My name is Sam Beattie. I’m a 23-year-old self-professed geek from Vermont, and I’ve spent the last year since graduation as a sportswriter. However, my real journalistic interests lie with video games, and I’m currently living in Vermont, working to get a career in gaming journalism off the ground. My ultimate goal, however, is to actually write for games; to create engaging, interactive narratives of my own.
I graduated from Dartmouth College in 2007, and wrote a senior thesis on the subject of storytelling and narrative potential in the medium of video games. Titled “Playing at Stories: Video Games as a Narrative Medium,” my dissertation examined how game designers have worked to integrate storytelling into gameplay, moving away from the traditional game-story-game layout of the traditional cutscene-dependent story.
Outside of gaming, I have strong interests in film, theater, and literature as well. Although gaming is unique from other storytelling media in a variety of ways, it’s likely, considering how mainstream video games are becoming these days, that these interests will at some point overlap with the focus of this blog.
