I have a crazy schedule — crazy! Seriously. Super crazy. So, I am not writing much. And, even when I have time, my writing is going up in a different place. Yes, I have sold out. All my creative-ness, it’s gone. Completely. I will never write here again. Your eyes are not reading this post either. (Also, it’s not 3 AM as I write this — no, it totally is. I’m tired.)

Anyway, other people — blog neighbors? Beighors? — are writing good stuff and I have read it. I want to take some time here to highlight things you should have read. Emphasis on the “should”.

Rachel Helps, over on Ludi Bin, has been writing up a storm. Last week saw What visual novels should learn from sequential art, something I’ve been meaning to write about for awhile now. Visual novels, with their emphasis on the single frames, are more like graphic novels with their cells. Each screen, then, should spend more time cutting down the dialogue and condensing the action — simple and solid is best.

Just a couple days ago, she wrote Dear Esther’s setting matches its emotional push talking about how atmosphere and mechanics link Dear Esther to the idea of a cybertext, but configurable. I still haven’t played it, so I can’t comment. It’s a neat approach though.

Actually, speaking of atmosphere and mechanics, Line Hollis goes all out on Limbo asking, as people have before, What’s the Point of Limbo? I don’t disagree with Line’s take, but have had my time with it and… I liked it. Overall, I liked. I’ll leave the aesthetic discussions to people who know more. It was a neat little thing.

Speaking of Line, and in the hope of getting more recorded interactive fiction sessions, there was I Am Bad at Interactive Fiction a couple weeks ago. It’s rare that I laugh while reading a blog post. Most of the time, it’s me considering a theory or trying to think through someone else’s point. That was a great example of someone just posting a thing for no other reasons than to just wanting to do it. I liked it.

They say that Punk’s Not Dead and, it seems, neither is ~hellfire~. I’m always glad to see people writing again and “whenever I’m” is a look into Rock Paper Shotgun’s new –series? — on “Punk Games”. (I might also be doing that, making games for no other reason than love of the process and trying to put something together.) Ewers, says ~hellfire~, are “very hard to craft” — and so are games. (That is so very true.)

That was the advice that Rampant Coyote echoed from Robert Boyd’s post on So You Want to Be an Indie Game Developer? That’s the advice I have tried to follow in both my writing and game making: follow your passion. Do what you love.