I’m not entirely certain on where to start here, so I’ll start with the events that have precipitated this post.

Afew friends of mine are having some troubles with their courses at the moment. One is tearing himself (we’ll call him Fred) up with worry over the last few weeks and deadlines associated with the end of his course at University level. The other is trying to finish her college education in states, where she is several years behind schedule (due to being home-schooled as she moved around the world during her childhood). We’ll call this girl Jill. Hell, I’ve been through the mill when it comes to formal education so I can empathise with them to some degree. I am, for all intents and purposes, a highly intelligent under-achiever. Due to the way my learning brain is skewed, I have a great deal of difficulty absorbing text-based information, be it textbooks, lecture slides or simple oratory/narration. Which is odd, because my reading and writing skills are pretty spot-on. I’m not author, but I have no problems with spelling and vocabulary. I even have a reasonable grasp of grammar, though you may never believe it to hear me speak The problem is actually so extreme (approximately 12 percentile here aka right at the wrong end of the bell-curve) that it affects my short-term working memory unless I am focused on the task at hand. Conversely, all other areas of my learning brain are top-notch. Above average, usually massively so, with a couple of areas being in the high-90s, bearing in mind the level of accuracy for the Cognitive Processes tests involved here were about 1%. Be that as it may, I scored a respectable but not exemplary 3 As, 3 Bs, 3Cs and 2 Ds at GCSE (exams taken at 16yrs old in a variety of subjects); a somewhat lacklustre B, C, D at A2 (full 2-year A-levels taken 16-18yrs) and an E at AS (a 1-year “half” A-level) levels. This always baffled my teachers as I routinely scored at the top of the list in the various intelligence tests that we did every couple of years at my secondry school.

So that might sound alittle like blowing my own trumpet to some degree but you should understand the degree of frustration that comes with this. I know I’m smart. People around me know I’m smart (and that’s not from me shouting it out all the time, I do not do this as a matter of course). Yet I can never seem to attain the expectations that are placed upon me by my peers, my betters and worst of all, myself.

The one thing I am, is incredibly lucky. Though it was very very late in the game, I did manage to find these things out about my learning brain (with the help of the wonderful support staff at my University), along with pointers on how to approach things in the future. Too late for my degree, alas; and not directly applicable to Fred and Jill. These 2 people are far from stupid, I can understand their frustration. Fred’s brain works alittle like mine (but not so extreme), but both of them have in common one terribly important feature. They both have had, or still do lack a degree of faith in themselves.

I’m lucky again, it seems. I was a very shy child, naturally an introvert. But through circumstance and alittle self-training, I have nurtured myself into someone who is relatively confident, has that supposedly all-important “can do” attitude (for the most part anyways, just don’t ask me to stop eating chocolate ), someone who can lead a group, mediate between people, confront problems and is quite happy standing up in front of thousands of people or afew respected peers and giving some form of talk. This puts me in good stead, for if only my grades spoke for myself I would truly be doomed.

This aside, the issue of self-confidence is a very important one. For instance, I used to adore Mathematics. It went hand-in-hand with my love of the Sciences, especially Physics (which has never left me), right up until A-level. I had even petitioned the school to allow myself and afew other students to take a “Further Mathematics” course. Compressing the original 2yr A-level into 1 year and doing another 2yr A-level in Mathematics in the 2nd year. This all went horribly wrong when they brought in the worst kind of teacher (indeed the worst actual teacher) that I have ever had the misfortune to meet, let alone be supposedly taught by. In 1 week, this teacher absolution annihilated all confidence I had left in whatever academic abilities I was struggling to maintain (I had no idea I had any kind of learning difficulty at this time and had only myself to blame for the years preceding and another 4 after this). I was effectively broken. I turned from Mathematics with only a form of hate in my heart for several years. With alittle practice, alot of maturity and the wonders of hindsight I have since regained some of that joy and some of that confidence in certain aspects of my academic life.

But I have noticed, time and time again that the system of education that we have maintained for thousands of years (through studying written texts and such) is failing more and more people. The worst part of it is, it seems to fail the best of us, by the greatest margins. I’ve worked with some pretty smart people at University, people who far excel me in technical ability and from time to time they’ve gotten stuck or got into some kind of fugue over their work. More often than not, it just takes alittle talk about it, break it down alittle and afew simple statements of encouragement. But encouragement isn’t really the right word. They are more statements of faith. Faith in their ability to succeed. For an awful lot of people that is all it takes. “You will get through this/work this out”. Not “I’m sure you’ll work it out” or “It’ll come to you”. You Will. Truly amazing how much power alittle faith has.

This got me thinking about some musings I’ve had in the past about religion (uh-ohes! yes, this blogger is going there) and such. Alittle background would be appropriate here. When I was younger (around 10 or 11 and for afew years after that) I went to sunday service/school at a Trinity Methodist Chapel. I didn’t consider myself to be religious, I don’t really recall what ideas I had about God at the time. My family isn’t religious, I might add. That eventually stopped (though I still feel the need to enter a church or cathedral on occasion – cathedrals fascinate me incidentally, but that’s a story for another time) and some years later I was madly in love with a girl who though not religious herself, had a pastor for a father and indeed both her parents were missionaries. I’d been through my atheist phase by then and described myself as agnostic, as I still do to this day. They weren’t initially happy that I wasn’t a believer but they came to grips with that as they got to know me. I’m not sure if they intended this but I developed a great respect for religion from knowing them. Religions were alittle abstract to me before then, certainly complicated and dangerous at times. Here I must clarify; it is not a religion that I find deserving of respect, it is the Faith behind such endeavours that is truly amazing. It occurred to me, afew years after that relationship had run it’s course and I was well into my University degree, that it takes alittle Faith to inspire us to greatness. It might be Great Good or Great Evil, that is ultimately upto us, but it’s the action of faith that leads us there. Faith in a God or Gods, in spirits, past-lives, non/deterministic reality or probably most importantly ourselves. I maintain a faith in Humanity. It is an extension of the believe I maintain in and of myself, that I am capable of getting through whatever comes my way. That whatever happens, however the course of my life may change, that it will all work out for the best. Or at least not as bad as it could have been

So if you’ve read all of this, I firstly congratulate you. I’ve been very wary of blogging in the past because I’m not a natural sharer of myself. I worry about sounding abit too egotistical, which does happen from time-to-time. Secondly though, I implore you. I implore you that the next time a friend, collegue or loved one is suffering from a crisis of confidence in themselves, no matter how small, you must instill alittle bit of that confidence back to them. There is very little that we cannot accomplish with alittle determination, alittle graft and alittle confidence.

Uhhh… not quite.

In short, I am a gamer. Since I moved to Wales when I was about 6 or 7 and my ‘rents bought me a Megadrive. Skipping all the boring stuff, I wrangled a PC of my own back in my days of secondry school (that’s ages 11-ish to 16/18 for non-UK people), and thus began the addiction! Well, I wouldn’t call it that so much. I kept decent grades (not amazing, but that is a WHOLE other story ) and so on and so forth.

For whatever reason, after my A-levels, I applied for a whole load of courses – almost all of them either Physics or joint-honours Physics-Computer Science. Apart from one. Which was Computer Science with Games Development at the University of Hull. I thought “well I looove playing games, wouldn’t it be just AWESOME to be making them?!” plus the money seemed pretty good at the time .

Oh how wrong was I?!

Over the next 5 years, I bounced from one mind-bending disaster to another, eventually culminating in my formally withdrawing from my Masters year just afew days ago (don’t worry – I’d already failed back before Christmas, I was just hanging around). 

Now this may be sounding abit like a sob-story by now, and I apologise if that’s true but there’s afew really good bits I’m going to mention now.

Though I discovered I have a problem learing from text-based sources (books, lecture slides etc), I did discover that I love working in more organisation and community-based roles. I much prefer working with people than face-planting the keyboard  Two people that helped me see this were John aka Shuttler and Shawn Schuster when they invited me to cohost TabulaCast with John, as Shawn moved onto greener pastures. It was like a kind of epiphany (y’know, aside from the 1st show jitters) and the listeners were incredibly kind and supportive.

Now ofc, times have moved on abit, TabulaRasa has gone to the great server-farm in the sky and I’m currently co-hosting (albeit alittle quietly at times) Limited Edition with Shuttler and RockJaw. Which is great, I thoroughly enjoy chatting with them and discussing the ins and outs of comic-based MMOs and the movies but I have to admit that I am somewhat lost when it comes to comics. Not for lack of trying, I might add

So all throughout this, I have been gaming. I used to always prefer playing offline single-player games but as I discovered that there was a vast repository of people out there playing together, I began my move towards almost exclusively playing MMOs. Starting with Anarchy Online back in 2000-ish. A great game, terrible launch and it took awhile to wrap your head around the skills-system – I still pop back for a afew weeks out of every year for a pure nostalgia trip. I was all about the Fixer there, which is a bit of a support role. The kind of role I still gravitate to, to this day. I’ve played (and often beta-tested) such varied games as Saga of Ryzom, SWG, EQ2, LotrO, DDO, Eve Online, Planetside, WoW, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Vanguard, WAR, AoC, CoH/V and there’s a probably afew more I cannot think of right now. With few exceptions (notably AoC and Pirates of the Burning Sea), I have returned back to each of these games from time to time. Rarely spending more than a year away. That’s the kind of gamer I am. Not so much hopping from one shiney thing to the next but I go to a game to get something out of it. Eve satisfies the Sci-Fi urges I get from reading too many such novels; LotrO and CoH/V are both fulfilling a need to play with people and keep in contact with some great friends; Saga of Ryzom is beautiful, has a truly dedicated community and has the best skill-based progression system I have played to-date. Occasionally I just need to shoot things and that is what Planetside and Left4Dead are for

Alot of people criticise alot of games past, present and future for being X-clones. Be it Ultima, EQ or WoW. The fact of the matter is provided there’s alittle something different (I draw you to the ease of getting into RvR scenarios and the innovative form of PQs in WAR as an example), that adds alittle something different, then does it matter if it’s largely the same mechanics as a previous best-seller? Are the vast majority of people really after something truly revolutionary? I don’t think they are. Most people just want to spend some time un-hooked from reality and the worries that brings; maybe spending some time with friends too far away to see regularly, or maybe just across the hall.

So as far as I’m concerned, so long as you’re having fun, the rest of the whiners and the haters can go take a hike

The reason for this newfound desire to blog? Well, alot of my fellow bloggers (at least the ones I chat with regularly) are also podcasters and they are very very good podcasters. But that does, even by their own admission, leave their blogs to neglect after they’ve said all they wanted to say on the podcast.  Now, I’m a cohost on the (AWESOME) Limited Edition podcast, over at the VirginWorlds Collective which focuses primarily on comicbooks and comic-related IPs in the gaming world (things like Champions Online, City of Heroes/Villains, DCUO etc), though we’ll chat about most of anything really. My initial role on the podcast was to provide the “newbie” perspective against John’s wild enthusiasm and Stephen’s encyclopaedic knowledge and initially I did a respectable job in going “WTF?!”. The problem is, I’ve been brought up, or brought myself up I should say, on novels. Lots and lots of novels. I read all the time in school (even when I should not have) and I continue to read afew dozen pages of something every night before sleep. I read scientific journals, the news, blogs, epic patchnotes, novels, texts (though not the ones related to the topic I’m studying), all the fluff in the Warhammer 40K rulebook etc etc. I just enjoy reading. Which does not lend itself to enjoying comicbooks. I’m so used to interpreting a story in my mind, I just cannot get into a comicbook where it is all provided for me on a glossy platter.

So this is where I’ll be talking about things that wouldn’t quite fit on the podcast. I love doing podcasts, especially Limited Edition with John and Stephen. I find the format to be enjoyable both in it’s format and the scope (I find it much easier to communicate in speech than in text – more so than might seem obvious due to the wonderful nature of my addled brain). That being said – I’m very passionate about computer games in general (not just ones relating to comic IPs) and a myriad of other topics that may or may not have anything todo with computers at all, let alone gaming.

So over the next week or so, I shall be making regular updates (hopefully one a day) until I’ve covered abit of my background, where I’m at right now and where I’m going. Along with afew things which have been hiding in the back of my mind for awhile now.

Before I go, I implore all readers who haven’t (and even those that have) to visit www.yellowspandex.com, totheblogmobile.com, www.virginworlds.com, www.vanhemlock.com and www.massively.com .

These are maintained by some great bloggers and are certainly in my daily-visit catergory of sites