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Before I became a full-time writer, I worked in tech support in those giant cubicle farms you see. I was surrounded by people who played video games all the time - sometimes actually in the call centers, playing online multiplayer games. I saw friends of mine who began to feel that going online was more compelling to them than real life.
I love the beautiful distractions of the world - television and movies, video games, the Internet in general. But I try really hard to avoid them, because they don't help me become a better writer. They subtract hours from my day. And a writer's main currency is time. Time to daydream, time to walk and think, time to sit and do the work.
Any established media, such as literature, music, or film, offers a wide variety of experiences touching emotions from the very primal to the deeply complex. No matter who the audience are or what kind of mood they are in, there will always be something right for them. Video games, as a fast-growing new medium, is on its way to catching up.
Look at the genres women like: a romantic comedy game doesn't exist. Few examples of a documentary game exist. What is the equivalent of a real drama game? They don't exist. Emotion with that complexity for a more mature, older audience are necessary to make medium-like video games healthy so it can be highly respected like the film industry.
When I started, people would come to interview me, and just knowing that I worked in videogames - it was like people wanted to stone me, it was that bad. People thought of video games as kind of a bad thing in society. Now, people that come to interview me, they have grown up with video games, and they know what they are; they've experienced it.
I don't think a lot of people would spot the video-game influences in '10 Cloverfield Lane.' People think it's just a Hitchcockian mystery. And I was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, for sure. But for a generation prior to mine, that would be the sole influence. Since I grew up playing video games, I drew so much inspiration from that world.