Liminality Versus The Man-Child

Are you between the ages of 18 and 34? Are you male? Do you watch sports? Play video games? Go to clubs? Try to "pick up chicks"? If you said yes to more than two of the above, congratulations you are a SYM and will never become a true man. What's a SYM you ask, you'll have to ask Kate Hymowitz.

"With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order, hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining with friends. Single young males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3 and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it's receding."

Alright so a SYM is a 18 to 34 year old male who is single. By gosh! I fit into that category! Why I even play video games (though not Halo 3)! My god, she even realized that I go out with my friends and try to meet girls! Oh sweet merciful father... Hymowitz has even found out about my secret leisure activity, underachieving. Sarcasm aside I really like how Hymowitz has only the women shopping, travelling and dining with friends, which guys apparently never do. Also, from what I know of girls at my college campus, I'm pretty sure they're drinking and "hooking up" as well (seeing as how guys hook up with girls at parties, I mean it's kind of hard to go looking for chicks without, you know, chicks). Even better though is that use of "underachieving" as if it were some kind of leisure activity that guys actively participate in. Hymowitz continues in spectactular fashion,

"Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature [SYM] come to be? The most prevalent theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles."

I've heard this theory used quite often on campus for a variety of things, such as why guys hold open doors for girls (Because our mothers drilled it into us from day one), and I've never quite understood it. Maybe it's because I have a strong mother and that I grew up with strong female characters in my television shows, comic books, regular books, etc... but I personally have never felt my masculinity questioned by empowered women. All of this so far is nothing compared to the last couple of paragraphs,

"And here's what may be the deepest existential problem with the child-man – a tendency to avoid not just marriage but any deep attachments. This is British writer Nick Hornby's central insight in his novel About a Boy. The book's anti-hero, Will, is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of responsibility. He has no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact that the author symbolizes by having the jobless 36-year-old live off the residuals of a popular Christmas song written by his late father. Mr. Hornby shows how the media-saturated limbo of contemporary guyhood makes it easy to fill your days without actually doing anything.

Will's unemployment is part of a more general passionlessness. To pick up women, for instance, he pretends to have a son and joins a single-parent organization; the plight of the single mothers means nothing to him. For Will, women are simply fleshy devices that dispense sex, and sex is just another form of entertainment, a "fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs and a great night out, but nothing much more than that."

The superficiality, indolence and passionlessness evoked in Mr. Hornby's novels haven't triggered any kind of cultural transformation. The SYM doesn't read much, remember, and he certainly doesn't read anything prescribing personal transformation. The child-man may be into self-mockery; self-reflection is something else entirely.

That's too bad. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations.

Adults don't emerge. They're made."  

I would have condensed the quote, but I felt that each piece is necessary to understand how ridiculous the next one is. I especially how Hymowitz says the SYM's (Me) don't read. I mean, most of her demographic (the SYMS) are only comprised of college students or recent college graduates, and we all know that they don't read, right?

Honestly, I wouldn't have brought up this article at all if it weren't for one major thing. Hymowitz bases her most controversial argument (that SYMS not only avoid "marriage, but any deep attachments") is based off of About A Boy. A novel, that was later turned into a movie. As a college student, and an English major I find actual physical pain in her use of a novel as evidence of a real-world phenomena. Fiction ≠ Evidence. Since this, her only piece of evidence for her final argument is complete bunk, then the rest must be as well, and thus I just don't give a shit.

-Cory Ragsdale

I'm So Confused

So I'm not entirely sure what brought about my massive rant about girls last time, as I had a pretty darn good day yesterday, but I got hit by a sudden depression today that seems much more appropriate for that post. Even stranger is that caffeine and good music turned that bad mood into the perfect atmosphere to coalesce all of the ideas I've been having lately (ones that I haven't posted on here) into a single story idea, which got me really pumped up. So to recap, good day leads to bad mood leads to story idea? Whatever, I'm just glad that I finally have a story idea that I like so that I can work on a narrative.

Also I realized that some people may not understand why gamers are so excited about Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Let's just say that you take the most fun party game I've ever played, and then make all of the characters be the most famous video game characters from our childhood. I guess in musical terms it would be like The Beatles, Elvis, and whoever else was awesome all getting together for some crazy awesome band/concert.

Also this will most likely not be my last post about girls, as I apparently really, really suck at the whole introduction part (as in getting from "hi there I'm Cory" to "hey wanna go make out"). I think it has something to do with my somewhat random confidence levels. I'm banking on there being some kind meet and greet or something on Valentines Day, as I'm really starting to hate that holiday. Oh well, back to feeling awesome, later all.

-Cory Ragsdale

Mr. Nice Guy

After years of careful study I have determined that "nice guys" do in fact "finish last." It all started when I was in elementary school, there I learned how to share (give other people your stuff so they can move away and never see you again), be polite (let people cut in line in front of you when you've been patiently waiting for hours or let others walk all over you in some other fashion), and how to play nice (never get want you want and always defer to other people's opinions). I've learned over the years how to get around the problems that are inherent with these "nice guy" acts, letting me be the good guy but still get what I want, save one, how to be a gentleman and a "nice guy" around women.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to express interest in a girl while still being a "nice guy" and a gentleman? I'm not allowed to just walk up and tell a girl that I like her, because that could make her uncomfortable (and the girls at this campus are paranoid enough to assume that I'm a stalker). I can't make eye contact for very long for the same reasons. I can't look at a girl's body without objectifying her and being a pervert. I'm supposed to act like a friend to these girls that I'm interested in, and every single girl that I am friends with tells me how creepy it would feel to start dating any of their friends. I'm not allowed to hit on girls who have boyfriends (how do I find that out without you telling me or being a facebook stalker?). Honestly, I'm at my wits end here and am just about ready to say "fuck it" and just start asking every girl that interests me (whether I know their name or not) if they want to go get some coffee sometime (mind you, I've been told repeatedly not to do this because it's somehow creepy, how it's creepy I have no clue).

The worst part of all of this is that I feel like I'm the only one my age who still tries to be a gentleman and a "nice guy". Here I am, opening doors for women and getting called a sexist pig for the trouble, while the guys behind them just walk up and slap their asses and get a girlfriend for their effort. I don't know, maybe there was some lesson in Middle School that I missed where they told all of the guys how to be assholes and pick up chicks that I missed while I was sleeping and growing an extra foot (I'm 6'5" which really doesn't help diffuse the big creepy guy factor, along with the bushy eyebrows and "supposedly" intense stare).

I'll give it 'till the end of the week, then if things don't pick up girl-wise I'm just gonna go do everything that I was told not to do.

-Cory Ragsdale

Not Much To Say

All I have to say is how absurdly pumped I am for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I loved the first two and Sakurai seems to have added a massive amount of content in addition to making the switch from the Gamecube to the Wii. Also, what kind of video game player can't be excited about finally getting to see Mario and Sonic throwdown? Also, poetry is apparently hard for me to write, I dunno, I keep feeling like I'm just faking it.

-Cory Ragsdale

Shut Your Damn Trap!

First things first, I did not post yesterday as I decided that trying to post every single day while going to school and hang out with my friends leads to posts like the one on Friday. As such I will no longer be updating on Friday or Saturday unless I really feel like it. With that out of the way I would like to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my heart, Silent Protagonists.

Once upon a time voice acting in a game was all but impossible, as such game designers opted to have written dialogue for their characters. This worked fine for the most part, but sometimes game designers noticed that players wouldn't really connect with the main characters in their stories, simply because that character's personality, what he chose to say and do, didn't mesh with how the player envisioned the character as a hero. The solution to this dilemma was deceptively simple, remove every single line of dialogue that the hero (the character in question and avatar of the player) had, turning them into a mute. 

These days with voice-acting and stories that spoon-feed the player information as to how they should feel have become the norm, and many game designers have begun to declare that the era of the "silent hero" has passed. I think that they could not be more wrong. While I believe that voice acting has done more to improve storytelling in video games than anything else, and I very much enjoy games that have no silent protagonist (The Final Fantasy series comes to mind) and tell a definitive story, I do not think that the silent protagonist cannot coexist with these games.

The power of the silent protagonist comes from the players imagination; while the character may say nothing in the game, the player will almost always respond to the situations in their mind, deciding on a personality for the character that is similar to their own. This connection turns the silent protagonist into an avatar for the player who becomes much more invested in the story. The best part of this arrangement is that since the player "is" the protagonist, when that character inevitably saves the day, it's the player who gets to be the hero.

However, just like any design decision, there are some drawbacks and pitfalls that come with the silent protagonist. The designers must be very careful when making situations where the protagonist fails/looks like a fool/falls into an obvious trap as the player will take these as attacks upon themselves, or even worse, disrupts the personality that the player has created for their avatar. The other problem is that no matter how well you design the game, there are going to be points where the player's idea of what his character would do or care about is going to conflict with the designer's. A good example is Half-Life 2, there are a lot of people who like the Alex Vance character and enjoy her interplay with their character (Gordon Freeman), but there are people who don't like Alex's personality, and so when the game seems to be developing a relationship between the two characters the player feels that their own creative ideas (their idea of who Gordon Freeman is) have been snubbed, and nobody likes that feeling.

In the end I believe that as long as you recognize the risks that come with making a silent protagonist that it is a stronger format than the other option. Silent protagonists are the best heroes, they never say anything stupid, they never complain, and when push comes to shove they are ready without a word, and in my personal opinion they have made the best heroes to appear in video games: The Boy(Secret of Mana), Gordon Freeman(Half-Life/2/Episode-1/Episode-2), The Student(Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3), and of course Crono(Chrono Trigger).

-Cory Ragsdale

P.S. I am not one of those who hates Alex Vance, I mean come on, a strong, smart, hot girl with infinite ammo who doesn't have to be rescued from every single little headcrab that comes your way, sign me up!

Edit: The origins of silent characters that I mention are entirely my own thoughts, I'm pretty sure it was probably just lazy programmers who didn't want to get/pay a writer to come up with the dialogue. Also, I almost forgot, Persona 3 uses dialogue options given to the player to diminish the chances of interrupting a player's perception of the protagonist.

Am I A Nerd? (YES!)

I had plans to go and hang out with my college buddies tonight, but then I stumbled upon Orson Scott Card's site on writing. Three hours later my roommates came back to find me glued to my laptop...

...All attempts to finish this post were met with massive mind fog, just go visit his site (it's in my bookmarks to the right), you'll be glad he did, even if you aren't a writer you'll learn a lot of interesting ideas about the writing process (Finally someone who dislikes "show don't tell" as much as I do).

-Cory Ragsdale

Technical Difficulties Part 2

Well, it's pretty much official, my monitor is dead. Ribbon cable is firmly in place and it still won't start up. I'm going to take the thing home this spring break and see if my dad can work some of his magic, but I think I'm still going to order a new monitor (one with a better warranty and isn't quite as sketchy) in the meantime so that I can keep working on my portfolio and so that I don't have to worry about whether my monitor is going to die every time I go to turn it on.

-Cory Ragsdale

Techincal Difficulties

Two posts in one night? Insanity! Actually I mainly wanted to comment on how writing the posts on my PC does keep all of the crazy layout and size glitches from occurring, but then I remembered what I went through today to actually use my PC.

The story starts simply enough: I had just gotten back to my room after class and decided that I wanted to check online to see what my homework for tomorrow was. I walk up to my desk, turn on my computer and then turn on my monitor, except my monitor doesn't turn on. Mind you, last semester my monitor pulled this trick, which turned out to be a ribbon cable that had fallen out. So, knowing what the problem most likely is, I pull my monitor off my desk and start prying it apart. It's at this point that I run into my first problem, I can't remember how to get the display to disconnect from the surrounding frame.

After a quick call to my dad I'm able to get the frame (which has the port that the ribbon cable connects to on it) off the monitor. Now I hit problem number 2, how do I get the ribbon cable (which has enough slack for my to be able to pick it up if I'm lucky) into the port that it slides out of far too easily (thus why I keep having problems with it). The frame gets in the way of my vision, and my fingers are too big to squeeze in between the frame and the monitor to insert the ribbon cable. After another call to my dad (my godsend in situations like these) I take my monitor entirely apart, tape the backside of the ribbon cable so that it has more slack and then put the frame on first when I put it back together. Finally I take the time and make for sure that the ribbon cable won't fall out again and put it all back together.

Thus it took me two hours to check my e-mail, and to top it all off, in my rage I forgot to take pictures of the whole event. Moral of the story, When you buy a nice monitor, don't try to save money and get it refurbished from a sketchy second-hand site.

-Cory Ragsdale

The Devil May Cry...

But I sure won't. Earlier today the Devil May Cry 4 demo was released onto the Playstation Network (PSN) and XBox Live, and as a rabid Devil May Cry fan I immediately downloaded it. The demo is fairly short, but more than makes up for it with the amount of content and polish it provides.

The demo comes in two flavors; the first starts the player off slowly, throwing only a couple of minor enemies at you while teaching you how to play, though they do get tougher and more numerous as the demo continues. This section is limited only by a ten minute timer, thus forcing the player to choose between exploring or dinking around with the combat system, which in true Devil May Cry fashion is very fun. The second choice starts the player far into the demo where they must fight off three Frosts, icy lizard type enemies with a variety of ice powers who are resistant enough to your attacks that you have to balance offense and defense carefully. After dispatching these three foes the player continues forward into a small cutscene that introduces the boss of the demo, a massive four-legged fire demon named Berial.

The fight with Berial takes place in a small town of wooden houses that catch fire as Berial approaches or are torn asunder by the demons massive blade as he tries to strike you. Berial is fairly non-aggressive during the fight, following the player very slowly, which forces the player to take the offensive. Unfortunately for the player, Nero (the protagonist of the demo) has far fewer options for dodging Berial's attacks than the old protagonist, Dante. I'm an avid DMC fan, having beaten all of the games in the series on Dante Must Die! mode (yes even the second one, which was terrible and nothing like the other two), and although I was still adjusting to Nero's differences from Dante I barely managed to beat the fight on my first try. I don't want to say any more, because one of the funnest parts of playing Devil May Cry games is learning what tricks the bosses have up their sleeves, but I do have to say that Berial has one attack (you'll know which one when you see it) that is amazing.

The demo is fast-paced, action packed, and manages to include instructions for newcomers to the series while also showing off what you can expect to see later in the game. All in all I must tip my hat to Capcom, this has been one of the best demos I've played in a year and I eagerly wait for the games release on February 4th.

-Cory Ragsdale

I Will Not Swear. I Will Not Swear.

Blogger.com has been doing some very weird things with my formatting lately. I'll try to fix my last post tomorrow, but I think it may be because I'm using my laptop to post instead of my PC, so hopefully that'll fix the problem, if not, then I may need to find a new place to do this.

-Cory Ragsdale

Reality Check

First things first. I apologize for the clearly rushed, extremely low-content post that I made yesterday (Tuesday). I was simply engrossed with watching my roommate play Super Mario Galaxy and was barely able to finish the post before I drooled all over my keyboard. I do intend to perform a full review of the game, but only after I have finished it, which, barring homework and Devil May Cry 4, should be sometime before the end of February. With that out of the way, let's talk about one of my favorite subjects, Realism.

As a concept I'm quite happy with Realism. I like the real world, it brings me great joy. I enjoy realistic looking paintings, I like pictures, and I learn about how the real world works. However, I do have a limit to how much I enjoy Realism, and when I've had enough of the real world I go read a book or play a video game. It is during these retreats that I start to encounter difficulties with Realism. That's not to say that I refuse to play realistic games or read books about real events, because that simply isn't true, but I find far too often that Realism equals boring.

Who reads history books for fun? Anyone? Oh you over there... yes I see, so what you're saying is that sometimes reading about history is pretty interesting. True, but how was that book written? Was it a straight run of the facts? I'm sorry, I can't quite hear you, but I'm guessing that you said that it wasn't. There were pictures, asides, anecdotal evidence, why there were even events that got cut-out. All of these things were done in the effort to make the history more presentable. A great example is Mark Twain's biography of Jeanne D'Arc (Joan of Arc). I would say that about half of Twain's biography is about his fictional protagonist, and yet when Jeanne does come up Twain changes, adds, and removes nothing from what we know about her and the events that surround her. The book is entertaining in its own right, and is also an extremely accurate, if slightly biased, biography. 

Video Games could learn a lot from Twain. It is more common than I would like to hear a game designer talking about how realistic their physics/visuals/setting is/are. I do like accurate physics (Half-Life 2's physics system was more fun than the original game), and I eagerly await when we break out of uncanny valley (when digital representations of people start looking to real they start looking really strange to us). What I do not like is when nobody asks that designer the question that should follow up anything they do or so involving a video game, "But is it fun?" Watching my roommates trade off on the TV has been a great example of this lesson for me. 

One of them has been playing Assassin's Creed, and the other has been playing Super Mario Galaxy. I watch my friend play Assassin's Creed and it looks like he's having fun, but then he swears a bit when hits a loading screen, or a little more when he stumbles off a ledge, and then curses wildly when his character falls over like a buffoon because a guard threw him. On the other side I have my friend who shouts in excitement as he gets hit by flying cannon shells that chase him, and laughs when he accidentally leaps into a black whole. The difference between the two games is that when Super Mario Galaxy was being made, the most common question that was asked was, "Is it fun?" Assassin's Creed is a lot of fun, but if the developers had made the character a little faster, a little better at jumping, and a whole lot better at not falling down like a drunk frat boy like the super-cool assassin that he's supposed to be, then both of my friends would be having as much fun as each other. I have some more to say about how the general public seems to fear things that aren't Realism, but it's one in the morning and I have class at nine-thirty. Till tomorrow, good night and sleep tight.

-Cory Ragsdale

Mario Galaxy = Super Crack?

So I was originally going to talk about the use of monsters in video games or how helpful a good demo is to the consumer, but then my roommate started playing Super Mario Galaxy. From the get-go I knew this game was going to be amazing. The beautiful visuals, the sweeping orchestral soundtrack, to be honest the introduction was more epic than most RPG's that I've played. I think what made me the happiest was seeing Bowser as a competent, if not somewhat frightening villain. This game takes the wonder that was Mario 64, adds the good elements from Super Mario Sunshine, and then takes it all to a new level. Even more impressive, is that the game predicts the player become bored with just moving around small planetoids and sends you into a galaxy more akin to Mario's previous adventures. I really cannot stress how amazing this game is, if you, or someone you know has a Wii, get this game!

-Cory Ragsdale

Sorry

Sorry about the weird formatting and colors of these last posts, blogger.com does some weird shit to my posts (like randomly making the last two paragraphs smaller sometimes), and it apparently hates it if you copy/paste text from Microsoft Word.

-Cory Ragsdale

I Hate Edith Wharton

Tomorrow I am going to head to Seattle with my dad so that he can drop me off at school on Saturday, because of this, and the general zaniness that accompanies seeing all of my school buddies for the first time in a month I won’t be posting until I start classes next Tuesday. With that out of the way I’d like to talk to you about stories, more specifically, tragedies.

Everybody loves tragedies, the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, Lily Bart’s downfall, and any French or French Canadian movie for the past fifty years. I hate tragedies. Why would I want to see a tragedy, read a tragedy, hear about a tragedy? So I can be depressed? So I can see how a good of a writer the author is? So I can learn something about the world? No, all tragedies do is muck about in their own self-pity. “Oh look at me I’m so sad and look how sad my life is, isn’t it sad, now pity me wah, wah, wah.” This doesn’t mean I don’t respect tragedy, tragedy most definitely has its place in story, but it certainly isn’t the end. Everyone forgets that the end of Romeo and Juliet isn’t the death of the lovers; it’s the unification of the warring families.

 I have no problems with tragic events, in fact, I say the more tragic the better. A good author should make the main characters demise or failure seem inevitable, but the great author saves that character, has them triumph, and the truly amazing author saves that character in a way that seems immediately apparent and simple as soon as it happens, but something the reader would never think of on their own. What I am saying is that a truly great story makes a tragedy, and then keeps going. That is why I can’t stand tragedies, or any films involving writers even remotely French.

 

P.S. The whole French thing is more of a stereotype, the French do make good films and books that aren’t tragedies, French Canadians on the other hand can bite me.

 

-Cory Ragsdale

My School Would Kick Me Out If I Did This

I’ve been trying my best to keep from discussing the whole Kevin McCullough Mass Effect fiasco, but I actually have something meaningful to say.

For those who are unaware, Kevin McCullough is a columnist for townhall.com who recently wrote an article on the sins of mass effect and how, “With it’s “over the net” capabilities virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away.” Essentially the guy rants for three pages about how Mass Effect is a terrible sinful game that lets the player have sex with anyone in any possible fashion, which is a complete and utter lie. In Mass Effect, there are three people you can have sex with, a man (only for female players), a woman (only for male characters), and a female alien (for both). The player can have sex with only one of these characters per play-through, and only once with that partner. To top it off, the sex in question is a thirty second clip of shadowed characters moving about with some heavy breathing. It is extremely low-key and surprisingly tasteful, it is even clean enough to be shown on youtube (which does not allow any sexual content). Honestly, watching basic TV for half-an-hour at two in the afternoon will show you more than Mass Effect does. The icing on the cake, is that Mass Effect is a mature rated game, meaning only those seventeen or older can purchase it.

 My big problem with this isn’t that Kevin McCullough is conservative, or religious, honestly I think TV has gotten absurdly sexual since I was a kid (although I do feel that if a kid is old enough to understand what’s going on, they’re old enough to see it). No, my problem is that Kevin McCullough simply didn’t do his research. If you are a PAID columnist, I expect at least one hours worth of research on your subject. If Kevin McCullough had spent five minutes looking up Mass Effect, he would have realized that only a couple of sentences in his three page tirade contain any factual information. Columnists, I understand video games are the new thing, and that they’re an easy target to pick on, but please, do your research.

The video game industry is just that, an industry, it is a group of people’s livelihood, and spreading lies and in fact, libel. I checked the comments on Mr. McCullough’s rants (he made an apology that was really an attack on gamers in response to criticism about his first article) and of the three hundred or some comments on each, only two were from people responding to the fact that McCullough had lied. The rest of these three hundred comments were all in praise of McCullough and from parents who had bought Mass Effect for their children “without realizing what it really was”. These are three hundred people who now feel that the game industry is for all intents and purposes a porn industry directed at children.

In the end though, it’s not just Kevin McCullough, people across the world have no idea what the game industry is like, what video games really are. People across America are lied to regularly about violence and sex in video games, if you don’t think so, go read the next article on video games that the New York Times publish, then go online and look up for yourself the information that the article reported and see how wrong they are. Don’t like the New York Times? Then how about NPR, I mean, it’s a very liberal, politically correct radio station right; they cover stories carefully, to make sure that they don’t get a single fact out of place right? Then think carefully on this, when interviewing Joseph Staten (the lead writer for the Halo series) on his recent novel, and New York Times best seller, Contact Harvest (a Halo novel), NPR’s Chana Joffe-Walt asked, “Do gamers read?” Yes, a reporter asked a video game writer, when interviewing him about his recent novel based on a video game, which was a best seller, if gamers read.

 Please people, one hour of research before you go ruin the reputation of game developers and gamers, that’s all I ask.

 

-Cory Ragsdale (Written On Wednesday 1/16/08)

Scary Scary

Yesterday and Today I have been packing to go back to school, so I’ve been thinking a lot about my future and what I want to do. If you can’t tell, I want to get into game design. I love video games, I love writing, and I love making things for people to enjoy. I just have one teensy little problem; I have no clue how to operate in the real world. I’ve had two jobs in my life, the first doesn’t count because it was a job in my school’s cafeteria, that could only fire me if I didn’t show up to work. The second of my two jobs was over this last summer, where I worked as an early morning stocker (4am-whenever we finished). Neither of these jobs have required any skills aside from being able to pick up boxes and place them in the appropriate shelves, and I was pretty much guaranteed to get both of these jobs.

Where this becomes a problem is that I’ve been looking at job openings at video game developers, and all of them require experience in the field, which is fine since I can do an internships, but those internships ask for a résumé and demonstrations of my work. Problem number 1, I have no freaking clue how to make a résumé out of my two previous jobs a stock-boy. Problem number 2 is that I don’t have any demonstrations of my work. I have no stories that I wrote that I feel comfortable sending to someone as a demonstration of my skill, and most developers ask for some kind of mod or campaign using something like the warcraft 3 editor or the neverwinter nights editor. I have had a PC for less than six months, during which time I had the hardest semester in my entire academic career. To top everything off, most internships at game developers are for college juniors, and their application deadline is the end of January. In essence, I am fucked.

Nevertheless, I shall attempt to cobble together a résumé, and if I manage to get into an internship program despite my inability to demonstrate my talent, then huzzah, and if not, well then I’ll either try for a quality assurance job over the summer, or if all else fails, I’ll spend the summer working on my portfolio.

 

-Cory Ragsdale (This Post Was Written On Tuesday 1/15/08)

Why College Is So Damned Important

In just one weeks time I will be returning to school to polish of my junior year at the University of Puget Sound. After this next semester I’ll only have one year left before I have to go out and join the real world. I say “real world” because college is not like the real world, there are penalties for your mistakes, but not nearly as severe as those you find outside of it. It’s not just about the punishments either, most people I know at UPS aren’t working, and most of our bills, food, housing, electricity, are already taken care of. In all honesty, the real world freaks the hell out of me. For god’s sake I don’t even know how to find an apartment! It makes me feel like a giant kid, and I’m terrified of what will happen once I leave college and that protective net is gone. All I can say is that I am enormously grateful to my parents for allowing me the opportunity to go this school.

I’ve learned more in these past two-and-a-half years than I could ever have hoped to have gleaned out of high school. Not only that, I’ve made an amazing group of friends there. Most of all though, I’ve learned a lot about myself; two years ago I was a quiet, shy, weak little boy. In two years here I’ve gone from someone who would give his friends money to rent games with because he was too self-conscious to do it himself, to someone who can embarrass himself freely in public without having a nervous breakdown. I used to hide the fact that I was a gamer, I would try and avoid discussions about games in public, and I tried to shop for games online so people wouldn’t see me. Now here I am, looking up game design internships and discussing the industry. College has been an integral part of all of these changes.

I guess that’s what makes me not understand parents who refuse to help pay for their child’s college education. I mean, these people spend thousands of dollars feeding, clothing, and generally raising this child, and finally when they’re at their peak, ready to change into adults like some gangly caterpillar, they rip open the cocoon. What’s worse is the excuse that most of these parents use, “this way they’ll appreciate their education.” Do you have any idea how hard it is to work while studying? You become a zombie, and what’s worse, you miss out on the social aspects of college. Honestly, if I came out of this university having taken no courses, it still would have been worth it just for the interpersonal skills and contacts I’ve gathered. How about the appreciation part of that phrase, clearly I don’t appreciate my college education as much as someone who had to pay for it themselves, right? Wrong bucko! If anything I appreciate my college education more, I realize exactly how much money this is costing my parents, and I can see how much they love me in what they’re having to sacrifice in order to help me get through. Going to my school has been an amazing experience, and I wouldn’t trade my time there for anything in the world, and every day that I talk to my parents I try to tell them just how much I appreciate what they are doing for me, because they have given me something truly remarkable.

-Cory Ragsdale (Written On Monday 1/14/08)

Yes I Do Want To Write

I just finished reading If You Want To Write by Brenda Ueland, which was amazing. Never have I read a book on writing that hooked onto my fears on writing within the first five pages. There is a bit that I disagree with, and she seems very obsessed with William Blake and all the Russian writers (Tolstoi, etc...), but even that didn't stop me from blasting my way through the book in one sitting. She just hit so precisely on what I had problems with, it was simply amazing. 

In other news I got MediaLink to work on my computer, and it's really quite something to stream my music and pictures from my laptop to my ps3 (the space visualizer on it is amazing by the way). Sometimes I forget how powerful some of these songs are when played through a good set of speakers rather than my dying headphones. The most amazing difference probably comes from the Ace Combat 5 OST, it's just so intense, and for lack of a better term, epic.

Edit: I have no clue why the second paragraph looks so much more cramped together, maybe it's just my eyes...

EditEdit: Apparently this site makes the last paragraph smaller than the rest.

...Then You Can Have Your Dessert

It took me quite longer than I thought to come up with a topic that I wanted to discuss today, but I finally decided that I want to write about video games and the general public. Specifically I want to discuss how unwilling most people are to try a video game if they've never played one before. I have nothing against people who don't enjoy video games, or people who don't have the time, or prefer to spend their time on something they enjoy more. What irks me is when someone won't even give games a chance, simply assuming that they are trash or that they can't do it. I know far too many guys whose girlfriends complain that they ignore them when they play video games, and yet when the guys try and get their girlfriends to join them, to try playing games, they immediately refuse. All I ask is that they try a little bit, play for half an hour, if they don't like it, fine, just don't assume that you won't like something until you try it. It's just like eating your vegetables when you were a kid, try it, you might like it.

New Game

Hello everyone my name is Cory Ragsdale and this is my new blog Quickload. For those who don't know, on January 1st 2008 I promised to start writing publicly every day before the 13th. This blog is a space for me to rant about various things, but the primary purpose behind this is to improve my writing. As such don't be surprised when the style of my posts, or the content of my posts changes dramatically. This first post is just an introduction, my first "real" post won't be coming until later tonight or early next morning, until then have a good evening.