Corey Brotherson is a writer, consultant and editor and renowned in the gaming world for his narratives and ideas but how easy is it to maintain a career in such a competitive industry?

Hi, I'm Dhruti Shah, and this is my podcast

Have You Thought About. I'm a writer, and I love to find out

about what passions people are pursuing, especially if they're

managing to blend together their skills in unusual ways. In each

edition, I'm going to chat with someone I find particularly

interesting and who's managed to fit things together in their

life or profession that you don't always think was an

obvious match. You're about to hear me chatting with Corey

Brotherson, an award winning freelance writer and creative

consultant.

Corey, hello. Now we met thanks to some serendipity of seating

at the ochre conference a special dinner. And what ochre

does is focus on entertainment creating significant impact. And

that is what you do. You create some pretty significant impact

with the multitude of work that you've already got behind you.

But for those who don't know, who are you, Corey, what are

just some of the things that you've been playing with? And I

use that term appropriately. I think

I'm a writer slash editor slash creative

consultant. I've been primarily working in the games industry

for about 23 years now, when I I feel every year of that, every

time I go out to a games industry social because

obviously there's, it's a very young person's industry. I

started off as a games journalist. Funnily enough, I

wanted to be a game journalist since I was about 11 years old.

And because this was the dark, distant past of the 1990s there

wasn't really a, kind of like a real path to be able to get to

become a games journalist or to get to become a fiction writer,

which was the other thing I wanted to kind of focus on. So I

focused on becoming a journalist. I studied a master's

in in journalism, and then through a stroke of luck or

destiny, or whatever you want to call it, a position on the place

that I did kind of like a bit of part time placement work at

while I was doing my Masters, opened up just when I finished

my the my degree. So I ended up getting straight into a job

after out of university. And then from there, I kind of

cascaded across the games industry. So I initially was

working for a video game website that got bought by Yahoo. I

worked with Yahoo for about a year, I left and freelanced for

a variety of different gaming websites, but also started

working on my own fiction at that point, because the internet

had become a thing, so it was actually easier to find out how

to become a general writer than general fiction writer. And so I

started writing, writing my own comic books, being hired to

write and graphic novels and so on and so forth. And then on the

second year of my freelance career, at that particular

moment in time, things weren't going particularly well, so I

thought, oh, I'll just see if I can get a full time job. And

again, as luck, destiny would would kind of make it. I ended

up working for PlayStation because I did some freelance

work for them during my first year, and that's where I stayed

for 12 years, still working, kind of like bits and pieces

here and there. Primarily I was working as a content producer

slash editorial writer for PlayStation, working on, like

marketing materials and working with the developers of the games

and product managers and and kind of putting stuff on them,

playstation.com and eventually PlayStation blog, when that

developed. The only reason really why I left PlayStation

because I was quite happy there for a long period of time. Was

one, I wanted to pursue a career in games narrative and two, I

actually started working on a game called Windrush Tales,

which was originated by a very talented Narrative Designer

writer called Chella Ramanan, who currently works for Ubisoft.

And she finished working on the avatar game last year. And she

wanted to work on something which was reflective of her

background, her Caribbean background. For those who don't

actually know what Windrush

is, is it possible just to give a little bit of a

background, because I just want to put this here. I didn't know

Corey was involved with the Windrush tales, and I went to

the British Library because they had an amazing digital

storytelling exhibition on and I played it there for the first

time before I'd even met Corey. So again, the serendipity, and

it was absolutely amazing. But for those who don't know Corey,

please explain

So back in the 1950s we call it wind regeneration, 1950s

to 1970s but we'll specifically start in the 1950s so we're

talking post World War Two, and basically Britain was in a bit

of a state, obviously, from under war. And they put out a

call to the Commonwealth. And the Caribbean is obviously a big

part of the Commonwealth. And a lot of Caribbean people felt

like Britain was very much like, described as the motherland,

essentially the home away from home. The call out went out from

Britain for Britain's government and royalty, kind of basically

saying, Please come and help us rebuild the country. And so

1000s and 1000s of people from the Caribbean arrived on

initially, what was the ship, the Empire Windrush. Hence the

the term the Windrush generation. And they came into

the country to help rebuild country, to help find jobs and

basically craft new lives, lives here in Britain. And as a

result, what you had was a wave of immigration where people

would either kind of tell stories of their friends and

family, back at home, back in the Caribbean, and say, Hey,

this is wonderful. It's amazing over here. You got to come over

and kind of like, help out and create a new life.

Alternatively, they would make enough money and then head back

to the Caribbean. My grandpa. Parents, and my parents are part

of that generation. They came over during the 60s, and that

became my history and my heritage. So when we wanted to

create a game around that shadow, was really adamant in

terms of, like, wanting to be able to capture the culture,

capture the challenges and the trials and the tribulations that

that generation went through during that period of time.

There's a lot of bigotry and racism and difficulty in getting

jobs, all those things that they faced at the same time. But we

also wanted to look at celebrating and uplifting the

strength and everything that they brought to this country.

You know, they changed the face of music, they changed the food.

They changed all these different elements that we now very much

can take for granted over here in the UK, very much, like any

large amount of immigrant influx into a country, you get all that

culture kind of integrating in there, and that's in itself, is

a wonderful thing and cause for celebration. So we wanted to be

able to kind of look at that and create a game around that story,

around that generation story, and kind of really look at the

lives that they led to a lot of kind of like, you know, talking

to members of my family and kind of going through, doing

interviews, reading a lot of books, watching documentaries,

all these things that contributed towards the creation

of a game which is hopefully reflective and respectful of

everything that they experienced

Was that the most personal game that even

narrative that you've ever been involved with and and how did

you marry that degree of having to bring yourself into it, but

also having to also have that, that objectivity, you know,

because it's for an audience that isn't you.

I would be lying if I said it was easy. There's a

great degree of pressure that we've put on ourselves to be

able to reflect and respect effectively. You know, the

people that are the reason why we're in this country, that we

were, that we came to this country, and being able to to

examine that has been tricky. It is exceptionally personal, like

you say, there's a level of of being able to look at what

they've gone through. And it kind of hurts to a certain

degree when you when you hear some of the stories. During one

of our workshops, we were talking to a relatively well

known Caribbean Windrush generation writer and

journalist. He was part of our workshop, and we're very

grateful to have him there, because some friends with his

son. We had all this feedback from him and other people, and

my mom, included, who was in one of the workshops, and when we

came back and finished one of the second workshops, we were in

such an emotional state, because the gravity of what we were

doing really hit home. It wasn't like we weren't aware of it

before, but it was actually the first time that we'd had shown

our game to people of that generation, and was getting

feedback from them directly. And it was such a powerful moment

of, oh, wow, should we be really be doing this? Because we really

felt it. We felt that expectation that was there,

trying to distance ourselves from that is is no easy thing

either. You're trying to be like you're saying. You're trying to

have a level of objectivity there. But I think ultimately,

there's no way to remove yourself entirely from from the

experience and what you're writing and what you want to try

and convey. I think if anything, it's being able to try and tap

into that and use it a little bit to help create a sense of

authenticity and realism of what they went through. We can never

kind of portray what they've experienced, because we can't

travel back in time, obviously, but it's a sad indictment of

where we are as a society that I can read my granddad's book. My

granddad, basically, my eternal granddad, had written like a

little book of his experiences when he came to the country, and

I've been using that, but we've been using that as part of the

research, and you can read some of the stuff he's gone through,

and you notice a similarity to the sort of stuff that my

parents have gone through, and that, in reflection, is also a

similarity to the stuff that I've gone through, especially as

a teenager, Where I encountered a lot of racism, and sadly, like

I can talk to my eldest niece and hear her stories about the

racism that she's faced as a young teenager, and it's

devastating. It's really hard to hear that. You know that this

sort of thing is always going to be there, but ultimately you

think, oh, at least things will improve and get better, but the

same cycles are just repeating, not necessarily in the same

ways, but they're repeating in ways which you see the

similarities, and you see that that level of bigotry which is

difficult to swallow. And so from my perspective, how I

personally try to use it as the as a writer and as a person that

is writing this. Game is that I take those personal experiences

and I try to use them through the lens of the time period of

that generation. The focus for me is always going to be the

emotional impact. How does it feel to be in that circumstance?

What is going through your mind? And if you can hone in on that,

then personally, I feel that becomes more impactful than just

trying to become a historical document, as it were, because I

think people will relate to that more directly. People can watch

a documentary, they can absorb these things from a distance in

themselves, if they want to. There is, there's material out

there. But for a game, I think it's important to be able to

show that, and can trade, kind of show it to the player, and

convey it in a way which allows them to feel like they're

experiencing it to a certain degree, certain empathy that

you're trying to kind of create. So it's really being able to

kind of look at that and say, Yeah, I may not have experienced

that directly, but I can take those emotional elements that I

can relate to and tap them and plug them into into that, and

hopefully make that feel authentic and realistic.

If you're going back in time and talking to your

16 year old self in terms of the journey that you've taken, it's

you know, you're you're working in spaces. You're being in

spaces where somebody like you, let's face it, underrepresented

wouldn't necessarily have been you're working in gaming, which

at one point perhaps was considered maybe a joke crew,

but it's actually very, very serious as big business. And so

if you were talking to your 16 year old self, like, what would

you say to them about where you are now and everything that

you've achieved? Because if I look at your paper bio flip in l

like, it is pretty amazing that you are where you are, and

everything that you've done, and you've been at the vanguard of

so much, how would you tell your younger self like this is what

you'll go on to do.

Thank you. This is actually, I'm a little

bit emotional, and you'll probably hear that in my voice

anyway, but this is actually quite a difficult question to

answer, in a certain degree, because earlier on this year, I

was on the verge of quitting the games industry, I genuinely was

like, I pretty much had enough. I was I'm freelancing at the

moment. I have been just for about a year and a half now, and

things were really, really difficult in terms of getting

work and trying to figure out exactly what the next steps are

going to be. And you asking this question is a really great way

to reflect on the journey of what I've gone through, because

ultimately, it's been such a long journey, and to be able to

kind of speak to my 16 year old self and go like, hey, there's

going to be times when you're going to feel really jaded and

feel like you're going to want to just quit, but it's going to

be an incredible ride, because me as a 16 year old didn't have

the internet. The only way to be a video game show this was to

write for paper based magazines. And that was even that was very

relatively limited. And there was a couple TV shows like games

master and bad influence and stuff like that that were, that

were there, but you never really thought you could get to that

particular point. It was always really about the writing of

things. So to know now that you know, yes, I have written for

magazines. I've written for an entire different platform that

didn't exist until 16 years old, because PlayStation didn't exist

at the time. I've written for, officially, for a platform for

over a decade. I've written games on writing games. I'm

writing comic books, editing and writing children's books. I

don't think my 16 year old self would believe me. You'd think I

would be taking the mickey out of him, and I wouldn't be able

to comprehend that journey at all. I think when I was back

then, it would just be like as a straight path. It's like, I'd

love to write books. I'd love to write comic books. Love to be in

video games, and that's it. And as the world has changed and

evolved, the horizons have changed and evolved as well, and

allowed me to explore avenues which I didn't even know

existed, and to go into places and be part of industries that I

never thought I would be able to now, I'm lucky enough to be

working on a film at the moment, and it's not my film, but it's

been, I've been asked to be part of that film as a writer, and

even, like four years ago, I wouldn't have thought that would

have been a case for me. I wouldn't be doing that so I

could turn around, talk to my 16 year old self and and he would

go, you're definitely trying to take the mickey out. I mean, you

are having an absolute laugh. I'd blow his mind with kind of

the opportunities that we would have been granted and kind of

fought for. You've made me realize, like, literally, right

now today, because I'm not, I've not had an amazing day in

myself. You made me realize that I really should be extremely

grateful for the path that I've taken and the opportunities I've

been given, I wouldn't have been able to even fathom this, this,

this career that I've had for 23 years. It just would have been,

it would have been basically saying I've climbed Everest to

my to my 16 year old self. And it's like, no how. That doesn't

even make any sense. So. Yeah, it's strange,

It's very easy to be our own critic. And I think

when you're striving and isn't easy at all. And as soon as you

know, we spoke, this is a dude, you embody the dudeness, and

then, like, in terms of the writing, you know, you've got

beautiful writing, absolutely amazing. But it's the

versatility that I just, I don't understand how in this one

person, you have such versatility. You're doing a

comic, even at the moment, an open an open comic that anybody

can come to for which please, please talk to us more about

you. So you're working on this film. You've got the games. It's

why is it important to have

that? So, I mean, I kind of, I'm lucky enough to be

working on multiple different comic books, and, you know, be I

want to make sure I shout out the ones that I kind of

primarily part of. The first of Clockwork watch, which is owned

by a friend and writer called Yomi Ayeni. And that's a

steampunk kind of thriller, essentially, which I edit. I

started helping writing it, and then I kind of edit. And then

there's also magic myths, which is, I work with my co

collaborator, co creator, artist Sergio Calvet, who lives in

Barcelona. Amazing artist, really, you know, that's a story

about me trying to find my own identity, really, through a

young lady who's traveling through the world of Greek and

Roman myth and why they're they're technically separate in

this universe. But I think the comic book that we're kind of

like touching upon is probably deadlier than that. One is

definitely a exceptionally personal comic book, because

it's effectively an anthropology of four stories, and those four

stories are sci fi, fantasy, bit of spy thriller, bit of fable,

totally unrelated, but the exception of one current theme

that runs through tied at all of them, and that theme is me

struggling with depression. I started writing this because I

released it a few, good few years ago. Now. I started

writing this when I was in the tinges of long undiagnosed

depression, and as I was going through it, I was writing more

stories, not realizing that I was actually writing stories

about my depression. Because there were, you know, sci fi

stories, fantasy stories kind of thing. What I didn't realize

until was quite deep into them, is that each story was

representative of a different stage in my depression. You know

that feeling of helplessness, that feeling of burden, the

feeling of being trapped and betrayed by your own body in

your own mind, the feeling of like society kind of abandoning

you. And all these things kind of came out in the stories. It

was one of those things where I finished writing all these

stories, and I was going through the rewriting and the editing

process of them, and where I realized subliminally the

earlier stories were about my depression, I realized that, and

then when I realized that I was already writing about the

depression throughout them, you know, I made some some tweaks to

really kind of bring out that theme, to make sure that it was

kind of more apparent in some areas as to what I was actually

going through, and I worked with some absolutely phenomenal

artists across the board, because each story has, like a

different artist, essentially, or different art team, to be

able to convey that. Because the story's initial concept was

about female characters and and kind of I wanted to make sure

that, like, a large majority of the art team were women. That

was really one of the main themes of of there. It wasn't

like I understand what it's like to be a woman, or I was trying

to convey what it's like to be a woman, but I wanted to put women

in in stories and spaces which I hadn't often seen within various

parts of fiction. So I was really exploring that. But as it

turned out the level of exploration of my own depression

became the connective tissue across all of them, the

overridden the kind of like the part of me wanting to just kind

of have, like a effectively under representation being shown

through different genres. So yeah, it ended up being kind of

like a very, very intense exploration of my experiences of

mental health and and the challenges of going through

that.

And you've turned those that was a few years ago,

but you're you're now publishing again. How would you describe

it? You're now sharing it with the world. What? What's the

actual process now?

So it's all published, it's all kind of

people can go out and buy, the book. I am looking to kind of

embellish this a little bit more as I go along, working on a

secret project, expand on that, and really flesh out some of the

ideas that I was looking at in the process of of the comic

book. But for me, in terms of, like, how I sort of think

together, it's very much like I sit down, I can put the ideas

down onto a page, and then I slowly, kind of chisel out those

ideas into a space where I feel there's a coherent story, and

then being able to draw that that story and and the themes of

what I want to say and what I want to. Explore what I want to

convey, and hopefully make them into something coherent, and

then turn them into scripts, and then working those scripts

through as much as possible create something which I feel

kind of captures those, those elements of what my my themes

are, and what I want to try and kind of convey and such. And,

you know, I go to conventions, and when I talk to people about

these stories, I try to be as open as possible about the

origins of them and what I was trying to convey with them, and

the sort of morals and themes that are existent within them,

because that's what people relate to. At the end of the

day, that's what draws people to stories, a sense of commonality

and universal, kind of themes and elements, be all experience,

or know someone that's experienced. So it's being able

to kind of portray those really as best as possible.

I would love to know what's your take then on

things where artificial intelligence now plays, plays a

bit of a role, or things like chat, GPT, etc, because I always

have a little bit of a shadow when it comes to those sort of

tools, and that's probably just me being a bit of a Luddite or

something. But when you see that, do you ever think about,

Oh, what the beauty of the pain of the writing? What am I going

to do with it? But what's your take on that? In terms of those

sort of tools?

I think I come from a place of skepticism when it

comes to AI. They're fun little tools, I think for people to

use, I always look with a bit of side eye on people that are

using them or to create stories. Now that isn't to say that these

things should never be done. I'm not keen on them. Don't get me

wrong, for me, AI is a tool in in a certain way, and it's a

tool which has been misused. Also, I feel like there's a

marketing bubble around it as such, because everything is now

AI. It's just like, the fact that predictive text is

technically AI. People will say like, Oh, we've introduced this

new AI into like a vacuum cleaner. It's just like, well,

it's the same Vacuum Cleaner from 10 years ago. It's just

that you've called this filtration system AI now,

because that's what everybody uses as a way of describing

something which is ever so slightly intelligent. The

problem with AI, and I think the issue with how people see it

when they try to use it as a creation tool, is that AI cannot

think. It's very easy to feel like it can think, but it cannot

make decisions in the same way that a human can make decisions.

It can take as much information as possible and predict and make

a what it feels like an informed choice based on that input, but

it cannot make a discerning choice. This is the reason why

we're getting so many kind of, like, really wild things like,

be it people putting in, like how to make pizza, and they're

getting recipes with glue or for their pizzas, because the air

can't discern what is, in this particular case, a important

factor of what it is to cook, which is, say, we try to put

ingredients in to create the food, but we also try To make it

healthy. AI is not be able to make that decision as to what is

healthy and what isn't, because it doesn't know. The only thing

it's got is a definition in a dictionary that it can refer to.

And so when we come to the creation of stories, one of the

fundamental parts is creativity. Where does creativity and

imagination come from? And it comes from all different types

of experiences and sources, but it comes from from living. It

comes from experiencing life. You know, we can ideas just by

walking out into a road and looking at everything around us,

and come back and write about that and look through the lens

of our history, our background, everything that we've gone

through as a person AI doesn't have that. It does not have that

at all. It can, you can tell it to replicate what it may feel

like to be a, in this case, a middle aged black man who's a

writer, but it wouldn't be able to give you the experience of

that. It wouldn't be able to tell you, like the fear, of what

it's like to to walk into into a pub and the whole pub just stop

and look at you. It wouldn't be able to tell you what it's like

to, you know, hold a baby in your hands and then be

introduced to your, you know, your your your first niece. It

wouldn't be able to tell you what it's like to be asked to

become a godparent. It can only tell you what is in raw

information that exists. And so as writers, it's very easy to

feel threatened by AI, but ultimately it can never

replicate those sorts of things, and until it can, which is a

very, very long way away. And I know AI is progressing at this

point, but it's going to be a long time before. Or it can

replicate a human experience, because these things are not

alive. They are intelligent, but they're not alive. And that's

the fundamental difference. It's not going to be able to pull in

the things which make us alive, which make us human, and those

are where the sources and the kind of springs of creativity

and imagination come from, which make writing and fiction

worthwhile in itself, in the same way that you know there's

artwork which you can look at it and say, oh my god, it looks

really close to what a human person would create, but the

source of inspiration will never be the same, and ultimately, the

AI won't be able to create, because it's always taking its

cues from everything else that's around it. I spent a long time

thinking about this sort of thing. I think it's like that.

My first response to AI kind of taking strikes that it has was,

was to kind of be a bit worried and be concerned and gone. Oh my

god. This is, this is terrible, and I still think it's terrible,

and I feel, I still feel a sense of threat from that, but I'm

reassured through the eyes of the fact that we as human

beings, our experiences are going to be very difficult to

fully replicate in a meaningful way that AI can replicate. And

that is that is ultimately what we're wanting, despite the fact

that, obviously some studios will just turn out the same

cookie cutter stuff, but that's by A divided by really.

Ultimately, there's diminishing returns that come with that. So,

so yeah, it's scary times, but I do feel there is, there's a

sense of hope that we can still cling on to.

that was Corey Brotherson, do you have an

interdisciplinary life? Because I would love to hear from you,

and maybe we can chat on this podcast that goes with my

newsletter, which is called, Have You Thought About and can

be found via www.dhruti shah.com, please join me next

time for a fun conversation with another guest who likes to mix

up lots of things in their life. Do listen to past episodes and

rate and review the podcast if you've enjoyed it. Thank you to

Rian Shah for the music.