One Reason I Play Videogames

I actually wrote this back in January as a note on Facebook, but it kind of matches my mood tonight. Therefore, I thought I would post it here.

Sunday, January 27, 2008 at 1:23 am:
So I think I finally found a reason for why I play videogames as much as I do. As most know, I'm a very mental sort of person. Everything I do is a thinking game. Makes it nice when come test time, but when I want to kick back and relax, it can be annoying. My brain never really shuts down even if I want to. Videogames though allow me to completely space-off for extended periods of time. I'm not thinking about anything, worrying, or trying to solve a problem. It's just playing a game. Most people probably won't get this, but that's ok. Most people don't get me. Anyways, it's 1:30am on a Saturday night and I really don't feel like thinking about shit anymore. So I'm going to go play some games for awhile until I'm tired enough to pass out.

COG Developers

As some of you may remember, I wrote a blog a few weeks back about starting to work on a new website. Well, Champions of Gaming (COG) is officially under development. I am working on it with Mark Fedor (papasmurf786) and Chris Tuvera (eviltim11). They are both people I play videogames on a fairly regular basis. Mark I have only known for the last two and a half years as I recall. I grew up knowing Chris since first grade. Mark has some pretty impressive graphic skills and is starting to learn some basic programming concepts. Chris is constantly getting better and better with his graphics skills. He also has some programming skills; though, he has yet to delve too much into web development. For the moment, I am doing most of the backend development while working with Chris and Mark on the frontend.

As for how the development is going, we have officially bought the domain now. We are hoping to pick up a few similar domain names, but that is still hanging in the air at the moment. The look-and-feel is pretty much set, and I must say it looks pretty sexy. We have mapped out a few placeholders for some features we think will be cool. No real functionality has been put in place yet, but a lot of ideas are being thrown around and decided on. I do not know how much will get done before Thanksgiving as all three of us are in college at the moment. However, hopefully, we will make some significant progress over winter break.

New Website: Champions of Gaming

I've recently started working on a new website. As many of you know, I frequently participate in a videogame clan. This includes not only playing games online with them, but running a website for them. Well, a few of us have decided to expand our involvement in the videogame culture. One website we regularly compete on in amateur tournaments is Gamebattles.

We have several complaints against Gamebattles. A lot of the admins are pricks. Most of them our high schoolers on power rushes. This results in the rules being horribly thrown by the wayside and very subjective rulings coming into play. They also tend to be aggravated by teams who repeatedly submit tickets because their opponents are breaking the rules. Rather than these teams who are trying to play legitly getting wins for their efforts, they are punished for using the system put in place by Gamebattles. I don't want to say all the admins and refs are corrupt, but a lot of them are. The few good ones tend to be lost in the sway, rubbed the wrong way by corrupt superiors (as I once was), or just too few make a difference.

When things go smoothly, the competition is awesome. I know all the KOR guys love it. We feed off of it. It gets to the point that we literally scheduled practices to get prepared for upcoming matches. We plan out our strategies. We have leaders to give out quick orders in the heat of the fray. We have even worked on a means for quite literally developing our own "playbook" of sorts. This is how KOR really got off its feet in the beginning. It started as a few guys playing together for fun. Then they got involved in GB (Gamebattles) and things took off from there.

So what does all this have to do with me building a new website? Well, some of us have gotten frustrated with GB for the above mentioned reasons. Some of us enjoy getting involved in various web development projects. So what does that all add up to? We sat around talking one day and got the idea we should make our own. Now we are actually starting to put some serious effort into it. We needed a name first. Since we needed a web domain to go with our name, we started ruling out names we couldn't get a domain for easily. Finally, we came up with Champions of Gaming. I'm not providing a link here because we are still in the very early stages of development. We haven't even purchased the domain we intend to use. I suspect this will come back to seriously haunt me if someone purchases before we do...