writing.

[Link to the website: www.TheKartel.com (Note: Also now defunct.)]

Moreau Catholic High School Journalism – Copy Editing and Article Writing – Wrote and edited stories for The Explorer, my high school’s newspaper, for my senior year, 2009-2010.

Experimental Writing

86 Reasons African-Americans Can’t Break Into Computer Science – A piece I wrote for a Latino studies class, an homage to Juan Felipe Herrera’s “187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border.”

Link to 86 Reasons. (View this as source code if you can, that is its intended form of consumption.)