This is actually my fifth article for 8bitfix. From a period of time between July and August, I had written a series of editorials giving my opinion about some recent news stories. I do intend to continue to do that sort of writing, but before I continue on with my writing for this site, I thought I was overdue for an introduction.
Hey.
My name is Mike Cervantes and I am a 29 year old El Paso native. I have an associate’s degree in graphic design, and in just one semester I will have completed my bachelor’s degree in creative writing and communication. I also have been working in a part time job as an assistant clerk at a local school for four years.
Since 2010, my close personal friend Ruben Rascon and I have taken up video cameras and combed El Paso in search of conventions, events and other cool geeky stuff. When we started, we were known as The Captain_M Show, but after about a year of production we took on about six other contributors, and in order to bring attention to everyone’s work, we started our own blog, called Augmented Reality.
Why is all this important? I mean, besides it being the story of my life so far? Well, I’ve established in these first few sentences that I am an extremely busy person. I work, I go to school, and I spend the majority of my free time going all around El Paso with a camera securing stories for my personal blog. It’s a fun and exciting time in my life to be sure, but it leaves precious little time for me to follow in a certain pursuit I’ve had since childhood. What is that pursuit?
Uh, you do know you’re on a gaming site aren’t you?
I’m not the busiest gamer in the world. Hell, the two people who founded this blog write articles, support local gaming tournaments, hold down jobs and raise children. No foolin’ man, they…RAISE KIDS! That automatically makes them way busier than I am! Also anyone who does this sort of work in a professional capacity, any tester, any developer, any programmer, any producer; they’re all busier than I am. The one thing I and all these other people have in common though is a true passion for gaming. We believe gaming to be important enough to write about them and make time in our schedules to promote gaming, despite the fact that all the time we use up our time furthering the prominence of our favorite hobby.
Most of us and most of the people who follow this site are making a transition in their lives. There going from a place where they played games most of their lives and amassed a large amount of fond memories about their childhood gaming conquests, and now as fully mature adults, they have to decide what kind of role gaming plays in their lives. A large amount of people decide just to keep on gaming; give themselves an hour a day they can plow through a campaign in an FPS. Another, more interesting in my opinion, group of people take what they’ve learned in maturity and try to apply their skills into making sure that video games continue to get recognized as a mainstream form of American art and entertainment.
Now, I don’t want to go on a whole big rant a’la Brian Schmoyer in his video essay “The Only Thing I Know,” but I do want to distinguish the road less traveled in this situation because it’s a noble one. People who work to write about gaming, program their own games, and eventually seek jobs in gaming are people who took their experiences from the TV screen and put them out for the world to see. They have the ability to look back at a youth in gaming as something positive and driving in their lives, and they want to do things that will help the notion of videogaming continue to be positive as well.
However, whether you simply continue to play games, or you do what you can to interact with gaming as a media, we are all faced with one particular obstacle: time. How do we balance gaming itself with how we hope to establish ourselves through gaming? How much do you have to play, or did you have to play, to be an authoritative gamer, and how important is it to balance the activities you’ve made in your life with gaming itself? Are you a disciple of the gaming culture, or a fan….or even a slave?
These are the questions I asked myself in my long hiatus from writing articles. I believe in the time I’ve taken away from this site, though, that I’ve come to some conclusions, and its these conclusions that are going to make up the basis for what I intend to write for 8bitfix in the future.
I give to you the experiment that is my life as a gamer so far, once a full time gamer bred in the early Nintendo days, to who I am now: a contributor to an open community blog. I will tell you about what life has been like since I’ve made some heavy decisions regarding the amount of gaming I do. How I went from spending hours blasting through a Nintendo game to mere hours polishing off a mission in Call of Duty between homework, lesson plans, and bed. I’m going to discuss experiences playing modern games in Reese’s Pieces and how those experiences compared to the full-on memorable gaming days of my youth. Hopefully, by doing this, I hope to answer for you those big questions we all have about growing up as a gamer.
Largely what I will be writing will be coming from my own experience, but in addition to that, and any current gaming news stories I wish to discuss, I would also appreciate it if I heard from you. Let me know how you feel about my perspectives, and my experiences, and let me hear some of your own as well. You can do that by leaving comments below these articles, hitting me up on the 8bitfix board, and even e-mailing my blog’s address: augmentedrealitymag@gmail.com. Let’s work together to paint a picture of what it means to be a marginal gamer…someone who hopes to give the wealth of their gaming experiences to the forthcoming future gaming generations.
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