Tag: gaming

Excited for my new computer

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What is a recent purchase you are excited about?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

It’s been a fair few years since I built my gaming PC, and a couple since I upgraded the GPU. Thankfully, the GPU is still in a good competitive position for the current market, so I don’t feel the need to upgrade it again (because that would be expensive enough as it is.)

Thinking on how long it had been since I built my PC, and watching my roommate go through the motions of upgrading his, I decided to follow suit (the FOMO was real.) So, I ordered all new parts, including a case, and I started a ground up new PC build using the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D that hit the market almost two months ago.

I had ordered all the parts prior to my vacation, and got most of them before I even left, so I put together everything I could while I waited for the new SSD and the CPU itself. Both were on back order and I wasn’t expecting them to arrive before my trip, which meant I wasn’t going to be missing out on playing with it while I was gone. The SSD was supposed to arrive the day after I left, but it showed up the day before, so that was alright. I just installed it right away and went back to waiting for the last part. The CPU.

I wasn’t expecting the CPU to show up until mid-January, but for some reason it managed to ship early. I got the notification while I was gone and had to have my roommate keep an eye out for it. I’m still surprised that it showed up as early as it did, because I was also planning on cleaning and reorganizing my gaming and hobby desk setup when I got back. Unfortunately, in that area, I haven’t done that yet, which means I haven’t finished setting up the new PC. On the bright side, though, my roommate and I did install the CPU and made sure that everything worked after getting the OS installed (he had a heck of a time getting everything working when he did his build, which I’m grateful for because it meant I could tap into that knowledge if I ran into similar issues.)

So, now I’m just kind of taking my time to get caught up on my cleaning and then I can get to gaming again. Maybe I’ll even do a couple of streams in the near future!

Beating 100 people in row

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

There is a line of 100 people. If you beat them all one-by-one at one thing, you get a big fat cheque. What challenge would you choose?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

I don’t know that I’m confident enough to pick something that would guarantee I win 100 times in a row. However, since it sounds like there is no cost to enter whatever this contest is, I don’t think I’d really care enough about picking something like that, unless the payout is truly exorbitant.

So, keeping in mind the stakes like that, I think it would have to be video game related. Maybe a game from the Battle Royale genre, like Fortnite or PUBG. Not sure how well this would work out, but it would be fun.

Maybe we could do highest placement rather than just flat out winning. As long as I placed high enough each time, it wouldn’t matter if I won the round of the game, because winning the match against the person would be what counted. If this were the case, then I’d say I have a solid chance. I’m decent enough at Fortnite these days, and I have a rough understanding of the general tactics employed by more skilled players, so I have a better chance in that regard.

Let’s run with that. Fortnite, with highest placement in each match up against 100 people, one at a time. Seems fair to me!

Acting IN character to feel out of character

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What is an out of character thing you have done?

https://thecoffeemonsterzco.com/blogs/midnight-blogging/journaling-prompts

Honestly, when I read this prompt, I’m taking it to mean something along the lines of acting out of the norm in your day-to-day life. Like, you made a choice to do or say something that doesn’t make sense for who you really are.

That being said, I don’t recall any times like that!

I do recall, however, several times where I’ve had to act “out of character” because I was playing a game involving improv. Specifically, Dungeons & Dragons, because for some reason I decided to play a goblin artificer character and one of my buddy’s ended up playing my goblin brother. I’m not shy or averse to doing voices, and I think I do a rather okay imitation of a goblin from the game Warcraft 3, so the two of us did our best goblin voices anytime we felt the need to act IN character which itself was something that felt out of character for me!

So, I didn’t do the goblin voice acting often, and sadly that particular campaign made it maybe two or three sessions before the DM decided they had other priorities and gave up (and this was the third time they had done this to us, so we stopped letting them run campaigns, which further led to us never speaking to him again, but for several reasons beyond just the game).

Acting is a tough gig, and voice acting is nothing to sneeze at, either.

Energy Suckers

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What are some activities or habits that drain my energy or motivation?

Not to be confused with Energy Vampires, those people that suck the energy and motivation out of you, but Energy Suckers are just about everything else. Unfortunately, there can be some overlap depending on how you go about handling different activities and habits.

For example, one of my favorite activities is playing Magic: The Gathering with friends. Usually this is a fun time, but every so often you just get into a bad round where nothing seems to be going right or you’re just not getting the cards you need to actually feel like you’re playing. You’re watching the person across from you draw card after card after card and just popping off on their turns while you’re stuck doing pretty much nothing. That’s one of those times where it just sucks the energy (and fun) out of you and you would rather just start a new hand or call it a night altogether. What can make it worse, in the “overlaps with Energy Vampires” area, is when you’re playing with someone else that happens to in a bad mood because THEY are in that unfortunate situation of not being able to do anything except sit on their hands, or this other person just happens to be a snarky asshole who likes to rub it in. I’ve actually stopped playing with some friends as often because they like to invite specific people that I just don’t vibe with anymore after too many nights of less-than-subtle jabs and taunts.

Similarly, this can happen with online gaming. Playing a specific game with people and when things just aren’t going quite right despite the normal challenges, it wears on you mentally. This is one of those things for why I never really played a lot of online multiplayer games back when I streamed a lot, and also something that baffles me as to why/how some people can slog through 8+ hours of their day playing a game that isn’t going to be fun. (Which is, sadly, what a lot of people do because they think it’s what they need to do if they want make it big in the streaming space.) What makes this more difficult is if you’re playing with random strangers and you again end up with, you guessed it, snarky assholes. (It’s one thing if they’re throwing shade at comedic times and also making themselves out to be the butt of jokes, but when they’re just full on harping on you alone and have absolutely zero positive attitude? That just sucks, period.)

Looking at other activities and habits, you can see the same things happen with them, and I’m sure I could go on and on about them but I won’t, or else I’ll just go on forever and seem stupidly nit picky. In the end, though, suffice to say, when something just isn’t going right and you’re struggling? That just sucks.

Current favorite game

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
View all responses

I’ve brought it up a few times before, but the table top card game Magic: The Gathering is probably up there at the top of the list of my favorite games.

It’s easy to get into, although, in the long run, it’s also not exactly super affordable. I say that because you can buy a pre constructed deck (referred to as a precon) for a reasonable price, but if you want to expand your collection and have more than one deck or play multiple styles then you need to buy more and more cards.

All that being said, the main reason I enjoy the game so much is because of how many different ways there are to play. There are so many cards, with hundreds of new cards being added each year, which makes it possible to build and rebuild decks over and over again. The rules are relatively simple but there are a lot of different mechanics to choose from and play with/against. The simple approach is: draw cards, play lands/mana (kinda sorta like the Pokemon TCG, if you’re familiar), cast spells, and do things with those spells until you win. How you approach all of this can be determine by the cards you want to play. Some give you more draw power, others make it so you can reduce the random chance of draw what you need by just letting you search your deck for what you want (within reason), and some cards will activate effects or abilities that do a wide variety things to affect your opponents.

Through all of this, you can come up with very straightforward strategies to win, or you can develop convoluted plans that require several cards to even get your strategy off the ground. In that regard, it becomes almost like a puzzle. A puzzle against time and your opponents putting together their own puzzle. Get the right cards, do all the things. And yet, on top of the element of chance, there is also a certain amount of skill involved. Guessing what your opponent is planning, getting cards to offset their potential plans and protect yourself, remembering the cards in your deck versus what you think they might have in theirs. It can almost be like an incredibly complicated game of poker.

So many facets that can each make the game more interesting the more you choose to play. Unless you’re hyper competitive and build your deck for it, no game ever plays out the same as others.

Passions

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

What are you passionate about?

If there is absolutely one thing I am passionate about, it’s gaming.

Not just one category of gaming either. I love video games, card games, tabletop games, all of them.

I know at least a couple people who don’t see the value or appeal in gaming, so I’m sure there are millions more out there. That just means they aren’t wired for that kind of entertainment, and I don’t let what they say deter me.

Gaming has evolved so much since the inception of the first dice and card games. There are even studies about the benefits of gaming!

Intricate story telling and artistic expression. Mechanics to challenge the mind and keep it sharp. Hand eye coordination. Group/team/social dynamics and strategy. There are many layers and facets to gaming that most people don’t see either because they just stick to one game or they never bothered to look.

Now, granted, the majority of games are on screens (just like social media) so nowadays it can greatly disrupt development of children’s mental and social skills if that’s how they spend all their time, but that is more a parenting issue than anything. Don’t let them have games or social media, or heavily restrict their exposure and interaction. Simple as that.

That being said, if you’re a parent who doesn’t mind your children playing games and you DO monitor and restrict their access, good on you! Depending on your values and priorities, you could let them play games that help them develop their math and reading comprehension. (Trust me, they’re out there. I grew up playing games like Math Blaster.)

Gaming can be amazing, and there’s usually something for everyone.

Brand quality and recognition

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite brands and why?
View all responses

When we’re talking about brands it really depends on the category of product. More often than not, I don’t particularly care about specific brands. Generic products are usually just as good as their brand name counterpart. The only time I truly care about a brand pick is when you don’t have many choices, like with gaming.

Gaming hardware is an area that is limited to just a few companies in the home console market, and computer components are kind of in a similar situation. Looking at consoles, my favorite brand has pretty much always been Nintendo. They don’t aim for the latest and greatest or most cutting edge technology when designing their consoles, preferring to go with well developed and tested modern components that they can try to stretch the limitations of (if you’ve played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you understand.)

For the computer gaming side of things it really depends on a component level to understand the wider landscape of brands. Graphics cards are limited to just a couple of primary designers/manufacturers (AMD, Nvidia, and more recently Intel) with many subsidiary brands that help with the manufacturing (such as Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc.) while CPU’s are limited to just AMD and Intel. You could get really down in the weeds when looking into building a PC and trying to select components from various brands. As for a favorite brand in this area, I would most likely pick AMD and EVGA. AMD specifically for their increased product development strategies of the last decade because they were fighting to catch up with Intel in the CPU/GPU markets (and finally getting to a very competitive position against Intel, who kind of stagnated their own hardware development by being complacent in their dominant position.) EVGA has had exceptional quality customer service (in my limited experience) when it comes to their GPU’s and PSU’s, so I’ve stuck with them for that reason.

We’ll leave things here for now, though, because I could probably go on for ages about the many different brands I like and why.

Streaming takes a lot

Taylor BurianLeave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
View all responses

I feel like the vast majority of people who see people posting dumb shit on social media and YouTube don’t fully understand the effort that can go into content creation.

Now, this also includes the people who decide to post that dumb shit, because a lot of them start off with the mentality “oh that’s easy, I can do that too, and I’ll make millions!” That’s not the case. At all. Granted, the most popular people on social media had to start somewhere but there is also the element of luck to consider.

Putting luck aside, the effort that the SUCCESSFUL people on social media and streaming platforms put in is incredible and varies depending on the style of content they’re choosing to create. In my case I can at least talk about streaming since I did that off and on for years as a hobby.

Most people don’t understand the amount of time and effort that gets invested into streaming. You might think it’s as easy as pushing a button to stream to the world and just sit at your desk playing games for a few hours, but there is much more to it than that. Especially if you have any intent to turn it into a “career” of some kind. You need the right equipment/software and know how to use it. You need to understand the target audience. What games do you like? What games do THEY like? What is your style of game play and audience interaction? Are you really good at a particular game, or are you clever/witty/funny? What’s the best time to stream at and can it fit into your schedule? How are you reaching your target audience to let them know you’re live? Are you streaming often enough? Are you limiting yourself to just streaming on a single platform or are you branching out somehow? What are the current trends in gaming? How do you get ahead of everyone and not feel like you’re riding on the coattails of big streamers who are nearing the end of their time interested in a game or genre? Boiling it all down into a singular question “How do you go from pushing the Live button to making it into a career?”

More and more questions your should be asking yourself the further you go down that rabbit hole. You can’t just record yourself doing something silly or dumb and expect to be famous the next day. People who experience that are incredibly lucky, and chances are it’s a flash in the pan kind of moment and it’ll never happen again. You can increase your odds of success by answering the questions I asked above and putting in the effort, but even then, it isn’t a guarantee.

If you want to break it down into something quantifiable like making a living then you can look into the numbers that are out there, but I can at least provide a hypothetical example for you to chew on.

on Twitch a Tier 1 sub costs a user US$4.99 before taxes. The streamer receives a 50% cut of that. Using nice even numbers that puts it US$2.50. If you were lucky enough to live in a part of the country where the cost of living was cheap, and you had no debts, and you could live off US$50,000 per year, what does that equate to in Twitch subs? That’s 20,000 subs. I don’t have the actual Follower to Subscriber conversion percentages at hand as I’m writing this, but if you were fortunate enough to have 20% of your followers convert to subs, you would need 100,000 followers on Twitch. Let me share a tweet with you all to offer some perspective. CommanderRoot shares a lot of fascinating statistics, and this tweet of theirs from December of 2020 likely still holds some truth to it in 2024. https://x.com/CommanderRoot/status/1336488690986717184

By the end of 2020 less than 4,000 streamers on the entire Twitch platform had greater than 100,000 followers. There are roughly 7,000,000 streamers on Twitch today in 2024, so assuming the numbers haven’t changed drastically between then and now we can do some more math. Using nice even numbers, if my math is right, that means approximately 0.06% of streamers on the entire platform meet the completely hypothetical criteria I set before. (Personally, I’d say the criteria are very optimistic compared to whatever the real numbers are.)

This is why I say most people don’t understand the effort that goes into streaming. If you want this to be a career and you have nothing else going for you, if you want to keep trying, then maybe someday you’ll get up there, but it’s going to take a TREMENDOUS amount of time and effort that you’re not going to get back, and this is all just in streaming on Twitch. At the core of all of this, you can figure out the basic idea and apply it to other forms of content creation, like writing. Follow the questions, follow the numbers, get your answer. No matter what you’re doing, do you understand it enough to know where to aim yourself?

Failure is the name of the game

Taylor BurianLeave a comment

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

I glanced at this prompt as I was getting ready for work this morning and used my short “meditative morning commute” to let my thoughts build themselves around the question.

FromSoftware has built up a reputation for making difficult games, however, the reality is that their games don’t follow or utilize many standard/common game design elements that the majority of players are used to. This made for the eventual creation of the “Soulsborne” genre of games. Brutally difficult for beginners, but exceedingly rewarding with that feeling of accomplishment when you make progress and beat a seemingly insurmountable boss.

Their game Elden Ring is no exception. In fact, it dials it up a notch!

You have the potential to build your character for any play style you choose (and yet you will invariably get your ass kicked at some point.) I always liked doing  dexterity builds, using light weapons for quick attacks and being able to dodge out of the way, so that’s where I started my character build. I ended up layering in magic quite a bit not long after starting.

Being a dexterity and magic focused build, my character was squishy. Not a lot of defense or health so most everything, not just bosses, could stagger or kill me in one or two hits. It took a while to get used to the timings of everything, dying over and over again, but eventually I did.

Every time I died, every failure, became a chance to try something different. Charging in and catching the enemies off guard? Checked. Sneaking in and pulling off a backstab? Tried. Attacking with magic from a distance? Sometimes a good start. Learning the parry timings? That eventually became paramount to my build. It took a lot of experimenting, learning different magics, finding and trying different weapons and shields over the course of more than a hundred hours just to get through the game.

There was one particular “hidden” boss that I got really stubborn about wanting to beat. I didn’t keep an exact count, but I probably died 60-80 times until I finally nailed down the parry timings and learned the distances I needed to work within to control the actions of the boss so that I could make it through the fight. Amazingly, I did it without a scratch in the last attempt, AND I have it recorded! If you’re curious you can check it out on my YouTube channel that I never really used.

Two or three hours of failed attempts, dying over and over again, boiled down to a three minute fight. The feeling of satisfaction at beating it was incredible!