Narrative Designer and Copywriter

Hi, I’m Andy Parruca, I graduated from university with a Games Design and Creative Writing BA and I’m Currently SideQuest Gamer’s Hub’s Head Copywriter.

My main drive for writing is character, I’ve always been compelled by characters, how they think, how they interact with others and their environment. Growing up as a queer and bilingual person with a diverse group of friends I’ve always been driven to write stories about people that made us feel represented. Initially, I wrote a lot of short stories based on other short stories I read and really enjoyed. An example of this is Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl or Halfie)”, I was enamoured by the story’s use of the second person and how it could poke at its culture while still honouring and celebrating it. I then tried to emulate this story by writing “How to Survive your Albanian *not* Family” a story that also used the second person narrative to make jest towards my familial and cultural traditions as well as myself while also appreciating how they’ve formed me. Having enjoyed this writing style I wanted to be able to receive feedback to be able to iterate and improve my writing and thus joined a bunch of workshops to be able to do so. I wrote a few stories that I was really proud of such as “Nicki Minaj” a story that has a jovial tone but looks into fan culture, social dynamics, capitalism, and the advancement of technology through the novum that is robot AI that people that can buy of their favourite celebrities.

While I still adore short stories, the narratives I have always been in awe of are those in video games as they often had characters that represented me and the people around me; this was my motivation for studying game design and narrative design at university. It was here that I was able to develop the vocabulary as to why I was such a fan of video game narratives. Games are by their very nature ergodic phenomena and greatly lend themselves to multimedia narratives. This meant I was able to combine writing styles I loved and was developing in my creative writing classes such as poetry and screenwriting into my games whether it was cutscenes in my games or collectibles that would flesh out the world e.g. a discarded note or a poem to a lover. I also found an affinity for essay writing having picked game theory throughout my course and as a final-year assessment. I find that essay writing has helped me not only become a better writer because of an expanded vocabulary but has also made me more intentional with choices I make from a narrative standpoint by ensuring that character representation is empowering, and the use of genre is subversive yet still honours traditions. The biggest culmination of my work at university was my third-year project Grisville, a neo-noir choice-based game where I used my coding and writing skills to create an engaging world for players with dynamic and interesting characters. Diversity as always was important to me and in using noir genre theory I studied character archetypes and the way minorities have been traditionally treated in the noir and gave them agency in the story while still adhering to genre traditions and archetypes. I often participate in game jams to keep the above skills sharp.

Currently I am working at SideQuest Gamer’s Hub as its Head Copywriter, here I have learned how to: attract and engage audiences, liaise with other teams to create cohesive promotional materials, analyse player data and trends, and enhance my writing skills. Working at SideQuest has helped me engage, enjoy and become knowledgeable about a whole range of games I hadn’t gravitated to prior to working at the company. In addition to, honing my professional capabilities such as: organising meetings, creating and delivering presentations, social media content creation, and team brainstorming.