Hello world!

Hello all, and welcome to my blog!

Well, my blog-type thing that I'm going to be using for my own purposes more than anything else, but it's defined as a blog none-the-less.




I've started this, as well as 2 other blogs, for the purposes of my own cataloguing and analysis of Games. This particular Blog, "The Life and Times of a Gamer Geek" or "LTGG" for short is more a personal blog, hence why my first post has gone here. Ultimately, anything that can't be categorised as "how I play games" or "why I enjoy games" but will still likely be game related is to go here.

My other 2 blogs are more academic in my approach to games, both as a consumer, a fanatic and hopefully also a future developer/designer. I'll no doubt be doing entry-esque posts on those very soon so you can head over to them at the following links, "What Makes Games Good?" and The Way I Play.


And now, a bit about myself.

I'm a chubby (once atheletic) 20-something attending Oxford Brookes University, studying Computer Science. If you haven't heard of Brookes, don't feel bad, I hadn't either.

Brookes is the "other" university. When you've got Oxford proper with its many many colleges and fantastic records, you're never really going to compare. Sad fact is Brookes isn't a bad uni, it's just not Oxford, and if you compare anything by their standards you're going to end up feeling a little crappy.

I went to school in north-west london, where I made my first truly adult decision in flunking out of school, well, not quite. I wanted to go out and do something, most probably work, but instead my parents were afraid I'd waste my life. Instead I wasted a good independant school education in a careless act of rebellion. Irony is I was always going to end up at University, whether I'd worked a year, hated it and gone to college and then to Uni, it was always a part of my destiny.


Obviously, I have a love of computer games. I believe they could be a truly interactive artform, where your decisions can craft everything from the direct gameplay experience to the very plot itself. No other media or indeed medium has that.


I'm fed up of stereotypes in games, and the blatant adolescent pandering that existis in some character designs.

Currently, as it's a new year, I'm working on losing some weight and establishing myself as a novice game designer. Whether it be by myself or in a team, hard-coding C# or using a basic Wisywig tool, I know that a good game experience comes from the narrative, mechanics and gameplay of a game, over fancy graphics and contrived stories.

Well, I think that'll do as a first post. I'll starting thinking about my two other blogs in the meantime and get to work on those soon, as well as giving this whole blog a nice coat of paint.