Nerds with a Heart of Gold, Gamers Giving Back

This story was originally posted on the Coquina Online web magazine. Editing and pull quotes are courtesy of Tracey Eaton.

Fifty years ago, comic books were a scourge that threatened the very future of America by turning its children into perverse social deviants. Times may have changed but sensationalism will always sell, and the new explanation for young deviancy has become the video game.
Video games and the people that play them have had a troubled history in the media. They’ve been perceived in turns as misfits, slackers, immature children and loose cannons. To those that call themselves “gamers,” this misrepresentation is as insulting as it is limited.
“I think a lot of people think of the term in negative connotations,” said Julie Schaffter, a junior at Flagler College. “You have to think of it this way: there are tons of ‘gamers’ in the world, but there are also different levels of gaming.”
Schaffter argues that there are now a variety of markets each with their own feel and culture. Games designed for families and marketed to kids or adults who typically don’t play games are typically on Nintendo’s Wii platform. Meanwhile, that market and culture is completely different than the user base of the more adult-centric Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.
Schaffter’s sentiments are echoed by the Entertainment Software Association, or ESA. The ESA is an organization designed to rate video games in the same way that the film industry rates movies. Recently the ESA released their annual report and their findings may surprise the uninformed.
The ESA report confirms Shaffter’s assertion that video games are truly for everyone, with nearly 68 percent of the homes polled in the study claiming a game console.

The average video game player, to the frustration of many wives and girlfriends, is 35-year-old male who has played games for over 12 years. That’s a far cry from the assumption that these games are just for kids.

Video games are also anything but socially isolating. Henry Jacobs, the director of Comparative Studies at MIT, recently wrote that more than half of the gamers he’s researched play socially. “Even games designed for single players are often played socially, with one person giving advice to another holding a joystick,” Jacobs writes. “Two players may be fighting to death on screen and growing closer as friends off screen.”

Clearly, it’s not fair to demonize video games. But there is damage to be repaired. So, who better to start fixing it than the gamers themselves? Many game players have started charities to prove that their hobby produces rational people and not socially awkward crazies.

Donate Games and Child’s Play are both charities founded by gamers that rely on the good will of gamers to make the lives of sick children better. Child’s Play is aimed at giving toy donations to sick children in hospitals all over the world during the Christmas season and Donate Games allows gamers to donate their played games to the charity which the organization will then sell to raise money for orphan’s disease.
Communities of gamers have also stepped up to the plate. A group of gamers that have formed around an online super hero game called City of Heroes didn’t form a charity of their own. Instead, they created a website called Real World Hero in order to direct people who play their game to charities and groups who help those less privileged or in need. All of this is run without the expectation of a profit and out of the kindness of each gamer’s heart.
So the next time you snicker at a group of overweight man-boys loitering outside of a GameStop, keep in mind that these are people. That ratty video game shirt and shorts on the weekend could be replaced by a suit and tie during the week. Video games have become as pervasive as any movie or book, and the people who play them are now your friends, neighbors, accountants and ministers.

Megan Frost, World Traveler

Below is a Feature Story I originally posted in my Writing for Mass Communication class over the summer. I thought I should feature this feature just one more time.

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla., - “Nothing really terrible happens to me,” claims Megan Frost with a Cheshire grin as the light from the bar plays across her pixie features.

Anyone who knows her would know this to be fundamentally untrue; plenty of terrible things can happen to Frost, who is known to most as “Megar” (a spelling error that has since become an identity of its own). But it’s Frost’s attitude that keeps her from being affected. Determined to find out where this devil-may-care streak came from, I began pressing her about it (as well as convincing her with more than a few Corona’s). She finally admits that, more than her stints as a waitress in St. Augustine, her passion for her art, or knowing any of the multitudes of people who live and work downtown; it quite simply comes from who she is, and who she is comes from where she’s been.

Frost is 5 feet 2 inches of energy with a shock of short, blonde hair framing an almost constant grin. She was brought up as what some refer to as an “army brat.” She was born in Stuttgart, Germany while her father was stationed there, and has since managed to live in Panama and every state in America except for Hawaii, Alaska, Montana, the Dakotas and Maine. After her parent’s divorce, her mom bought a camper and the Frost family toured the country, twice. She even managed to live in the Estes state park, which to this day is a claim most don’t believe. Her life as a sort of nomad is really what makes Megan Frost “Megar.”

Megar may have lived in a lot of places all over the world, but St. Augustine is her home. She grew up here emotionally, if not physically, and despite the wanderlust that flows through her, has put down the most permanent roots she can muster here. Even so, travel still defines her. She’s since visited Australia, Canada, the Bahamas, Peurto Rico, France, Austria, and went back to Germany. “Traveling has made me unafraid of adventures or starting new things and meeting new people,” Frost explained while playing with her puppy, a souvenir from her spring trip to Peurto Rico. “Instead of going to school [growing up], I mostly learned things based around local customs and history. I also learned that if you’re open and honest, and smile a lot, people will help you.”

When asked where the best place she’s gone has been, her eyes light up and it takes less than a second for her to blurt out, “Australia!” “Australia is the most fantastic place. It’s like America 20 years ago everywhere; people are all so honest and up front, everything has that big-sky-spirit-of-adventure feeling to it.” She should know, she’s been twice, although the first time was not as exciting as the second. “I drank spoiled milk in Samoa and then threw up from one end of Australia to the next.” Despite that trauma, she came back for more. “I went to the Great Barrier Reef and was chased by a Clown Fish, which are really mean despite what Pixar tries to tell you. Then we got stranded on the reef when the boat engine failed and had to finish the beer while we waited for rescue. Fantastic time.” If forced to give a recommendation on where to travel; the number one place to see before you die, “Australia would be it. It doesn’t matter if you’re staying for one week or one year, the longer you stay the more you’ll see is all.”

Despite all the resilience that travel’s afforded her, though, she does concede the drawbacks on moving yearly, if not monthly as a child. “I have a tough time putting down roots; permanence becomes a frightening prospect,” she said. “I also never really had that one best friend growing up. The only people I’ve ever been really close with are my immediate family. I guess that’s made me more independent, but sometimes I wish I had that [close friend].” The friends she keeps now all know the Megan Frost that marches to her own tune. “Megar’s always been a free spirit,” her friend Melissa Strait said, “she’s not afraid of starting over from scratch, living out of her car, and having fun while doing it.”

Megar may not be world famous, but she can at least say she’s seen more of the world than most famous people. Her strength of character comes from being forced to adapt while being on the move. While most of us have never had a life like her, we can at least learn from Megar that life’s too short to stay in one place. That people are basically good, nothing really terrible ever happens to you, and that, “panic never helps you. There will always be a later flight.”

Working on something special

So my old school excuse still holds up. But I think I'm going to use this blog as a place to clear out some ideas and background research to stories I'm working on. Although my readership is few... primarily because the blog is so horribly neglected, just getting this out of my head and onto E-paper will be good for me.

Check back in the near future for what I'm working on right now. I'm collaborating on a few things with photojournalist Whitney Warren, so hopefully I'll have some good stuff to show you, for both sides of your brain.

Stay tuned!

South Korea Owned my Soul

So, my last post I mentioned my WoW characterImbohl. Well, I'm still working on him and as if I didn't have a crap-ton of stuff to do already, I succumbed to buying another MMO and taking it for a whirl. Aion has reached out it's lovingly-rendered anime-inspired hand all the way from South Korea and touched my heart. I gathered some old Xbox games I hadn't been playing and marched down to the hell-pit known as Gamestop to pick it up (for $12 with a month free I can'treally go wrong).

I have to say first off that I'm only 7 levels into the game but so far it's knocked my socks off. It's taking me a little bit to get used to a WoW-clone, albeit a excellent WoW-clone, with good writing and a decent semblance of a story that came out of Asia. These things typically go together like healthy eating habits and fat kids (ok, I admit I just wanted to see that clip again), but Aion pulls it off.

But Aion hasn't just copied from WoW, they've managed to throw in some innovations to their map system and quest log that would even make Blizzard envious. While not as drastic as the Tome of Knowledge system in Warhammer, Aion's quest guide will define lore terms and provide backgrounds for nearly every area in the game as well as point out where your quest objectives can be found with a neat little hypertext system. Color me impressed. The character customization is also leaps and bounds ahead of many MMO's, giving you full range on designing your character's look and body type while keeping most characters grounded in the look of the game (you can make some freakish creations that can make Gollum look handsome, but you gotta work at it).

Right now the only severe flaw in the game is NCsoft's handling of the launch. While for the most part the game has launched smoothly, due in no small part to already being released for a year in South Korea, there's some typical launch hiccups. NCsoft touted impressive numbers of preoders for the game, but kept the server bank the size the game was projected to require down the road when your trial people (like myself) shrink back into the woodwork. They've since admitted to the bungle while people are enjoying up to 7 hour queue times, and claim to be working to allieviate the problem with higher server caps and an additional server launch this weekend. The tricky bit about servers though, is you don't want to get yourself into a Warhammer situation where you have 2-4 populated servers and a bunch of dead ones you reluctantly have to merge and deactivate later on down the line.

In all, outside of the massive reading that's piling up for me (2 hour queues are actually helping me at this point), I give Aion a hopeful thumbs up so far. I'll revisit my opinion when I get into their PvPvE system, but for now it looks like a beautiful peice of work and one of the more pleasant surprises I've seen come out of the Asian game-scape.

Well...

the Main Fraggin Man

Another school year and another mountain of work is to be done. I'm taking Photojournalism and I've got a photo blog for the class now, so I'm trying to keep up with that. I've also found the need to really keep up on this blog, and with that in mind I'm making my first entry in a long time.

Honestly nothing really to comment on, I think I'll post some of my drunken quasi-philosophical ramblings further down the line as I seem to have amassed a fair amount in recent months. Other than that my personal life is in turmoil and I'm dealing with it by taking on more work, and playing productivity's serial killer: World of Warcraft (Imbohl is the man).

I'll post more either tonight or in the next few day, including links to stories I'm following and possibly my opinions of them (whoa... BLOG STYLE. Welcome back 1999). Until then, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.

Basic Truths from College so Far

I've found 2 things to be true about Flagler so far. One is that I'll always, ALWAYS have to write about marijuana legalization. Thankfully, by writing and talking so much about it I've sorta become an expert on the whole deal. But I'll welcome a semester, even a summer semester, where I don't have to write about that business.

Second, Flagler follows the "Amusement Park Rule". Where the people in my classes for the first semester I had will be the same people I see every year, every where (just like the people you see at the ticket line at Disney will be at every ride and every restaurant). The sad thing is that so far there's been at least 4 people I've had in 3 or 4 classes and they still don't know who I am.

Other than that there's really no new news to report on. Things churn like they always do, finished an intro to Final Cut movie edit project, Team Fortress 2's spy video is flippin awesome, Auto-tune the News makes me laugh every time I watch it, and I can officially say that Twitter has changed my life. Twitter gives me all these great updates on great people and is starting to show me that if you media whore yourself out enough anyone can be famous these days (Perez Hilton, iJustine... lookin' at you two).

Anyhow, figured I'd update for updating's sake, more to come later. Hopefully it'll knock your socks off.

Wacky times

Poor neglected blog. I'll probably have to post sparingly on this until my time frees up a little from adjusting from summer classes and whatnot. Also, I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to participate in an MMO beta that rhymes with Hampions Monline, so while I can't talk about the ins and outs of that, I'll be a little busy nonetheless. More to follow, hopefully this afternoon.