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. Enter the Gateway.