GOW3 Writer Purposefully Avoids Gaming

Karen Traviss, author of the plot for Gears of War 3 and quite a few Gears of War novels (not to mention some Halo and Star Wars novels as well), tells 1UP that she doesn't play games, preferring to come to them "cold."

"I have an obsessive personality and it's taken all my strength to not buy the FIFA game. The thing about Gears, and the thing about anything I work on, is that I must come to it cold. The less I know about something, the better."

"For me, so much of the back story lies only in the visuals, the art," she continued. "Images are the most important thing I can extrapolate from. The best way I can describe it is like an aerial recon image. These guys that possess the image that come back from recon satellites and aircraft? They go through it with a fine-tooth comb, they work out what those things on the ground are. That's what I'm like when I see an image from a game.

"The imagery of Gears is such that when you look into the environments, I want to walk into that world and down those paths."

How playing FIFA would have any bearing on someone writing a sci-fi shooter narrative is anyone's guess, but one has to wonder if Ms. Traviss avoids fiction of all sorts (books, TV, movies, etc.) given that it would have unwanted influence on her writing.

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