Jared Dettwiller

My name is Jared Dettwiller. I am currently a student at Western Washington University, and am currently pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering. I’m also a video gamer and creative story writer.  For me, blending the two together can result in some really great ideas and topics to write about or discuss with friends. It lets you create your own universe the way you want it. But why do I write? There are multiple reasons why. For one, I need it in order to continue succeeding in school, because so much of school revolves around writing, whether you realize it or not. Another reason is due to the fact that I use it all the time when I do creative writing or documenting. That’s especially important now as it was when I was in middle school, as I still heavily write for fun and for use outside of creative writing. In the future, it would still be important, because I still wish to continue writing stories, but also there may come a point where I might need it for my job or for another professional reason. However, I will keep up my writing skills mainly for the creative writing aspect, because when I finally get that spark of creativity, I could write for hours on end working on this new idea I just came up with. Creative writing is the main reason why I even bother to write in the first place.

The webtext that my research partner and I designed combines two things that I really like: video games and story writing. Our web-text talks about how story writers for video games go about incorporating the lore, or history, of the video game’s universe into the game itself. Is the lore pretty clear and given to you on a silver platter? Or do you have to take the time and go out searching for it on your own, picking up the bits and pieces left behind? While we only dug into two games, we found some very interesting results from them.

When we went about creating the webtext, we had the concept of it being like an archive where you could go in and read up on the game’s story, and see how the lore elements were incorporated into that game specifically. We wanted to have the main focus be on the games we played through, as well as our analysis of them, such as including the games in a drop-down menu. We feel that everything is neatly presented and should be easy to navigate for players.

With this in mind, enjoy reading about our research.

Perry Olix

Hi. My name is Perry Olix. I am a Freshman at Western Washington University and I plan to pursue a major in Biology. I believe that most people I know would disagree with me, or think I am crazy. I prefer to write essays with theses and facts as opposed to introspective papers or posts. I have three voices for writing. The first is a formal voice, with proper grammar, wide use of diction and a cold tone. The second is a more informal voice, one that has grammatical mistakes that are more often seen in speech, using contractions, and written in the first person. The third is the voice I use when talking to people on MMS, Discord, Skype, Instagram, or other social media platforms. This voice is informal uses contractions, slang, swears and allows mistakes such as simple typos, or non-capitalized I’s to slip through. These three voices have their respective purposes, but for an Author’s Statement, I admit that I am at loss as to which to use.

When drafting assignments, it is often easier to read the assignment, look at the requirements, then begin to write. This can lead to a process of checking off the boxes to meet the minimum level of completion that the assignment demands. This process yields a choppy piece of writing, with poor transitions into the next requirement. There will be transitions in this Author Statement that will be rough, unpolished, and at times difficult to follow. Such as this one.

I enjoy editing papers. It provides me with an opportunity to test my knowledge of the English language, while also allowing me to help others. I often come off as harsh, cutting down large swaths of filler words, grammar errors, and logical fallacies. I would not expect anything less from someone else editing my drafts. I enjoy going over my paper after it is edited, correcting issues that were flagged, and improving it. Over the past few years, this process has lead to my writing as it is today.

As part of English 101, we are expected to create a web-text. A hybrid of website and essay of sorts. Informal but neat, efficient but pretty. The website that the co-author Jared and I have created is easy to navigate, with all the pages in drop-down menus in the index. We plan to go more in depth for the web-text than we did for our poster to provide a more accurate representation of the work we did to get to where we are in the project. Jared has taken the opportunity to unleash his inner designer and has helped change the web-text from a set of requirements on a rubric to a well-structured website. We invite you to navigate our website at your own pace, reading the pages in an order that makes sense to you. All pages should be understandable without context from other pages. If needed, background knowledge will be provided through a link or an excerpt from the original page.

Welcome, to the World of Lorecraft.