English Department
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Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.
If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.
The love of the family, the love of the person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.
Nothing will work unless you do.
It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.
Word cloud: a look at some of the names from the British Council research
Otomo’s arresting and vivid portrayal of gang warfare on the streets of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo ran throughout the ’80s, drawing in influences from both the West (Star Wars) and the East (Japanese author Seishi Yokomizo), to dazzling effect. Widely credited with introducing both manga, and though its animated movie translation, anime, to Western audiences, Akira explores ideas of mutation, psychokinesis, military corruption and terrorism, all the while exhibiting the nuclear paranoia that flooded Japanese culture after 1945. Every Armageddon-obsessed adventure from Final Fantasy to Infamous has ideas that can be traced back here. Alternatively: Another classic 80s manga, Fist of the North Star, has been influential. And from the west, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen are two works dealing in similar areas of warped heroism, mutated humanity and future-noir paranoia.
Through a selection of interconnected stories written throughout the twenties and thirties, American writer HP Lovecraft created a new horror mythology, blending the supernatural and science fiction and imagining a universe of dank oppressive dread in which humanity is at the mercy of gigantically powerful monsters. Lovecraft’s bestiary was a huge influence on the makers of seminal tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, thereby working its way into most video game RPGs ever since. And the Cthulhu Mythos that emerged from his works has had an enormous influence on games designers in other genres: indeed, the entire concept of ‘end of level bosses’ practically percolates Lovecraft’s entire philosophy into one game convention. Alternatively: other writers whose own complex fantasy/horror mythologies have inspired game designers include Michael Moorcock (especially the Elric books) and Stephen King (The Dark Tower). Lovecraft was also an influence on another provider of video game set texts, Robert Bloch.
Originally serialised in the weekly Japanese comic, Shōnen Jump, Dragon Ball is widely considered to be one of the greatest mangas of all-time, its volumes selling over 230m copies worldwide. Based around the Chinese novel Journey to the West (the source for the cult TV series Monkey), the epic work combines exciting martial arts action and a Picaresque narrative heaving with eccentric and fascinating characters. There have been dozens of video game conversions of the original works, but Toriyama’s mix of combat, mythology and comedy has inspired hundreds more beat-’em-ups and action adventures. There are also dozens of games that make use of the 
Video games are utterly crammed with conventions, ideas and archetypes ripped from world mythologies, but Ancient Greece has provided many of the key inspirations. The idea of the heroic quest, a central element in almost every role-playing game, is symbolised in the adventures of Odysseus, Perseus and Theseus, as are the underlying concepts of prophesy, destiny and of ‘the chosen one’ who is born to vanquish evil. This inspiration is obvious in titles like God of War and Altered Beast, but every time a character reaches for a magic item or feels as though they are at the mercy of vengeful gods, it is likely the source goes back to Ancient Greece. I have opted for Robert Graves’ much-respected analysis here, but there are plenty of other options, including Bullfinch’s Mythology. Alternatively: the Norse and Celtic mythologies have also been a huge influence on game designers, adding their own slants on iconic concepts such as magical items, warring gods and heroic journeys. There’s also the Bible, of course, which is filled with war, heroism and wrathful deities.
This is a slight cheat as it’s obviously not a novel, but Joseph Campbell’s exhaustive study of world mythologies and the concept of the heroic archetype has been named as an inspiration by countless developers I have spoken to over the last two decades. Campbell’s central argument, that all mythological tales spring from a single monomyth in which a hero defeats a series of challenges to attain a life-changing gift, is central to both video game and movie structure. This is the core stuff of story-telling, later refined into a writing guide by Christopher Vogler in his similarly much-cited work, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. Alternatively: Sir James George Frazer’s classic study of archetypal religious beliefs and practices, The Golden Bough, is another oft-named source for video game ideas.
There was a time in the early 2000s when it seemed every studio I visited had a well-thumbed copy of this challenging but fascinating novel left on a desk somewhere. Here, though, it’s as much about form as it is about content – House of Leaves is a cybertext, a work of “ergodic” literature in which the formatting of the text becomes a puzzle the reader must solve. Through footnotes, blank pages, interviews and codes, Danielewski creates a sort of dynamic experience, that reflected a lot of the experiments into interactive fiction and alternative reality gaming taking place on the web at the time. In essence its a story about how to tell stories in the digital age. Alternatively: Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges is another surreal and playful text that creates meaning in obtuse layers – it has been name-checked by many developers I’ve spoken to. A couple also mentioned Theodore Roszak’s Flicker, a slightly more conventional take on Danielewski’s use of fictionalised historical writing.
Published in 1885, Haggard’s colonialist romp through the deserts and mountains of Africa, brought us Allan Quartermain, the archetypal flawed adventure hero, and introduced the Lost World genre of fiction. These elements, modernised through the Indiana Jones trilogy (don’t… just don’t mention the fourth film), has gone on to inspire everything from Pitfall to Tomb Raider. Any game in which a hero and his bickering team locate a lost temple filled with fabled treasures probably has its roots in Haggard’s novel. Alternatively: Along with Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan), Haggard no doubt influenced the heroic fantasy works of authors like Robert E. Howard, whose Conan books have spawned a hundred monosyllabic video game warriors as well shaping the whole sword and sorcery sub-genre.
Well, it had to be in here. Although Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax 
Certainly not the first cyberpunk novel, but possibly the most influential. Gibson’s post-modern tale of hackers, criminal corporations and sentient AIs worked alongside Bladerunner to instil in game designers a new aesthetic of the future. No shiny spaceships and helpful robots, just noirish paranoia, busted up computer hardware, hard-drinking renegades and drugs. The anarchic, counter-culture feel of Gibson’s works appealed to the bedroom programmers of the 80s and early 90s who identified with the author’s damaged, technically brilliant protagonists, and with the assimilation of biological and computer organisms. Games like Syndicate, Beneath as Steel Sky and later Deus Ex, .hack// and Metal Gear Solid caught the vibe perfectly. Alternatively: pretty much anything by Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson or Pat Cadigan. And from manga, Bubblegum Crisis, Ghost in the Shell and Appleseed.
Gears of War, Halo, Killzone, Quake… all of them owe a debt to the concept of the space marine brilliantly realised in Heinlein’s future war epic. He wasn’t the first to write about the concept of a mechanised military defending humanity from invading aliens, but Heinlein captured many of the key elements that would go into the biggest sci-fi games. A troubled hero advancing through the ranks, an insect-like extra-terrestrial threat, a factional military… whatever you think about the archetypal video game space soldier, with his buzz cut, tribal tattoos and immense metallic body armour, it is one of the key images of this console generation, and his family tree goes back to this novel and its contemporaries. Alternatively: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, EE Smith’s Lensman series and Iain M Banks’ Culture novels also deal with galactic war, mega weaponry and vicious aliens/AIs. And where would games be without those?