<3 Gaming

If you look out the window of your vehicle on your way into work today you may notice that there are in fact pigs flying. It all started on Friday the 19th when my wife and I decided to stop by the local AT&T store to check out the iPhone that had recently gone on sale. After about an hour in of some healthy debating, figuring, and some decent salesmanship on the part of the guy helping us, we left the store with an iPhone each and a huge phone bill for next month. It was around this time that we also saw the first delicious piece of bacon flutter off into the great blue yonder. Since then the number of flying mammals has only increased as my attachment the iPhone strengthens.

Here is a short list of reasons why this phone is now the coolest thing in my pocket.
1. A mobile SSH client
2. I now own an mp3 player
3. I pretend to wave a lightsaber around whenever the urge strikes me
5. I can check my email/weather/time of day/schedule/shop on amazon/learn Japanese
6. I can do any of the above anywhere I get cell phone reception on a tiny device that fits comfortably in my pocket.

You may guess that this is my first time owning a phone that has a feature other than just calling people and storing phone numbers, and you would be right. However I think that I held out for the appropriate length of time since the iPhone is now affordable and has basically taken the place of the Dell mini I was hoping to purchase for my new mobile computing needs (sorry Dell). With the added bonus of using cell towers for data if needed, being smaller, and having the same amount of storage… it’s definitely better.

As for the drawbacks, besides the huge cell phone bill we will have every month people are sure to call me an Apple’s consumer bitch… Also my thumbs get sore from playing tap tap revenge 2 for too long.

Sometimes I think to myself “Whatever happened to that guy I used to pwn noobs with on <insert game name here>?” More often than not the thoughts are just a passing wisp in the wind of my mind’s wandering. However today I had a conversation with a friend who made me stop and ponder more thoughtfully about it.

If I take a look back at my history of gaming I realize that a large majority of it was very social. It seems that the stigma of a gamer being typecast as the loner who sits on his computer has not ever applied to me (ok there was a short bit of time when this was true) or maybe not even the majority of current gamers. On top of that it seems that the social experiences I have had with gaming may have even furthered my desire to continue playing.

When I was twelve I lived in a small city. My brother and I were too young to stay at home by ourselves so we would be dropped off at a day care between the end of school and parents finishing work. This day care happened to be run by a woman who had three sons, the oldest of which was only a year or two older than me. This guy was the definition of cool, for me. We would spend hours watching him play Final Fantasy 3 (the US SNES version) or take turns amongst the three of us on bouts of Tekken 2. It was then that video games became something more to me than just another game. It wasn’t just the fact that the games were interesting, but I genuinely had tons of fun playing them with other people.

The next big step for me was when I hit my freshman year of college. Up to that point my gaming was still fairly social among friends who I went to school with. We would play Diablo 2 (LAN), Starcraft (LAN), or Goldeneye. With college however came the internet. A commodity previously sparse at my home due to dial-up was now overflowing from my cat5 cable eager to feed my newly built computer’s hunger.

At the time I was playing Warcraft 3, but fell into Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and even a bit of Natural Selection. I remember campus wide CS and Halo matches, and when nothing was going on I would hop on to bnet and play some WC3 with the new friends I had made there. It was almost total immersion. Then my junior year of college came, and probably the biggest social game in history of video games was released that winter. World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is the best video game ever made to date. Even though now I could care less to play the game at all I say this because the game is so diverse and all encompassing that you can spend months and days playing the game, and have fun the whole time. I still manage to get sucked back in whenever a new expansion comes out. Put bluntly fun was had on large proportions, and it was with tons of other people. During my time with WoW I experienced quite a bit. I remember in Vanilla that upon reaching 60 and gearing up a bit that I somehow managed to get into the Death and Taxes with the help of a friend. At the time I had no idea of the scope of what that meant. I just knew that they were suppose to be the best guild on my server, it was only after joining did I realize that these guys were somewhat of a big deal even for WoW standards. My time with Death and Taxes taught me many things. Most importantly how important organization is in team gaming. I don’t think any of my time spent with any other raiding guild has been nearly as successful in organization as DnT was. People not only knew their jobs but were able to listen to and respond to each others actions with amazing precision. It was probably the first time I had ever felt I was in over my head yet there I was often rolling as the only druid through Molten Core progress raids and holding my own… I digress.

The realization of social gaming has become apparent in almost any video game you can pick up these days. With services like Steam and Xbox Live its almost impossible to find a game that is solitary even if it is single player. If gaming is not already a part of everyday modern life then it surely will be in the near future when you see what is knocking on innovations door. With new social gaming comes new people to play with. Sadly some of my old internet friends have become lost to the waves time, either because I have forgotten their names myself, or the only means of communication I had with them has been severed. I am grateful to have been able to play with a very diverse and fun crowd of people and hopefully will be able to continue doing so for a long time into the future.