Philip Hough, a freshman English major at Hardin-Simmons University from Garland has throughout his life developed many unique passions, hobbies and goals that continue to drive his motivations and help make him into the person that he is today.
Growing up was relatively stationary for Hough. “I think I can count on one hand, maybe just barely two, the number of times I’ve been out of state. I haven’t been out of the country at all. I lived right down the street from a mall I’d walk to every so often,” Hough said.
Recently, Hough developed some unique passions and hobbies consisting of music, gaming and writing. While Hough does not play any instruments, he has a genuine passion for music and has several different bands that he enjoys. “I listen to an inordinate amount of music, I suppose you could call that a passion of sorts at this point, even though I can neither actually write nor play any. Listening to music and talking about music, [are some] of my favorite things. The Dear Hunter are my favorite band and I’ll talk about them to no end. Right now, I’ve also been listening to a lot of Sleep Token.”
In addition to his love for music, Hough thoroughly enjoys playing video games such as D&D, Minecraft and Ultrakill. “I prefer running games of that nature, a process that pretty much consists of developing a world, characters, plot, etc. for the players to run around in and explore. I used to write prose fiction for a while, but once I started writing for D&D and other tabletop role playing games (RPGs), I haven’t really looked back,” Hough said.
Hough’s love for “story-like” video games is evident in his passion for his future career. He hopes to do something related to storytelling. “Ideally, I want to get into immersive, experimental storytelling: the idea being to tell stories in a way that makes people feel less like consumers of the story and more like participants in it.” This has been inspired by various places such as “Galaxy’s Edge at Disney and the Wizarding World at Universal,” however Hough wants to “get into it with less of a ‘sell merch’ focus and more of a narrative focus.” Hough said.
Hough’s passion for writing and storytelling is evident not only in his goals but also in his hobbies. According to Hough, “People connect with stories differently when they feel like they actually played a crucial part in making them turn out the way they do, and that’s an incredibly powerful force that’s not quite being used to its full potential yet.”
