I remember attending an event once for the Scottish College Development Network or something very similar to that title, I attended with a group of students who I had created a computer game with. We were invited to show off our game at an event called “The Festival of Dangerous Ideas” I was so proud of our little side scrolling platform game. At the beginning of the day we were asked to use a hashtag #gforlearning and then the name of the event and give our own definition of gamification; I said gamification was “Having a passion for gaming and involving in everyday life”. This tweet was picked out and said to be the stand out tweet for the meaning, not sure if I still stand by those exact words but the general description is still right.
I have always had a life long affair with computer games, I have always enjoyed playing them and getting involved with games. They are the best friend we need when there is nobody around, or they can be the bond that holds a friendship together when we grow up and drift apart. I have used them as a distraction my whole life, I will play games to keep myself occupied and stop myself getting bored or dwelling to much on past troubles. I understand this is all a little bit dark but this is a blog and not a typical news article.
On a lighter note, I have seen a few new talented writers coming into the XBLG fold and this in turn is increasing the output of articles that we are able to turn out each day. These are people that are also passionate about writing, together we are putting our gaming lives out there for people to read and in turn contribute back to us. This website is not a 1 way function, we encourage back and forth with our members so we get an idea of what is working and what is not. As well as the writing our YouTube channel has seen increased views in the past couple of weeks with the semi-regular videos we are managing to get out when time permits. I am not sure if people realise that we do this work for the site because we are all passionate about gaming and we do not get paid for this. Some of us are students, have jobs, families or other prior commitments, we come on here and write these things because we all want to get involved with the games industry in one way or another.
In the past few years I have attended several gaming shows and events where I meet up with other gamers, we are a humble bunch by nature. I never see malice or anger at an event, we are a generation of people who like to duel; but instead of acts of physical violence and sportsmanship we would rather let our skills at games do the talking. I have met my fair share of idiots and morons every time you place a head set on in an online game, this is now a stigma attached to online gaming. The good thing about the online gaming aspect is head sets are optional and you are in no way forced to converse with people who are half you age and seem to boast about sexual antics with half your family members.
I did not know really where I was going with his blog when I started typing it up, truth is I wanted to talk about aspects of games. Though maybe this is a good chance to actually start a series of blogs entries and see where it goes. I started writing for XBLG in September 2014 and so far have tripled my twitter (@Cetrie) followers and found the act of writing very rewarding. I love this community and where it has came in the past 30 years and where is going to go from here. I still believe gamification is involving and taking aspects of gaming and integrating them into real life, it is just interesting to see where levelling up will take us next.
If you have any questions or comments then please feel free to contact me on – [email protected] or on twitter @Cetrie
Till next time, thanks for reading guys and gals.
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