Welcome to Game-oscopy. This is my first attempt at writing and maintaining my own blog, and my second attempt at writing for a blog at all. I should have my head examined for doing this as this is a ridiculous time in my life to take on the task of providing content for a potential audience which I might never even get in the first place. If you know me or have read my previous blog, then you know that not only do I have my own responsibilities that I, just like every other adult, have to attend to, I also have a young daughter sprouting up right before my eyes, who has just started attending school. You might think that would free up some time for some of my extra curricular activities, but furthermore to my duties at work and at home, I have also started attending school. I'm going only part time, yet it is still a significant portion of the 168 living hours I get every week.
However, I still have all of this stuff and all of these opinions inside my brain begging to be let out and put into words on the web. Hence the formation of this blog. I have been meaning to start this for quite a few months now and am finally getting to it after hyping it to some of my friends and being pressured into it by others. And with it I have a few objectives:
- I have been a gamer since about first grade to the disappointment of my parents. I was brought up in a household that not only dismissed video games as a childish waste of time, but resented them as evil brain melters with no value to them in any aspect. When I was a freshman in high school I decided to make a plea to my parents to finally allow a video game system in the house. I outlined a list of ten arguments for my case and after some deliberation I was granted permission to bring my own Nintendo 64 into the house. Yet it was never fully accepted as a viable form of entertainment in our home and to this day my father asserts that it was a mistake to transform our house into a gamer's house. So this blog is an attempt to legitimize the medium of video games as something more than just a hobby or a pastime. There is some value to the mindless catharsis that some video games offer when you've had a stressful day and you want to blow off some steam by crashing cars or shooting zombies, but I support the notion that video games warrant careful scrutiny from certain viewpoints similarly to fine cinema or literature.
- My second objective serves as the counterpart to my first objective. Hopefully by legitimizing my favorite entertainment medium to naysayers, I might inspire someone who has never-or almost never-picked up a controller and put serious time into playing a game to do so. I've heard it said on some of the outlets of video game news and opinion to which I subscribe that Angry Birds is now considered to be the "gateway game" for many people who never considered themselves gamers before. I disagree with the notion that Angry Birds or Cut the Rope (or any other enormously popular, easily accessible game) can turn a non-gamer into a gamer. No one who is not a gamer, in my opinion, is likely to move over to playing Half Life 2 after becoming engrossed in Fruit Ninja or Rock Band. The casual gamer* will more than likely be overwhelmed by some of the deeper, more rich experiences found in gaming's vast catalog. This is a discussion for another blog entry, but to put it simply, I would like to share my experiences in games with those who might otherwise be put off or even frightened of trying something with some depth to it.
- I have to admit a purely selfish motivation behind my third objective. I would like this blog to serve as a companion to a podcast I intend on releasing. I used to do a podcast with my dear friend Joe Locastro and I loved every second of it. I have always wanted to fantasize that I was a talk radio personality and podcasting was the perfect outlet for me. I miss it a lot and I know Joe does as well. And most of the deepest, most stimulating conversations I've had about games have been with Joe. I want to resuscitate the dynamic duo that we had and bring our particular brand of intellectualism back to the Internet airwaves. My other reasoning behind the podcast is to fill a void that I have observed in the video game podcasting community. Most of the gaming podcasts I have found talk about current and upcoming games from the perspective of players who are anxious and anticipatory of ones they are interested in playing. I have to give respect to Michael Abbott of Brainy Gamer for filling this void somewhat (in fact when I was brainstorming ideas for the name of this blog "Brainy Gamer" was one of my ideas. I found out that it was already taken.) for though he primarily focuses on current, recent, or upcoming games, he does an excellent job of analyzing them on deeper levels than "I really like it," or "I'm really looking forward to it." In planning this undertaking I was also planning on calling out Gary Whitta, Kris Graft, and Colin Campbell of the formerly former Game Theory podcast as a team that had also partially filled the intellectual game discussion void but Game Theory has returned.
- I am somewhat conflicted about my fourth objective which dovetails into my fifth objective. I want to steer this blog away from doing reviews for a few reasons. Primarily because it's pointless. Not only will I not be able to influence anyone's decision whether or not to buy a game, but I will not be able compete with the entrenched review outlets for readership. Why would anyone come to read my review of a game when there are already dozens of reviews out there by more famous game critics which might say the same thing as my review anyway? Another reason I don't want to be known as a review site is that I have personal objectives to the concept of video game reviewing in the first place. Most things that people write and call reviews for video games are actually just essays detailing their personal opinions about the individual games and the genres into which they are classified. Not to belabor this notion but the whole business of reviewing video games is fundamentally broken.
- Having said that, however, it would be nice if enough people noticed my writings and opinions here that I might be able to recoup some of the time I've spent putting this blog together monetarily or even to earn a position as a regular writer for a proper video game journalism site. It has always been an ambition of mine to write about video games since, as mentioned before, I have many opinions about the games and things that other bloggers/writers say about them and I almost always have something to say in response. So my fifth objective is to use this blog as a platform for a)getting my opinions out there, and b)building a portfolio of material that I can use as a sort of resume if I ever apply to a site looking for new writers. And in the interest of full disclosure, a new feature of blogger.com is to include a link to Amazon.com for any product being written about. I plan on utilizing this feature and would hope that my readers would use those links to buy the games about which I write if they find themselves intrigued by what I say.
Stay tuned!
Sincerely,
Calvin
