I just finished Alan Wake this morning. Unlike what you’d expect, I am neither shaking with fear nor pumping my fists in victory. Instead there’s a lump in my throat, and my mind is vibrating with a creative intensity that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in a long time. I feel like I’ve been hit by a train. Like someone reached into my head to show me a place that I’d forgotten I’d loved. That metaphorical darkness, you see, is an old friend of mine.

Alan Wake is already one of my favorite games. That sounds overzealous, even to me - it hasn’t even been out for a week. And I could probably think of a few games that either have more variety or less jarring interface elements. But this, right here, is the only game I’ve ever played that speaks to me, as a writer and as a person. Maybe I’m a tad impressionable because I’ve recently fallen in love (hey, what’s this cat doing here, and what was he doing in this bag?), but something came unglued in my head the moment those credits rolled. Somewhere at the bottom of a very dark place, like a sunken skyscraper, a dead spark reignited. A familiar voice I’d forgotten for years spoke to me once again. My stories woke up.

I’ve long believed that stories are sentient in their own way, composed as they are of hopes and dreams drawn from a writer’s life and the lives of those he loves. Like Hari Kelvin in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, a story is made of remembered fragments of real people. And like those people, it has aspirations and desires of its own. It wants to be free. It wants to be felt. It wants to grow and evolve within the minds of readers, viewers, players; to love them as the writer loved it. Writers are conduits. Stories have a power that is uniquely their own, and all they need from us is permission.

I know only a handful of writers - the likes of King and Gaiman - who have professed such a belief. I thought it was a quirky little thing that I could never fully describe, not with all the words in time and space. And for reasons too numerous and silly to name, that force has been dormant in me for the last few years. I hesitated to give it permission, feeling inadequate and unprepared as I often did. Imagine my surprise to see Sam Lake and Remedy Entertainment tear the thing from me and lay it bare on a 32-inch LCD before my eyes.

You want to know what it’s like to write uncontrollably? To become utterly lost in your own mind, holding reason aloft like a torch as you rummage for words in a storm of impulses? To claw your way back from the brink of something that’s too keen to be madness, too wild to be sanity? To climb from an abyss unknown to all but the tattered host of poets and junkies, clutching to your chest the only thing that’s worth risking your own mind: a tiny scrap of truth? If you want to know what that feels like, read my last post on videogame method acting and then play Alan Wake.

Ultimately, though, this isn’t about the game. The game only loosened the rusted cogs. What matters is that the machinery has lurched back to life. Coughing and sputtering, as a disused machine will do (my adjectives are still out of control, you’ll notice), but alive and vibrant nonetheless (see?).

The voice of urgency has returned as well. I don’t know when it began or whence it came; maybe from an old friend, or a lover, or something I heard once in the distance when I was a boy in the forest. It’s the voice of a woman whispering in my ear from a million years hence, speaking with restrained boldness the only words that truly matter to a writer: finish it. I don’t know who she is. I doubt I’ve modeled her after anyone in particular. But she is writing. She is storytelling. She has been at humanity’s side since the first legend was told. And I hadn’t heard from her in years. This morning, over the shrill whine of my Xbox’s optical drive, she spoke those words again. And here I am, banging out my disjointed thoughts at 7AM in the vain hope that, once I get some sleep, everything I write here will still make some kind of metaphorical sense and not sound like grandiose drivel.

Ultimately though, I think it’s pretty damn wonderful that a videogame did this to me. Bravo, Remedy Entertainment, and thank you.