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Dystopian

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The year was circa 2002. Ragnarok Online was getting long in the tooth and I was invited into a mystical world that existed only until 2005, which was Dark Age of Camelot. The entire game itself was I would argue harder than Dark Souls. Soloing anything was next to near impossible and leveling required a group and lots of patience. FFXI, while not my cup of tea, was in many ways similar and players have similar opinions. The point of the game, the success, came from community. Building community with like minded players who wanted to sit and chat and play a video game together was your reward. It wasn’t power. It wasn’t fame. It wasn’t prize money. It was friendship, something we’ve long long lost in online gaming. To level, you would have to have a stereotypical archetype group of a tank, healer and DPS. The tank could only…

This is a difficult topic for me because I believe that games journalism is just such a weird thing to begin with. I’ve been writing in this industry now for over 15 years professionally, as in paid to write and it’s still hard for me to even consider myself a journalist. I’ve sourced stories, been featured on TV shows as someone who predicted World of Warcraft going free-to-play and in general have spent most of my time honestly just writing guides and covering games I liked. Here’s the thing, people look at the folks writing about games who do present themselves as journalists and pass some interesting judgements good and bad about their content, but these days it’s actually really hard as a text based site to matter to the marketing companies that are hired by developers and publishers unless you’re the mainstream media. It started back when video was…

More and more I’m becoming an eco-aware person because I’m finding paper straws are showing up more frequently in restaurants. Paper straws are a much more eco-friendlier version of the plastic straw which shouldn’t exist, but do. The mouthfeel of them is so awful and the taste of the beverage so far ruined that it makes me mad respect when the sweet lady at the sushi place behind where I live gets on everyone to reuse their straws. We need to cut carbon emissions fast and it’s growing more obvious each day. If we don’t, paper straws are just the start of the dystopian future where the US starts issuing Star Citizen packages as bonds and Bitcoin is the official in-game currency of World of Warcraft. We don’t need to jux our reality any further from the median into some Demolition Man world with the shells. They’re not the solution…