🎮🧠 New on WOTS: Ethics in Game Consumption

Games don’t exist in a vacuum — they’re shaped by labor, monetization, AI, and corporate incentives that often conflict with the joy they create.

This essay looks at how we engage with games after the hype fades, and what responsibility (if any) players actually have.

#WOTS #GamingCulture #VideoGameEthics #GamesWriting #VideoGames

http://whatsontheshelf.blog/2026/01/13/ethics-in-video-game-consumption/

Writing villains
(TMNT: Mutant Mayhem spoiler included)

In the effort to make our villains complex, engaging, and sympathetic enough to be interesting, we often undermine their villainy.

This has been highlighted by some recent client work I've undertaken. The brief is clear enough: write through the lore and intentions of the villains, who are inevitably doomed on both a narrative and mechanical basis.

My first few stabs at these stories were far too sympathetic.

I like writing sympathetic, complicated villains, to the point where you'd have trouble finding a pure and upstanding character in any of my work. And I'm very used to doing so.

Much of this is simply because I'm so used to seeing myself in villains. Shades of my sexuality, ethnicity and trans/gender (none too specifically in the latter case, admittedly).

But another factor is the frequently indulged habit of writing The Justifiable Villain. Superfly from the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem movie had such a reasonable point to make about systemic oppression that the writers resorted to giving him a contextually inexplicable urge to perpetrate genocide in order to justify his status as a villain, lest he become too obviously cast as a noble freedom fighter.

And therein exists the poison lie.

In reality, the people orchestrating genocide don't have noble reasons. They aren't fighting against oppression. They are the oppressors.

The reason the crassly villainous behaviour and statements of billionaires, politicians and other sundry oppressors seem a little too on-the-nose is because, though modern fiction, we have made ourselves accustomed to the notion of a villain who is nuanced, sympathetic, perhaps even redeemable.

We give them the traits and trappings of the oppressed.

It certainly makes them more fun to write.

But looking at our world as it stands, our fiction may better serve us by being clear that - although very human - your average arch-villain is likely to be self-serving, callous, inclined to take pleasure in the suffering of others, and without any sympathetic justification for these positions bar their own sense of entitlement and the rock-solid conviction that they both are and deserve better than others.

#Writing #GamesWriting #WritersOfMastodon #Character

After our hiatus last week, we're back with another edition of the Fediverse.Games Magazine! @flwwhtrbt has done a whole of great work this week, with features and interviews covering Retrom, RetroAssembly and CrankBoy!

Hope you enjoy the edition, and please let us know what you want to see!

#FediverseDotGamesMagazine #FGMag230825 #Retrom #RetroAssembly #CrankBoy #Playdate #Gamescom #Gamescom2025 #VideoGames #GamesWriting #Writing #Ezine #Zine #Blogging #Blog

Surprisingly (it surprised me!!) I have a novelette release today! And it's on... Steam 😲

"I Shall Guard You" in the tie-in anthology for the game King Arthur: Knight's Tale, titled Chronicles of Avalon!

Public & free Patreon post about it, with more info, how to buy, etc:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-novelette-i-75099932

#BogiWrites #KingArthur #TieIn #GamesWriting #Fantasy #HistoricalFantasy #Bookstodon #Steam #SRPG #TurnBased #Arthurian

Slowly but surely, I am recovering my old writing from the mists of time (i.e. waybackmachining), dusting them off, and republishing them.

Here's my review of Mark of the Ninja: https://www.jennfrank.net/2012/09/11/mark-of-the-ninja-review-xbla/ #games #gamedev #writing #gameswriting #videogames #bideogames #journalism! #review #reviewers (I know the hashtags look so uncool and SEO-y, but it's how people find other people on here)