Before she started Write video games, Emma Kidwell loved Dusk Fan fiction. Her stories “Bad, Self-Insert” found a home on Deviantart, an online community where people placed fank art, original work and so much more. “The low access barrier made it very accessible,” says Kidwell.
Her writing has turned into role -play forums, and Dusk Fandom made way for a love for video games like Mass -effect. Kidwell is today a writer for firaxis games and an upcoming star in the world of game narrative. Her work includes Reflection, Borderlands 4, Life is odd 2and Sid Meier’s civilization VII;; She was featured in Forbes 30 under 30 and the Game Awards’ future class of 2023.
This week she will host the annual Independent Games Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. All this happens with her talk about how writing in Fandoms as a child helped her to write DLC Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
It seems that writing fan fiction is not so different from writing licensed characters. “I’m role -playing when I write Marvel IP for firaxis,” Kidwell says. “Fan fiction gave me the foundation to expand.”
Fan fiction is often considered a lower form of writing, as self lenient or outrageous erotic, the kind of work one does secretly. In the Internet culture Pantheon, few fanphic writers have ever gained fame, and those who sometimes do it for the fickle nature of their work. ‘My immortal’, a notorious Harry Potter Fanfic, is still referred to in interviews today. Writers like El James, who Fifty shades series (originally a Dusk Fanfic), however, began to turn their work into something profitable.
Others, like Kidwell, have turned it into a runway for their careers. “I think because of FAN Fiction’s relationship with marginalized communities, it was initially not considered a valid form of writing,” Kidwell says. Obviously, it’s wrong. The game and fanphic communities provide a harmonious marriage. The story-driven nature of most games means a lot of fans who want to new narratives, but writers on well-known sites such as Archive of our own can-and-will-all in an original story. Even Tetris.
“Fan fiction is your sandbox,” says Kidwell. “You have to play. There are no rules. You get comfortable playing with characters who are not yours and do whatever you want. ‘
For Midnight sunsKidwell got four characters to choose from, including Deadpool and Storm. Whatever she wrote would be based on the comic versions of the characters, not their movie -like peers. As she examined both characters, she had a revelation: “It’s really similar to what I would think if I create an original character in a role-play environment. How would this character fit in with other established characters?”
Writers in Kidwell’s position still have to stick to the rules of the franchise, including the story canon. It didn’t like Kidwell to tell the stories she wanted. “I think a great, general misconception with IP writing is that it is very restrictive,” says Kidwell. “But I think there is a lot of creative freedom within certain boundaries, because you can inject a small piece of yourself into these characters. It’s just like a puzzle: Find out how you can do it authentically and how you can do it in a way that makes sense to the game. ‘
Kidwell still plays in her spare time. At the moment she is deep in the Dragon Age community. “I see that IP is writing as a kind in between,” she says of fan fiction and fiction. This is a natural next step in role play: “I’m just doing it in a professional environment.”