Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Positive tweets for game developers

Social media can be incredibly toxic. In the world of video games this is especially true, with game developers sometimes enduring torrents of abuse from people who either have an axe to grind or just find harassment to be a fun pastime. Recently Colin Moriarty, a former senior editor at IGN and cofounder of Kinda Funny, put out a video detailing some of the cyber bullying experienced by a game developer, a games journalist, and himself. It’s a great insight into what some people in the games industry experience and if you have about 19 minutes to spare it’s definitely worth your time. I’ve embedded the video below.


After watching Colin’s video I was thinking about what, if anything, I could do to help combat the tide of online abuse. At first I was drawing a blank since I’m just one person with zero online influence, but then I got an idea. What I could do is use my Twitter account, which currently is used mostly to observe the tweets of others, and start sending out some encouraging tweets. After finishing each game that I play for Late to the Party I’m going to send a positive tweet to the game’s developer. Even if I end up not liking a game I’ll still send a tweet to thank the developer for making the game. One tweet at time, I’m going to try to put a little positivity out into the online world.

Oh, and if for some reason your curious, my Twitter profile is @ricardopedia.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

No more Five Guys until December

I like Five Guys, but it’s not cheap to eat there and I sometimes walk away from my meal feeling like I shouldn’t have gotten it. After thinking it over I’ve decided that I’m not going to buy another meal from Five Guys until December. An exception might be made if a friend takes me to lunch there or it there’s some sort of social gathering at a Five Guys, but otherwise I’m cutting myself off from those tasty burgers and overly abundant fries for most of this year. As much as I’ll miss it, I suspect both my body and my wallet will be better for this decision.

Monday, January 29, 2018

Post #700 was last Friday

Last Friday I published my 700th post to this website and I’m pleased to say that it was none other than the birth of the next generation of my flagship gaming series, Late to the Party. I do believe a gif is in order for an occasion such as this. Join me today in celebrating this accomplishment, and let’s all look forward to the next 100 posts!

Let's keep running towards Post #800!

Friday, January 26, 2018

Late to the Party - Bound

Hello everyone, and welcome to Late to the Party, a series in which I discuss video games that I’ve finally got around to playing. As much as I enjoy games, it's rare for me to play them right when they are first released. Normally it takes me a anywhere from a few months to a few years to get around to playing to a game, and because of this I've got a considerable backlog of games that I've been meaning to play. From time to time I’m able to chip away at that backlog and whenever I do so I like to write about it in this series. Today I’m going to tell you about Bound, a surreal 3D platformer. This discussion might contain some minor spoilers but not anything too big.


Thursday, January 25, 2018

Late to the Party, Season 2 - The Struggle

Author’s Note: This post was written about two weeks ago.

I’m a little stressed out about how I’m going to write the debut of Late to the Party, Season 2, but I really shouldn’t be. In Season 1 it took me quite a few entries to find my footing and Season 2 will likely be the same. I just have to fight the battle, over and over again, until it becomes more of a dance than a desperate struggle. With that in mind, the first batch of games I’ve got lined up for Season 2 are all shorter games that shouldn’t take too long to beat even though I have a full-time job and other life responsibilities. I’ll train myself on these smaller games, and by the time I get to the big ones I’ll (hopefully) be ready.

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Late to the Party, Season 2 - The Format

I’ve already finished the first game of the second season of Late to the Party, but at the time that I’m writing this post I still haven’t fully figured out how I want this new season of Late to the Party to differ from the old one. The approximate format of Season 1 was something like this for most of the entries:

Opening
My background with the game
Overview of the game’s story
Thoughts on the story
Thoughts on gameplay, game world
Thoughts on graphics, performance, and audio
Notable criticisms
Overall verdict
Closing

This format worked well in that it allowed me to neatly organize my opinions into separate paragraphs, but it also made for a rigid and inflexible way of writing about games. Much like the Greek phalanx, it was strong in some ways but weak in others. If possible I’d like to try to modify this format in Season 2 and find a way to more freely flow between the various aspects of the game that I want to talk about, and maybe incorporate some of the more personal elements I introduced in Replaying the Classics. I’d also like to add another segment or two to the discussion. Right now the addition I have in mind is some sort of brief overview of where the game came from.

Should I also add some type of score at the end of these writing pieces? That debate has been raging in my head for weeks now. I intentionally avoided putting any scores in Season 1 because I didn’t think of those writing pieces as game reviews, even though they had just about all the trappings of a review. Now that I’m at the cusp of Season 2 I’m split between the part of me that wants to give it a try and the part of me that thinks game scores are a gross oversimplification of a reviewer’s thoughts on a game. Maybe I should write up the score of a game and just see how it looks with the rest of the writing piece.

One thing that will absolutely remain the same from Season 1 to Season 2, however, is the variability of the length of the writing pieces. This was a good choice back then and I’m sticking with it now. With some games I need a few thousand words to state everything I want to say, while with others I only need a few hundred.

Monday, January 22, 2018

Improving Mass Effect 3 - The No Budget Option

While I was proofreading last week’s two writing pieces on improving Mass Effect 3, I realized there was in fact a third option for changing the game. This method would require no budget at all, aside from whatever it costs to have an intern write and publish a single sentence online. I call this the No Budget Option. To improve Mass Effect 3 for practically no money, all developer Bioware would have to do is confirm the Indoctrination Theory.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

The Last Jedi and my view of Star Wars

On Monday I laid out some of the things I found troublesome with The Last Jedi and on Tuesday I listed a few things I thought the movie did well. After reading both of those posts it would be natural to ask where my Star Wars fan level currently rests. As I said in Monday’s post, I walked out of the movie theater still a Star Wars fan after both times I watched the film. My love of Star Wars has managed to survive everything that both George Lucas and Disney have done to the series, so a single enjoyable but problematic film isn’t going to turn me off to Star Wars. At the same time, however, I can’t deny that I’m a little less optimistic then I was in the aftermath of The Force Awakens and Rogue One. Despite it’s flaws, The Force Awakens had me convinced that a bright future was possible for Star Wars and I had high hopes for where the series would go. Rogue One was a good movie and affirmed this positive outlook, but now The Last Jedi has dimmed the light a little. I still have hopes for whatever Episode 9 turns out to be—it’s just that those hopes are a little tempered now. Next in line for Star Wars is the Han Solo movie. Hopefully that doesn’t cause my Star Wars fandom to fade a little more.

Friday, January 12, 2018

2018: Late to the Party, Season 2

If there’s one thing I’m excited for regarding this year’s writings, it’s the second season of Late to the Party. I’ve got a lot of games lined up for playing and writing about, and next week I think I’ll be publishing a more extensive post with both the games that are currently on the list as well as some thoughts on how Season 2 will compare with Season 1. I hope you’re looking forward to this new season as much as I am.

Thursday, January 11, 2018

2018: The Topics

At the moment I’m content for my 2018 writings to be on same topics that were common in 2017. Gaming will remain the most frequent thing I write about, with life stories, travel-related writings, and various musings also being prominent. For better or for worse political posts are bound to show up from time to time, though I don’t know yet if 2018 will see me dive deeper into the political ocean or try to wade my way back to the shore.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

2018: Changing the publishing schedule

Since 2016 I’ve kept to my commitment to publish on this website five times a week, Monday through Friday. In 2018 that schedule might change. While I certainly could keep to the current schedule for 2018, for the last few months I’ve had this nagging feeling that it’s been slowing me down in other areas of my life that I want focus more on. I don’t want to stop publishing on this website, but I might need to scale things back a little. What I’m thinking of doing is adjusting the schedule to publishing three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ll give this a try for a few weeks later this year (probably February or March) and see how it goes. Whether I go to a new publishing schedule or stick with the old one, I’ll make an announcement so that everyone knows what to expect.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

2018: Changing the publishing time

Some of you might have noticed that in 2017 I started regularly publishing my writing pieces at 6:00pm Mountain Time. This was done in an effort to increase my professionalism by forcing me to have posts ready before an exact deadline, and it also was meant to give the audience a sense of stability in that they could always count on having something to read at the same time every day. For 2018 I’m thinking that I ought to move the publishing time forward to somewhere in the morning. Maybe 7:00am or 8:00am. You might have noticed I did that last week. Another idea I had was maybe setting the publishing time to noon. You might have noticed that I’m doing that this week. I’ll give both morning and noon a try for several weeks, and by sometime in February it should be clear which one I’ve settled on.

Monday, January 8, 2018

2018: Where is the new website?

It’s coming, I promise. I hope to have an announcement on that later this month.

Friday, January 5, 2018

2017’s Posts: My Picks

I published 235 writing pieces in the year 2017. Naturally, some of them stand out from the others, and today I’m going to give several of my personal picks for posts that I think deserve to be highlighted, either for serious or silly reasons. Below are my selections, in no particular order, with a short description of each writing piece. Clicking the title of each post will take you to it.


Inauguration Day
A collection of my thoughts on the day Donald Trump became president. It’s interesting to read these and think about where we are now versus where we were about a year ago.

Replaying the Classics
Ok, so this isn’t an individual writing piece, but I’m going to highlight all of Replaying the Classics since it, along with a few others, was one of my flagship writing series for 2017. For those that don’t know, Replaying the Classics are my posts about slightly older games that I replayed.

Milo Yiannopoulos
I had heard of Milo Yiannopolous prior to 2017, but I didn’t really know much about him. After the Berkley riots I set out to investigate and find out for myself who he really was.

E3 2017 Conference Recaps (part 1 and part 2)
I got over the announcements from E3 2017 that stood out in my mind.

Wolfhounds
My grandfather doesn’t talk much about his time in the Korean War, but before leaving for Asia I was able to chat with him and learned some new details about his time in the Army.

Game Changers
Some of the games that changed the way I thought about gaming.

Call of Duty: WWII
My initial thoughts on Call of Duty: WWII after its initial reveal.

Why can’t we have both conversations?
We’re not doing ourselves any favors by pretending there’s no conversation to be had about these two issues.

Sargon of Akkad
Similar to my Milo writing piece, this post was about me learning more about a popular Youtube personality.

Ima Fire Tiger
2017 saw the birth of my latest alter-ego: Ima Fire Tiger. I only dedicated five posts to him this year, but all of them were fun to write.

Random Other Gaming Awards
After announcing my GOTY 2016 I wanted to also hand out a few other awards for memorable gaming experiences in 2016.

Destiny 2 Beta Recap
As a fan of Destiny, I didn’t skip the opportunity to try out Destiny 2’s beta and afterwards I wrote up my thoughts on it.

Regarding that Google memo
After James Damore’s memo on Google’s ideological echo chamber went viral, I decided to read it for myself rather than just believe the headlines.

Top 10 PS4/Xbox One games
Because it’s fun to make lists and I hadn’t gotten around to it, I created my own Top 10 list of PS4 and Xbox One games that I had played so far. For a quick description and explanation of why each game made the list, see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Asia 2017
Stories from my trip to Japan and Korea.

Do you need to be good at video games to write or talk about them professionally?
My take on the ongoing debate regarding the relationship between a person’s skill in gaming and their ability to speak about it on a professional level.

Thursday, January 4, 2018

2017: Political Writings

I never wanted this to be a political blog, and I still don’t want this to be a political blog, but one of the things that became clear to me in 2017 is that there’s no getting away from writing about politics. As much as I don’t like it, I’ve come to accept that I’m now about waist-deep in the pool and I can’t get out easily.

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

2017: The Tenacity

Without a doubt writing for this website in 2017 was harder to consistently produce than in 2016. Less free time, more job stress, an international trip, and a lot of other things going on in my life came together to pump the brakes on my writing career. In spite of all of that, I’m glad that I can look back at 2017 and say that I kept to my writing commitment, even if at many times of the year it felt like I was just treading water and not really getting anywhere. 2017 was a year of tenacity. Sometimes all a writer can do is just keep fighting in the stubborn belief that one day all the agonizing, typing, and editing will lead to vindication.

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

2017’s Final Word Count

With 2017 now in the books I want to spend the rest of this week looking back at the preceding year and then next week looking at the year ahead. Today I’m proud to announce the final word count on this website for 2017. The total number of words published here in 2017 was:

78,069

That’s only about half as many words published as last year, but completely within my expectations given the differences in the content being published in 2016 versus what was published in 2017. In 2016 I had a lot more posts with over a thousand words due to series like Late to the Party and the travelogue posts from Europe 2015, as well as a period of unemployment that gave me the time needed to generate longer writing pieces on a regular basis. 2017, by contrast, was marked by long stretches of being busy with life and a trip to Asia during which I didn’t publish often. Replaying the Classics did help bump up the number of longer posts in 2017, but I didn’t have the time to replay and write about as many games as I did when I was working through Late to the Party in 2016.

Regardless of the reason for the number, I believe in celebrating all victories, big and small, and on this website most of you know that I commonly do so with gifs. To commemorate 2017’s final word count, I present something that’s long overdue on this website: a Star Wars-themed gif.


Monday, January 1, 2018

Happy New Year 2018!

It’s not every year that New Year’s Day happens to fall on a Monday, but it feels really fitting whenever it does. Even though the first day of the week is technically Sunday, for me Monday always felt like the start of a new week and beginning a new year on a Monday means a perfect synch between the energy of the calendar year and the energy of the week. The old year and week are behind and brand new ones are now before us.

I don’t know what your thoughts are on the upcoming year, but even though I don’t know how 2018 is going to play out for our country and planet, for some reason I’ve got a hunch that 2018 could be a good one for me personally. What do you say we all commit to making 2018 a great year for us individually? Maybe that’s the key to making 2018 a great year for our nation and world.