Interview: Author of the End Online series

D. Wolfin (the End Online series) is a young author with an ambition for fantasy and the new litRPG. He has always been an avid reader of the genres, and finally decided to start writing works of his very own. Wolfin was born and still lives in Australia. He has many dreams of travelling the world, pen and paper in hand with the wind at his back, but such dreams are currently being used for creating his stories.

MDB: Why gaming? What prompted you to dream up a virtual world?

D. Wolfin: Gaming has always been a passion of mine, especially those of the role-playing genre. I expanded from actually playing those games to reading when I discovered online series, translations mostly, based on virtual role playing worlds and others with systems similar to the games I so much love. I became engrossed in these stories and quickly read through a large number of them. It got to the point where I had read everything on my immediate reading list, and couldn't find anything else out there that was to my taste. It was at that point, during late 2014, that I thought "what story could be more to my tastes than my own?" and began the series we now know as End Online. I already had the virtual world in my mind, as it was an imaginary game that I wanted to play the most, all I had to do was create the characters a write out their journey as the story.

Best gaming fiction writer Michael Atamanov

Michael Atamanov was born in 1975 in Grozny, Chechnia. He excelled at school, winning numerous national science and writing competitions. Having graduated with honors, he entered Moscow University to study material engineering. Soon, however, he had no home to return to: their house was destroyed during the first Chechen campaign. Michael's family fled the war, taking shelter with some relatives in Stavropol Territory in the South of Russia. Then one day unexpectedly for himself he started writing fairy tales and science fiction novels. For several years, his audience consisted of only one person: Michael's elder son. Then, at the end of 2014 he decided to upload one of his manuscripts to a free online writers resource. Readers liked it and demanded a sequel. Michael uploaded another book, and yet another, his audience growing as did his list. It was his readers who helped Michael hone his writing style. He finally had the breakthrough he deserved when the Moscow-based EKSMO - the biggest publishing house in Europe - offered him a contract for his first and consequent books.

MDB: Why gaming? What prompted you to dream up a virtual world?

Michael Atamanov: For quite some time, I’d been working in genres which were borderline LitRPG. My entire Gray Raven fantasy series was in fact conceived as a MMORPG storyline complete with quests and leveling scenarios. Still, once the publisher had accepted it, he asked me to delete all gaming references. My Quit the Game novel is in fact a cross between an Eve Online fanfic and a space-opera LitRPG. In it, the MC realizes he’s stuck in an online game - but unlike other players he can’t quit it because he is in fact a piece of software. So no wonder I began writing my next project Perimeter Defense. Sector Eight as purely LitRPG.

Vasily Mahanenko, author of mind-blowing LitRPG novels

Vasily Mahanenko is a fantasy author working in the new genre of LitRPG - the MMO-based fantasy and sci fi. His Way of the Shaman series took Russian literature by storm in 2012.

MDB: Why gaming? What prompted you to dream up a virtual world?

VM: My love for computer games decided my choice of writing genre. You can still find me online in the world’s most popular MMORPG game (I’m not going to plug it in here but everybody knows which one I mean - this absolutely brilliant piece of computer art). Seven years of playing online couldn’t but leave their mark. So one day I realized I wanted to be heard. I wanted to communicate my own ideas, experiences, dreams and desires to the world. I just hope that I at least partially succeeded.

Interview with Gary Cooper (the Omegaverse series)

Author of the famous Omegaverse series G.R. Cooper is a twenty year veteran of the game industry, mostly spent in the trenches of massively multi-player online game development. He's done a little of everything; producing, level design, AI scripting, community management, customer support - even a little 3D modeling - but he considers himself a game designer at heart.

MDB: Why gaming? What prompted you to dream up a virtual world?

GC: It's been one of my jobs for the past twenty years. I started work at one of the pioneers in online gaming, Kesmai Studios, in 1995 because I was so involved in the "virtual" worlds of the era and knew deep down that it was the beginning of something big. My career almost since college has been in developing online gaming. Sometime around the year 2000 I began designing my "dream" game - that game is very much like the game described in the first three volumes of the Omegaverse series. Given that it seems unlikely that I'll ever have the opportunity to make the game, I thought it natural to at least use what I'd designed to, hopefully, entertain some folks in another way. When I discovered LitRPG, it all kind of fell into place. One of the tools a game designer uses is called a "use case". That's where the designer describes, in prose, what the player will do and how they will interact with the game world as well as other players. It helps us to visualize the activities from a player's point of view and is a very good way to discover problems with the design. When I first read D. Rus's Alterworld, something in my head clicked - a lot of what he'd written was much like you'd read for a game design use case. When I discovered that there was an audience for that kind of writing, it just felt like a natural fit with what I'd been doing for years.

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