Microcraft: Essays and Gaming

Microcraft: Essays and Gaming

Plus: Interviews and Our Summer Series

Essays and Gaming

This week, we launched our summer series, WALKTHROUGH, featuring short essays about/from/within video games. Hannah Grieco kicked off the series with "Killing It," and I'm so excited for you to read what we have in store every Monday from now until the end of July.In his craft essay "Text Adventure" in Bendinge Genre, Ander Monson writes that "One of the central pleasures of any game, graphic or textual, first person or third person, is exploration" (82). There are obvious parallels to video game worlds and the world-building of fiction; no matter how realistic a novel is, it still needs textures and settings and stakes for the characters to navigate. But Monson applies his point to creative nonfiction.One of my favorite things about starting a new video game is getting lost in the details. I tend to ignore the main questline in favor of finding more treasure chests and scrolls and any scrap of backstory or character development I can find. When writing essays, I have the same problem. I get bogged down in the pleasure of exploring a topic through research and recollection so much that I forget that creative nonfiction is, by its nature, a meaning-making process.There are obvious ways that world-building (which, by extension, gives the reader something to explore) lends itself to memoir. There is the author's expertise on their own life, their own genealogy, their home town and which vending machines are haunted by which ghosts, and so forth. It's easy to be a maximalist, but at a certain point, I'm just avoiding the difficult task of providing insight on a given subject, or worse, I'm avoiding a real reckoning with my subject matter. I fixate on the side quests instead of the main story.Monson contends that reading "is an experience of exploration of a created world" and that the author has "control" over how the reader navigates that world (85). But memoir is also driven by vulnerability, by the instability and fluidity of memory, by the art of interpreting the past and not just relaying it. The reader often enters into a work of memoir to find the writer still drawing out their world, still processing their subject material. As Melissa Febos puts it in Body Work, "Let's face it: if you write about your wounds, it is likely to be therapeutic" (9).Maybe memoir is a co-operative exploration. Yes, I can describe my hometown, I can convey the fact that its first official structure was a saloon, and I can connect that to the fact that the saloon-founder later became the town undertaker, but my interpretation of why that matters to me now is a shifting target. Maybe writing, like gaming, is just a matter of target practice.In the meantime, I hope you keep writing. The world needs it.Peace,Keene ShortEditor-in-ChiefAtticus Review

THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

WALKTHROUGH 1

KILLING ITbyHannah Grieco

NEW FROM THE ATTIC

Confronting Invisible Winds: A Conversation with Rachel Rueckert about EAST WINDS

by Tiffany Troy

"I was lucky with mentors, friends, peers, and book groups who helped me shape this book into a universal narrative about the path all of us take to untangle living our own lives, on our own terms, rather than the life others want or expect of us."

ISSUE FOUR SPOTLIGHT

BROKENbyBETSY BOLTON

SUPPORT ATTICUS!

We are able to bring you content such as this through the generous support of writers and readers like yourself. Please consider becoming a regular

today. All subscription levels include free submissions.

Our Reading List is updated each week. Go check it out!Are you a contributor to Atticus Review who'd like your book featured in the reading list? Send us an email at [email protected]. 

**For photo credits, follow links to stories.**