Tag: video games

Getting lost in digital worlds

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What is your favorite hobby or pastime?

Well, this is easy to answer today.

Video games!

I want to throw out some clarifying information before diving into why I love video games. There’s a lot to be said about video games, and there’s always some kind of negative social commentary surrounding them, but those detractors are either isolated incidents with little supporting evidence or the issue is actually a symptom of something deeper.

What am I talking about? Well, lately, on social media (particularly Threads, for some reason) there’s this weird attention grabbing push from people who are asking questions like “Ladies, what’s a red flag/deal breaker for guys?” A lot of people are throwing video games under the bus here, and they’re saying things like “they’re a waste of time” or “they’re spending more time with games than with me/helping around the home” and things of that nature. (Ladies, I hate to break it to you, that’s an issue with the guy and his priorities, not the games.)

Video games have come so far from just being shapes on a screen. The stories and narratives. The interactivity and puzzles. It’s absolutely incredible! In many ways it’s better than just reading a book (I do love books, don’t come at me) or watching a TV show. There’s even a potential social aspect of them. Conventions, for in person stuff, or just online gaming in general. I know several people who met their spouses through online gaming.

The reason I love video games as a hobby is because in the same way I can get lost in a good book, I can get into the deep lore and narrative of a game. I can see someone else’s vision made manifest in a way that would be otherwise impossible, and further still I can take creative inspiration from them through this medium. (I know some people say video games aren’t art, and to you I say fuck off. The defining characteristics of “art” have changed over the centuries.)

So, excuse my rambling, but that’s I’ll leave you all with for today’s prompt. I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday!

Relaxation time

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How do you relax?

It’s really quite simple. Anything that I do that allows me to immerse myself into it and forget the things that have been stressing me out are things that help me relax.

Video games, reading/writing, painting miniatures while listening to music or podcasts (lately it has been Legends of Avantris and their Once Upon A Witchlight campaign on YouTube) and of course sleeping.

Each of these activities takes my focus away from the stressors of life and gives me a good distraction so that I can relax, often in an almost pseudo-meditative state of mind.

Just for one day

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What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?

There are way too many jobs to choose from for this question…

I think I’ll settle for being the president of a AAA video game studio. Not on one of their easiest or average days, but one of their busiest or more challenging days just to see what they need to be prepared to do. What kinds of choices they have to make, the pressure they have to deal with, and so on.

Brand quality and recognition

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Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite brands and why?
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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.

Topics I enjoy

Taylor Burian1 Comment

What topics do you like to discuss?

Anyone who has been following me on my journey of getting back into the swing of a consistent writing cadence might already know a few things I like talking about.

Video games and related media are a big thing for me. I could talk about strategies and tips/tricks or even just the history of games all day. With the exceptions of Racing and Fighting genres, I’m familiar enough with most of the rest to talk about (or at least understand) a huge variety of games. On console vs PC, how are they played, niches and tropes of the stories, design and functionality of game mechanics, the subjects run deep.

I’ve also spent roughly the last decade immersing myself into Magic: The Gathering, and I love talking about almost all the same subjects mentioned above because they’re just that similar! It makes it easy to jump from one to the other. There are almost 27,000 unique cards in the game and millions of people who play. This leads to a massive variety in deck designs across multiple formats as well as so many different play styles. I will add that I don’t play competitively and so I never really pay attention to that aspect of the overarching global Magic community. I just love playing the game and reading up on the stories/history of the characters and the worlds they come from.

I’d say those are the two biggest topics I like to discuss. I’m big into anime and manga as well, but I just don’t discuss it with many people or very often. Same goes for books and movies/TV. Occasionally a conversation drifts towards one of these topics and I can just go off on fun little tangents.

So, if you like the same topics/subjects as I do, maybe we can spark up a conversation about it someday.

Streaming takes a lot

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Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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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?

Where I’d go for a shopping spree

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Where would you go on a shopping spree?

I get that the idea is to just pick a store that has all kinds of things you really want and to not think too hard about the process or aftermath. Like, you go somewhere and buy thousands of dollars of stuff, but where are you going to put it? I bring this up because for some bizarre reason, when I first read this prompt, I thought IKEA just to be funny.

If I had a house of my own and needed to furnish it, I COULD go on a shopping spree at IKEA, but then I remembered I would be putting everything together myself. So, scratch that idea.

After that whole thought process ran its course, I thought about my hobbies. I could go somewhere like Best Buy for a shopping spree. New TV and sound system for a house, new washer and dryer, maybe a new fridge…wait, nope, did it again. I wouldn’t have room for any of it. So, maybe just the computer parts, monitors, video games and consoles. Stuff like that gets expensive, so a carte blanche shopping spree for all of that could be fun. Although, if I were to focus on that type of stuff I would be better off going to Micro Center because they specialize in computer parts. That would be the way to go.

Always looking to learn something new

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What is the last thing you learned?

This is hard to pick out. I haven’t kept track of the exact items or concepts I’ve learned recently, because I’m always looking to make sure I understand what I’m doing and improving myself along the way.

Of course, I’m also probably just making this out to be more difficult than it needs to be. If I didn’t want to think about this from the angle of “worthwhile lesson” I could just list off things I’ve learned from random YouTube videos that aren’t about useful life skills.

Oh well.

I guess I could just go down that route anyway.

I learned some interesting tricks that people use to speedrun Baldur’s Gate 3. Like the way that you can effectively carry an NPC while invisible, or you can carry a dead teammate in your inventory, so long as your character has a high enough Strength stat. In conjunction with carrying the body of a teammate in your inventory, you can also “reverse pickpocket” that teammate’s body into an NPC’s inventory and then use a teleportation skill that swaps positions between character and dead teammate.

Wild things happening in these any% speedruns. If I could have figured these things out on my own my first playthrough would have been WAY different.

My Year in Review for 2023

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It’s the second to last day of the year, I’m still laying in bed as I type this, and I didn’t even know where an appropriate place was to start looking back on the year.

Then I recalled I had received an email from WordPress about my blogs year in review, so I dug that back out and looked it over. Something didn’t match up, so I looked at my stats through the app and cross checked against what was on the actual website. That email sucked because it was generated too early for a proper “year in review”.

Anyways, on to what I actually accomplished for myself through the blog.

  • 1,440 views (greater than all previous years combined!)
  • 80 posts
  • Wednesdays are my best days
  • Best time is 10:00AM

I started my blog in late 2018 with the original intent of posting a couple of times a week or more, and building up from there. That obviously didn’t happen. I hit a mental block and felt like I was holding myself to too high of a standard starting out. Over the course of 2023 I had been constantly reminding myself of things like “nobody can read what you don’t write” and other mantras to try and psych myself up. Then I had a conversation with a friend that helped kind of nudge me in the right direction. So I started answering the daily writing prompts that show up in the Jetpack app. All of those 80 posts are from the last three months and nearly all are from those writing prompts. I just needed to get into the habit of posting regardless of the content, regardless of the length or word count, and ignoring that small voice of self-doubt. I just needed to do it.

Of those 1,440 views only 141 precede when I started writing again this year. That means roughly 1,299 views from days with newly written posts (I’m not going to nitpick how many views in the month of October were prior to starting again.)

Not sure why Wednesday is my best day of the week, but I know that 10:00AM is probably because I set a goal for myself to have my daily post written around that time. Usually, I had found time earlier in the morning to write, and initially I was thinking I would schedule my posts for 10:00AM to try and get that consistency but I said screw it and just dove in head first every day.

So that’s the blogs year in review. On a personal level outside of the blog? I guess I wasn’t really keeping track. I know Spotify and Steam did, which is always neat to look over. I’ll toss some screenshots of those below.

I’m not sure what else I could throw out to recap my year. The blog stats are what I was mostly concerned with anyways. For all of you that do read my blog, I appreciate it, and I hope to keep up with posting regularly for the foreseeable future!