Elegy for a Dead World Brings Writing and Gaming Together - http://clapway.com/2016/01/06/elegy-dead-world-brings-writing-gaming-together/

Dejobaan Games and Popcannibal have collaborated to create a video game perfect for overcoming writer’s block and engaging creative minds with stunning visuals and storytelling.

The creators of Elegy for a Dead World use British Romantic Era poets as inspiration for this indie video game. It’s a single player game in which players must explore three post-apocalyptic, lost civilizations, unveiling incredible scenery, and write each world’s unique history along the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfps2HKE4B4

Each lost world contains imagery and music inspired by poems from the Romantic era about the end days: Lord Byron’s Darkness, Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, and John Keats’ When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be. The worlds feature strong moods that hope to inspire players to write.

Elegy for a Dead World eases writers into the process with prompts, challenges, and fill-in-the-blank sentences. There are 27 writing challenges ranging from short stories about a new character’s last days to songs about accepting the end to poetry about war. Each challenge is different, offering new points-of-view, characters, and more to explore.

As players move further along, they have the option to do away with all prompts and free-write instead. At the end of each world and the game, players have the option to share their stories with other players, read their works, post comments, and participate in discussions. All work is the player’s own.

One of the game’s developers, Ichiro Lambe, says, “The most important thing for us is that someone sits down and has a positive experience doing something creative.” The creators encourage anyone to play, whether a writer or not.

Elegy for a Dead World is available on Steam for $14.99.

Elegy for a Dead World Brings Writing and Gaming Together

The Writing Teacher"s Hypocrisy - http://clapway.com/2015/11/08/writing-teachers-hypocrisy/

The hardest thing about teaching people how to write is teaching them to make mistakes, to not be afraid, and to write what they want to write. Most of my students were more concerned with the product than the process, which is what kills good writing. How can someone produce a good piece of writing if s/he is counting how many points I will take off for each grammatical error? How can an essay be enticing if the author’s main concern is where their thesis statement belongs, or that there are only two body paragraphs in the essay instead of three? How can a teacher teach someone to write if they are expected to count the grammatical errors, or evaluate the formulaic essay? That is one reason I stopped teaching. I was a hypocrite! Writers become writers when they take risks when they learn how to enter the zone, when they make a million mistakes, delete drafts, and revisit a piece over and over again. How could I not teach that? I was not an effective teacher because I couldn’t teach my students that their process of writing was valuable. Standardized education teaches students to earn a grade in the same way that they will earn a salary someday.

The new audience for a high school student is a computer that can grade a paper objectively. Do computers remember a piece that made them laugh or cry? Do computers get blown away by something a student wrote? Do computers know where that piece started and ended? Do computers know that sometimes a subject only deserves one paragraph? How can a piece of writing be evaluated without emotion?

I stopped teaching because the audience is the most critical part of the process. It is hypocrisy to teach that it is not. I had become too comfortable in my public-school-pension-cocoon, so at 56 I gave up the better pension, stuffed all of my stuff in my attic, rented out my house and headed to Malaysia. After four months working for an e-learning company, I suddenly found myself in a position as a team leader because I was the only one willing to take the risk and do it. Taking this risk has given me a chance to grow. I find myself jazzed by the challenge and the knowledge I have gained about people, process, language, and business. And I have not gained this knowledge without a few mistakes along the way. Now, I am not a hypocrite. I can ask people to take risks, make mistakes, meet impossible deadlines, and rewrite, or restart. However, here in an office, in a country far away from my own, I see the writers suffering from the non-risk-taking syndrome. They, like my students, balk at rewriting their work, doing something more than once, or doing something differently. These are people who were raised in the 60’s and 70’s. Weren’t their masters Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Alan Ginsburg, Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Atwood to mention a few?

So I leave you with the introduction to this piece, which just became the conclusion. Sometimes when I start to write a piece for this blog, I look at the other posts and my critical voice tells me this is all wrong. I am not following the rules. When I search a site that lists trending topics, I am wrong again. No one seems to be interested in Indonesia or stranded cars in Mexico. So what to write? I want to tell the world what to do. I want to be funny and opinionated. I want to write about being an expatriate, about lessons learned, about being a teacher, about my two-year walkabout. . . So that is what I am going to do.

The Writing Teacher"s Hypocrisy