Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Give me three bucks and you can see the rest of this post.. .. Just Kidding.. Never pay for my writing, I'm a hack. Back on 10 /26/2013 I wrote about Microtransactions ruining my love of video games. To this day that's still my 4th most viewed post on this blog. It's even more viewed than my post about  Trials of passage in Orc society, which for the record, no one read. This is brief post is in effect a revisit of the subject, a part duex. The duce. In rereading my old post I realized that on one hand it was completely disorganized and  scatterbrained. On the other hand  it was also quite naive. Three years have gone by since that post and no I have not given up online gaming. Microtransactions have not gone anywhere, and it hasn't  seemed to have made any great difference to my habits. Or for that matter how much I spend on electronic games. Then two games come along that seem  to be tied at the hip. Two games, while very different still  share enough si...

This ones not about “The Shards of Thimbral” Lets Just take an Off topic side trip for a second. Besides it's Sunday and I'm not due for another post until tomorrow. I want to talk about the new generation of video game systems. I am also going to do so with out ever giving an opinion on which I think is better or which one a person should run out and drop their hot $500 plus dollars on. That's up to you. I have had some thoughts on this recently along the lines of, “Should a 38 year old man even be considering this video game stuff.” with the present crop of games, I'm not 100% sure I should be. I realize a lot of the gaming industry is trying to find what's going to hold people of my age group, what I call the “original video game generation.” More adult themed games and stories percolate around the surface of gaming every now and then, and designers show that a game system can do more than Call O' Duty. It can also do more involving games and apparently th...

Microtransactions are destroying my love of video games. (kind of a bonus post not related to the rest of the blog. I'm not going to announce this one around, so if you are reading this, Thank you.) I am a gamer of that original gamer generation. I'm 38, I remember playing pinball and Pac man in the arcade. I owned an Atari 2600, even Pong was part of my early years. I did not have every system through the years mostly for financial reasons, but once I had my own cash I have had the systems I have wanted and played the games I have wanted to play. So that's a solid 20 + years of steady plying. However this also puts me in a group where games are still just games. To some of the the younger gaming generation games are the movies, the competition, and the culture. Halo is their star wars, call of duty is there Monday night NFL, and they seem to be willing to spend cash to get ahead. Here is my gripe: It used to be that when you bought a game you got whatever was on the dis...