Writer/Gamer Q&A: Sarah Glady
Cartridge Lit
This week’s interview is with the talented Sarah Glady, who wrote about Angry Birds and seemingly endless (mindless) conflict in her piece, “Look to the Angry Birds of the Air.”
Sarah’s work has been featured in SpokeWrite, Rock and Sling, and Script. She can be found on Twitter: @gladyface.
Cartridge Lit: What games are you playing right now, if any?
Sarah Glady: This is more in the realm of RPG’s, but a few dear friends and I recently started a campaign through the initial Kickstarter wave for Storium. It’s been such a fun platform that combines of D&D, choose-your-own-adventure books, and World of Warcraft. I’m an unhinged druid named Improbussesa. I’m excited to see how the site grows in the coming year.
CL: What was your first video game system? Did you love it or hate it or feel something completely different about it?
SG: I discovered all things electronic and literary around eight, so my first systems bucket holds a really old PC (with Oregon Trail, Mathblaster and Treasure Mountain), a Game Boy color (side note, classmates at eight do not find it charming when you insist they call it a Game Girl), N64, Tamagotchis, and a survival simulation on LaserDisc that I’m pretty sure starred one of the Savage brothers. I loved them all, because they gave me stories and power and cool music, none of which I had a lot of access to on my own in the nineties.
CL: Most nostalgia-laden memory from your video game history?
SG: My cousins bought GoldenEye 007 the day it came out in 1997, and I remember sitting and watching them play for hours. I’m the oldest kid in my immediate family, but I really wanted an older brother growing up (which apparently, even if you pray for in class at Sunday School, is still a bit of a biological impossibility), so I used to pretend my older cousins were my brothers, and it made me feel like I had some sort of cultural captain to follow. I also felt like as a little kid, I had achieved some new level of greatness since even though they wouldn’t let me join in, I was the only girl allowed to watch them play. I would then go back and show the other girls (except for my friend Amy who was insanely media literate, naturally killer at all things Nintendo, and another captain of culture) how to shoot in Golden Eye, drift in Mario Kart, or find their missing Pokémon.
CL: Care to list your top five games?
SG: Right now, I’d rank them as Wii Zumba (I’m a sucker for DDR type games), all space game apps, most of the Mario Karts (although I don’t own the Wii U console yet, so I’m frustratingly bad at it), Pokémon Snap, and RollerCoaster Tycoon.
CL: What novel would you like to see turned into a game? What genre would it be? How would it play?
SG: I would love to see a blend of poetry and gaming, but I would want it have to have some sort simultaneous multiple player point of view narrative. Or not. I just saw Interstellar so I keep thinking about how writers other than Dylan Thomas work graphed against time and space.
CL: If someone made a game about your life, what genre would it be? How would it play?
SG: I think it would be an online RPG, but set in a Margaret Atwood-type world and players would have to somehow work together to defeat a boss modeled after IT, the giant evil brain in Wrinkle in Time, although the final takedown absolutely cannot be either a literal or figurative nod to unconditional love. We already read/saw The Giver. Also, it would probably be an app and would look like a mix of Tinder and Spaceteam.