Before she started writing video games, Emma Kidwell loved Twilight fanfiction. Her “bad, self-insert” stories found a home on DeviantArt, an online community where people posted fan art, original work, and so much more. “The low barrier of entry made it very accessible,” Kidwell says.
Her writing turned into role-playing in forums, and Twilight fandom gave way to a love of video games like Mass Effect. Today, Kidwell is a writer for Firaxis Games and a rising star in the world of game narrative. Her work includes Hindsight, Borderlands 4, Life Is Strange 2, and Sid Meier’s Civilization VII; she’s been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 and The Game Awards’ Future Class of 2023.
This week, she’s hosting the annual Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. All of that is happening alongside her talk about how writing in fandoms as a kid helped her write DLC for Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
Writing fanfiction, it turns out, isn’t so different from writing licensed characters. “I’m role-playing when I’m writing Marvel IP for Firaxis,” Kidwell says. “Fanfiction gave me that foundation to build off of.”
Fanfiction has often been considered a lower form of writing, as either self indulgent or outrageously erotic, the sort of work one does in secret. In the internet culture pantheon, few fanfic writers have ever achieved fame, and those that have sometimes do so for the salacious nature of their work. “My Immortal,” an infamous Harry Potter fanfic, is still referenced in interviews even today. Writers such as E.L. James, who created the Fifty Shades series (originally a Twilight fanfic), however, have begun to turn their work into something profitable.
Others, like Kidwell, have turned it into a runway for their careers. “I think because of fanfiction’s relationship to marginalized communities, it wasn’t initially seen as being a valid form of writing,” Kidwell says. Clearly, that’s wrong. The gaming and fanfic communities make for a harmonious marriage. The story-driven nature of most games means plenty of fodder for fans craving new narratives, but writers on well-known sites like Archive of Our Own can—and will turn—anything into an original story. Even Tetris.
“Fanfiction is your sandbox,” Kidwell says. “You get to play. There are no rules. You get comfortable playing around with characters that aren’t yours and doing whatever the hell you want with them.”
For Midnight Suns, Kidwell was given four characters to choose from, including Deadpool and Storm. Whatever she wrote would be based on the comic versions of the characters, not their cinematic counterparts. While researching both characters, she had a revelation: “This is really similar to what I would think about when creating an original character in a role-playing setting. How would this character fit in with other established characters?”
Writers in Kidwell’s position still have to stick to the rules of the franchise, including its story canon. That hasn’t kept Kidwell from being able to tell the stories she wants. “I think a big, common misconception with IP writing is that it’s super restrictive,” Kidwell says. “But I think there’s a lot of creative freedom within certain boundaries because you get to inject a little piece of yourself into these characters. It’s just kind of like a puzzle: figure out how you can do it authentically and how you can do it in a way that makes sense for the game.”
Kidwell still role-plays in her spare time. Right now, she’s deep into the Dragon Age community. “I see IP writing as kind of the in-between,” she says of fanfiction and fiction. It’s a natural next step in role-playing: “I’m just doing it in a professional setting now.”
