My New Year's Resolution: More of the Same, Just a Year Older

The first few weeks of the new year have just went by. Day after day, things have gone by just like any other day. As my Dad joked while dropping me off to work on a foggy, gloomy January 1, "The streets are the same. The houses are the same. Even the house numbers are the same. They're all just a year older." That joke basically sums up my pursuit of an independent game development career: unchanged beyond being a year older. As things stand, I still live here at home browsing the Internet, playing video games, reading a book or two, keeping my anxiety in check via medication, and work the same part-time job to generate income. I admit I've come a long way in striving to achieve my goal of attaining a career. I confess that I haven't done as much practice as I would've liked due to various circumstances, some beyond my control and others that are entirely my fault. There are still things I need to work on first before I can start game development on a more regular basis.

My New Year's Resolution: What Went Wrong in 2020 and How Things Could Be Better in 2021

In spite of all that's happened in 2020, I'm still here. Never giving up my goal to one day become a full-fledged independent game developer.

Let's face it: the year 2020 has sucked for a lot of us due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In one form or another, we have all felt the effects on our health, our sanity, and our daily lives by the virus, the media/Internet-fueled panic, and the various measures taken by this country's state governments in an attempt to prevent further infections. Many lives have been lost to the virus including those of our family and friends. Various businesses have been forced to adapt to various social distancing measures, sanitation protocols, and stay-at-home orders in order to keep running. The businesses that could not, including various nonessential ones like comic book shops and movie theaters, went under. Many people have had their jobs impacted or lost. And here I am just trying going about my daily life while also looking for ways to get my video game development career off the ground during this whole mess. And while me and my family have been fortunate enough to not be infected by COVID-19, I honestly wish things could've been better during 2020 in more ways than just staying healthy and sane.

My New Year's Resolution aka How I Plan to Move Forward in My Video Game Career

As you can probably guess, that me sitting in my makeshift studio office.

With the latest Christmas festivities behind and the first day of the new year upon us, most people would treat it like any other day by either going about their daily lives or just lazing around. Others would take the opportunity to reflect on the past year and set up new goals and resolutions as to what to do for the new year until the beginning of the next one. I myself am part of the latter, the resolution being to have a career in video game development and design. For 4 long years, I've been making these resolutions only to have some of my goals partially met and others having not been met at all. A majority of my attempts to meet my goals have been met with stagnation, procrastination, distractions, mental blocks, oversleeping, and numerous incidents of needless pacing, overflowing anxiety, and passive clicking on the Internet. The overall result of these setbacks has been the lack of progress and not much materials to add to my portfolio. Rather than wasting more of my time pounding a square peg into a round hole, I've spent a considerable amount of 2019 reminding myself of these setbacks, reflecting on what I've been doing wrong, collecting and absorbing new sources of inspiration for my video game ideas, keeping on top of what's going on in the video game industry via the Internet, planning new approaches to productivity, and thinking up ways I could discipline myself.

Announcement: Upcoming Changes to Cyberjack

Due to various circumstances, changes are going to be made as to what posts will be written on Cyberjack. As I continue to prepare for a career in game development in addition to other things, my commitment to blogging has diminished over the years. Recently, I have started writing posts for IndieWatch.net, a website that seeks to connect independent (aka indie) game developers and gamers by gaming culture. As of this writing, I currently have two articles posted on the site: one that covers how possessing a college degree would not necessarily lead to a job in the video game industry and one that discusses ways in which to manage the stress of a college senior game project. Given that my writing tends to be one of my greatest strengths, I have been recently making plans to write more posts related to game development for the site as well as sponsored posts as a means of generating income. As part of those developing plans, I had thoughts about taking Cyberjack in a new direction without abandoning its roots, which is my passion for video games. But rather than merely sharing that passion by posting about random video game related topics as I had done in the past, I'm considering using Cyberjack as a way to connect with the gaming community at large and also to bridge gaps between that community and the society outside of it. To that end, the following key points illustrate the new direction I have in mind for Cyberjack:

Paying to Win, Progress, and Level Up: The Road to Industry Suicide?

From top left to bottom right: Candy Crush Saga, Farmville, Dungeon Keeper Mobile, Call of Duty: WWII, Assassin's Creed: Origins, and NBA 2K18. These games contain in-game currency that allows players to purchase extra lives, faster progression, and increased chances of getting desired items via randomized loot boxes.

In an age long since past, video games were an avenue of pure adventurous escapism in the eyes of those sitting on the floor or couch across from the TV in their living rooms or bedrooms with a controller in hand, being close to their computers with their fingers flying across the keyboard, or hanging around with friends at a local arcade. The moment we ran our PCs and consoles or insert our quarters into the arcade machines, gamers of my generation, myself included, were transported into various worlds uncovering treasures, slaying monsters, uncovering secrets, going through stories rivaling those of other media, feeling like badasses, and experiencing the thrill of getting a high score to show off our skills. These times were what we would call the Golden and Silver Ages of gaming. But since the latter half of the 7th generation video game era, we have entered what a lot of us would probably call the Dark Ages.

When A Video Game Reboot Goes Wrong

Ever since Pong arrived on the scene around four decades ago, there have been titles that stood out like a few golden needles in a massive stack of bland hay. This was possible by possessing unique, and sometimes original, features for such games, whether they involve gameplay, art style, or story. But as the years went by, such unique titles have been set aside as the video game industry moved on in technology and popularity; they are still remembered fondly by long-time gamers, sold in specialty stores, and sometimes re-released on anthology disks and in digital stores. Yet companies, often publishers, still search for ways to continue making money off of those titles. One fairly common way of doing so is by rebooting those titles. Reboots of this sort tend to be done by making considerable changes to gameplay mechanics, level design, graphics, art style, and storytelling while maintaining the core concepts of what made the original games special in the first place, reinvigorating them for both old fans and newcomers. While there have been success stories, there have also been many cases in which video game reboots went wrong, tarnishing the reputation of the franchises and, in the worst cases, destroyed the companies responsible for making them. As a more detailed description of this scenario, the following list contains of some the most infamous reboots in video game history, a good number of which have been mentioned in most top five or ten lists of the worst video game reboots around the Internet. It should also be noted that this list is not set in any particular order.

A Connecticut Town’s Plan on Collecting and Destroying Video Games: A Sign of Moral Panic

(Originally posted for The Voice of Heard on January 4, 2013)

Last night, I read a Gamespot article that briefly describes how community leaders at Southington, Connecticut are planning to have volunteers give away violent video games, CDs, and DVDs for destruction in exchange for “a gift certificate to a local restaurant, the Lake Compounce amusement park, or a bowling alley.” This is in the wake of last month’s shooting at the neighboring town of Newport that left 20 children and 6 adults dead. While they are not directly linking the games to the tragic incident, the organizers said that this is “suitable time for parents to engage their children in discussions about whether or not playing violent games is appropriate” when “there’s evidence that [they] cause increases in aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and desensitization about actions of violence.”