Jess declares the Year of the Game Editor
Hello!
It’s been a busy few months since I last wrote, GDC-bound, in early March. Attending the IGF awards as part of the award-winningest Titanium Court coterie was just one highlight of my whirlwind trip.
Since then I’ve been on something of a tour to spread the good word about professional editing for games. I spoke at NarraScope, went on a podcast, and officially launched GEN, my new community for game editors—and I’m not done yet.
(This is Jess Verbs Nouns, the place for occasional updates about my work, life, and play. You can subscribe, unsubscribe from emails, follow via RSS, or view the archive.)
In March, I was…
Gathering game editors at GDC
During GDC I hosted a meetup for editors, localizers, and other wordsmiths in games to start building momentum for GEN. Not only did we assemble an excellent group with diverse backgrounds and specialties across tabletop and video games, we miraculously managed to secure a big table in Yerba Buena at the height of the lunch rush. Huge success.
When I wasn’t lunching, tea-ing, and generally hobnobbing, I made time to catch some professionally interesting GDC sessions on game editing, voice directing, and “dialogue design”—one of many names I hadn’t heard before for a field with some interesting crossover with my own editing and VO production work.
Rubbing shoulders at awards ceremonies
I was able to attend GDC this year on a festival ticket as part of the team on Titanium Court, which was nominated in four IGF categories and won two, including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. (That’s me holding it super irreverently there—AP’s got the Excellence in Design trophy, upside-down.)
While just about any game these days is collaborative to some degree, Titanium Court is about as solo a project as you can get. But AP was incredibly gracious to bring me along, acknowledge both me and my mother (as the game’s editor and proofreader) onstage, and generally share the glory. I was also named in the Excellence in Narrative nomination, and though we didn’t get that one, I was pleased to see it go to some good friends on Perfect Tides: Station to Station.
In fact, I got to celebrate with two other editor pals who got recognized alongside their winning teams that night—Matt Carney, editor of Perfect Tides, and Arden Ripley, editor of Horses, which won the Nuovo Award. The three of us have plans to sit down and do a panel on game editing at some point this year. The hook is “three IGF award–winning editors talk craft.” (They had both already won in past years, so I’m the newbie in that club!)
I also made it out to represent Francisco and Grundislav Games at the Latinx Game Awards, where Rosewater was up for Excellence in Narrative and Game of the Year. We didn’t win, but I enjoyed the ceremony with fellow adventure game devs Adam and Joseph Riches, creators of Loco Motive, who came along for moral support.
Going through the Looking-glass
Back home from GDC, I dove into a copyedit of the hefty rulebook for Queen Alice, an intricate, table-eatingly expansive Through the Looking-Glass–themed Eurogame. Most of my work is in digital games, so this made for a nice change of pace. And once you wrap your head around the rules, the game is quite fun!
For a while, I briefly wondered if I was carving out a new niche as an editor exclusively of games about becoming queen of a magical otherworldly realm. They do say it’s good to specialize.
In April, I was…
Cheering the launch of Titanium Court
I don’t think I need to say too much about this one. People liked it. It’s very good. You can go play it if you haven’t yet!
Me, I can never play it again. If you have, you’ll understand.
In June, I was…
Launching the Game Editorial Network
I announced the opening of the Game Editorial Network, a new community for game editors, with a website and the GEN-L list, an old-school email discussion list running on an open-source alternative to Listserv. Other planned features, like a resource library and public member directory, are still in the works, but my top priority was to get people connected and talking.
It may seem odd to start a brand-new 90’s-style email list in this day and age, but sometimes the old ways are best. It works, and it keeps us from the prying eyes and grasping hands of big platforms.
We’ve been gathering members of all different backgrounds, experience levels, and career specialties, from tabletop RPG editors to translators to game copyeditors—even established traditional editors curious about the world of games, and games folks curious about the world of editing.
My goal with the group is twofold: on the one hand, to offer community and professional development opportunities for members, and on the other, to work together to professionalize and expand the role of editors in game dev, which is the mission I’ve been pursuing all year.
Speaking about game editing at NarraScope
NarraScope is one of my few must-attend conferences. Conveniently for me, this year’s location in Albany, close to where I’m from, meant I could skip hotels and stay with family. Having access to a car and a whole house with a pool and hot tub made for an unusually luxurious conference experience. Definitely recommend.
This was my fourth year as a speaker at NarraScope. Marissa Koors and I presented our joint talk “The Well-Edited Game: How Professional Editing Elevates Our Medium,” laying out our case for why editing should be a routine part of the production process, along with some practical advice about hiring and working with editors.
We hope the recorded talk can be both a tool for editors to help articulate the importance of their craft, and a guide for devs and publishers curious about professional editing services (or even unaware that that’s a thing!).
Appearing on The Editor’s Half Hour podcast
I get antsy listening to people ramble on, unedited, for hours and hours, so I immediately dug the concept of The Editor’s Half Hour—a blessedly short (strictly 30 minutes!), personable, informative interview with editors working in diverse specialties, from romantasy to technical editing to medical editing. Nadia is an infectiously bubbly host, and I was honored to be her most recent guest for the July episode, dedicated to, you probably guessed it, game editing—the latest stop on my Year of the Game Editor world tour. Find it from your pod slinger of choice, or see the video version on YouTube.
This month I’ve been…
Hosting the NYC Indie Games Socials
Well, I do this every month, but at the last one, Lorri Hopping was kind enough to take some pictures!
I’ve been running these for 13 years now, and they’re more popular than ever. After a few false starts in the past year trying new venues, we’re settling into a nice new seasonal rotation split between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The website is currently borked because of AI crawler bullshit—I’ll migrate to something else eventually—but you can sign up for email alerts about new events if you’d like to join us sometime.
Exploring the vampire underworld in Red Kiss
One excellent thing that came out of my trip to GDC was getting to meet some folks from Fellow Traveller, publisher of Titanium Court and many fine narrative games, around the table at the IGF awards. That connection led to some consulting and copyediting work on their just-announced title Red Kiss, a stylish, vampire-themed tactical narrative RPG set in 1980s Berlin, developed by Wispfire.
I love me a good vampire story, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with this one. Keep an eye out for it!
Later this year I’ll be…
Speaking at AdventureX
The schedule was just announced, so I can now share that Marissa Koors and I will be reprising a new version of our talk, “The Well-Edited Game: Building an Editorial Culture in Game Dev” at AdventureX in London this November!
This will be a somewhat streamlined version of our previous talk to fit a shorter slot, with a new focus: what is the “editorial culture” that games are missing, and how can we take steps to cultivating one?
This is the next planned stop of the Year of the Game Editor World Tour, but I’ve got a few more still in the works.
In other news, I’ve been…
Reading/watching/playing
Re-reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass for our book club, inspired by Queen Alice. My verdict: it has less cultural cachet, but Looking-Glass is the superior work. The Red Queen is a more interesting character than the one-note Queen of Hearts, the chess motif is more consistent and better developed than the playing cards one, and both Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter are in this one, so.
Inspired partly by Red Kiss and partly by seeing a random gif on Discord, re-watching old fave Forever Knight, the classic 90s Canadian tv series about a Toronto detective who’s secretly a centuries-old, guilt-ridden vampire. I dragged Francisco into watching this with me after discovering I owned a complete DVD set of the series I’d forgotten about, and he discovered just how much of a debt the Gabriel Knight series owes to this obviously influential work, putting Forever Knight squarely in his chain of creative ancestry. He says it’s “very FMV,” but I think that really just means that FMV games are “very 90s budget genre series.”
Saying goodbye to Happy Fun Time, the GTA RP server where Francisco and I whiled away so much of the past two and a half years, which sadly shut down last month. I tinkered around in Rockstar Editor and picked up some new video editing skills in DaVinci Resolve to make a little music video coda sending off my characters. We’ve mostly completed our mourning process and are enjoying the extra free time in this brief window before the launch of a brand-new Red Dead RP server we joined that’s opening any day now...
Listening constantly to NTS radio. I gave up Spotify and other paid subs a while back in favor of free streaming radio stations. I also dig Soma.fm, Radiooooo, Poolsuite, and the excellent Triode app, but lately I’ve been putting on the NTS website every day and delving into the excellently curated DJ sets, radio shows, and infinite playlists for background and working music.
Phew! That was too long, I know. I can’t promise I’ll do less stuff, but maybe next time I’ll write sooner before it all piles up.
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Thanks for reading, until next time!
Cheers,
Jess
Personal site: https://jesshaskins.com
The Game Editors: https://thegameeditors.com
NYC Indie Games Social: https://jesshaskins.com/nycindiegames
Game Editorial Network: https://gameeditorial.net
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