you know i fell in love with text games because it came to me cheap. mom and dad got me a laptop, my beloved 11" macbook air (they don't make macbooks that small anymore) and at the time it was the most expensive thing they ever got me and it was all mine.

i don't remember learning how to download epubs or watch thing online free or torrent software. it was like i was born knowing these things. i don't know. one day i was eating rocks and flowers and picking up snails and the next i was playing a kinetic novel i found through the ren'py website which i read about on the off-topic board of a percy jackson RP forum i frequented (i was twelve).

my first game on itch.io is a text game. there are many reasons i love text games but deep down i really love to write. i've been writing stories since i read my first novel as a first grader. for a long time i let my own doubts about writing and my writing ability get the better of me and i told myself i didn't care about words. but i do, i really do.

i let myself fall into a complicated relationship with language for a while. i'm korean, and i speak both english and korean fluently, but neither one fully contains my life. i speak to my family in korean, i speak to friends in english. i write in english, i did my studies in korean. when i was a kid i wrote stories by copying the style of american novelists. now, as i try to write stories of my own, i hesitate to name a character or a place, to set the world in reality.

when i was a kid i just named my guys "bob." i haven't met a single person named bob.

i've noticed that what i've written in the past few years has taken on this surreal second-person-present-tense nameless placelessness. in retrospect, it's my attempt at getting closer to writing something i genuinely empathise with. but i lose so much color, i've been thinking i should pivot my approach. not completely, just enough to pull the important stuff into focus, so maybe you could glimpse what i'm trying to scratch out of the paper.