For my short story I attempted to create a short story based on game series ‘X-Com’. In short this game revolves around creating your own soldiers and commanding them against the threat of an alien invasion.

I mainly drew my story on the concept of ‘Agency’, even though I don’t really know if it worked or not. I took one of my soldiers in the game, Jones, and created a sort of audio log type story to go alongside her achievements as a soldier in-game. It’s a bit difficult to explain but essentially what I was trying to achieve was a sense of heavy user participation alongside the nature of short story as expressed by Matthews. This sense of agency I was hoping to achieve came from the idea that I could write in between missions that would be played in the game itself – sort of a soldier’s diary. Jones being a sniper in the actual game, gave me the idea to create an audio log highlighting the events she had endured in between X-Com: Enemy Unknown and X-Com 2 which has around a 20 year time gap in between. Although I’m not entirely sure how well I had managed to achieve that, but it was worth a try.

Jones in X-Com:Enemy Unknown

Jones in X-Com 2