Gaming: Cara Ellison, Senior Narrative Designer On Vampire: The Masquerade...

The narrative designer of Void Bastards and Ghost Town walks us through what's on her PC.

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Narrative designer Cara Ellison got into gaming via the BBC Micro her father had stolen from work. "He was like 'I'm borrowing it so I can work from home.' He wasn't. He stole it and he never gave it back", she says. The first game to grab her attention was the 1987 narrative adventure Acheton. "I couldn't read or write at the time, and I was determined to be able to talk to the computer."

After growing up on games like Grand Theft Auto and SimCity 2000, Ellison spent several years working as a games journalist, including for PC Gamer, before transitioning to game design, writing for titles like Dishonored 2 and the comedy immersive sim Void Bastards, with more recent projects including God of War: Ragnarok and the VR mystery game Ghost Town developed by the creators of The Room series of 3D puzzlers. Ellison was also senior narrative designer on Bloodlines 2 before Hardsuit Labs and Paradox parted ways.

Currently, Ellison works as senior narrative designer at independent studio Gravity Well Games, as well as on Sleight of Hand, a deckbuilding stealth game inspired by Metal Gear Solid and Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines. "I feel like it is the successor to Bloodlines, in a way," she says. "I guess it depends how much of an RPG we can really make out of it."

I asked Ellison to guide me along the word-strewn superhighway of her PC, a journey that took us from the shadowy waterfront of Santa Monica out into the sunless blue beyond.

Cara Ellison is a former games journalist turned narrative designer, with credits that include Dishonored 2, Hardsuit Labs' Bloodlines 2 and Void Bastards. For a year she travelled the world meeting and writing about game developers, and her blog posts were collected in the book Embed with Games.

There's a game called Titanium Court. I've been playing the demo like crazy because it's so wonderful.

It's Douglas Adams-quality writing that's so silly and a little bit satirical. It references things in the real world but it's a fantasy world. I guess the shape of it is supposed to b

Source: PC Gamer