2025-02-11
1 小时 20 分钟Foreign.
Narrative designer and writer for video games.
Born in the Chesapeake Bay State of Maryland, she studied information technology in English at Penn State University as a Millennium Scholar.
While at Penn State, she started multiple research projects investigating how players represent themselves in video games through their choice of skins.
After graduating, she began writing for video games, specializing in character driven stories focused on people of color.
My guest has written for projects including Celestia, the romance game Kiss you, and most recently Spirit Swap Lo fi beats to match 3:2, released earlier this month.
Welcome Adana Ned.
Thank you, sire.
That's such a fancy intro.
I'm like, wow, I've done a lot of cool stuff.
Thank you.
Well Adana, I first encountered your work when I edited a wonderful piece you wrote for the magazine, a Profound Waste of Time, all about the art and science of designing romance options in games, which I think has been a pretty major element of your work.
And you've talked about it at GDC and all sorts of things.
So tell me, I know this, but tell our listeners what was the your first experience of dating a video game character?
So my first experience in dating a video game character is a game that I will be talking about, Playdara, which is Fire Emblem Awakening, which is a turn based RPG for the 3DS.
And one of the most interesting things is as in Fire Emblem games, the way it works is as you manage your armies, you can pair up different units, you have to increase their relationships and these relationships will translate into stat bonuses.
And Awakening, specifically you as a player character could also date other members of your army and have children.
It's actually a pretty important plot point, but we'll get to that later.
I think one of the funniest things is that like the game, even though it's like this hard, hardcore like tactics action rpg, it like opens like a Hallmark romance movie when like Chrom first looks at you and he's like, hey.
And then it just zooms in directly on his beautiful face.