When writers are just starting out, a lot of them are told simply to read more in order to become better at their craft. To get involved in stories, so you can make up more interesting ones on your own. When The First Law and The Devils author Joe Abercrombie was growing up, he found video games to be a great source of inspiration for his imagination, alongside books.
Speaking to us at Celsius 232 recently, Abercrombie explained how gaming when he was a kid relied on the player having to fill in a lot of narrative gaps themselves. "When I was four or five, we first got a computer, which was, I think, an Acorn Atom, 2K," Abercrombie said, adding that his family upgraded computers and gaming machines as he grew into his teenage years.
"When, I suppose, when young people would be reacting to books. I was reacting to books, but also to video games. And in that era, I guess you had to fill in a lot of the blanks for yourself and in a way to kind of have your own backstories to characters. And so they were very, I think, powerful for stimulating the imagination. And so those are my first kind of writing experiences, in a sense, fleshing out the background to the games that I was playing when it was just a few pixels on the screen."
On the flip side of that point, we asked Abercrombie if he'd ever fancy trying his hand at writing a video game. Perhaps a morally ambiguous RPG, as our interviewer David Caballero suggests. "It's a fascinating area. Obviously, that business is becoming so huge, so much bigger than film and TV, bigger than books. Over time, I'm sure it will become bigger yet. And so it is undoubtedly a fertile field for writing. But I think there's still a degree to which writers are somewhat at the mercy of the design and the programming and the kind of commercial elements," Abercrombie explained.
"It's a tough space to kind of slot into as a book writer. As an author, you have this total authority over what you do, which can be a pressure, but at the same time is a great deal of freedom. And so I'm not sure how I would now, as someone who's used to getting his way, respond to having to do as I'm told," he said.
There's still the potential for more adaptations based on Abercrombie's work, though, and you can hear all about them in our full interview below:
