Hello, Team. Once again another week, another chat, and what’s becoming true to form I’m writing this article at work at an ungodly hour of the morning when no man should be awake (STOP STARING AT MY COMPUTER DAN OR ELSE I’LL SHOW YOU THE MEANING OF REPRESSED MEMORIES). This week I figured we’d take a break from turning you all into devote warriors of gaming good. Let’s instead get to know each other a bit more personally with a series of events where gaming has affected real life, does that sound like fun? Doesn’t matter, because that’s what we’re doing.

While it’s true that I am the voice of the people, I can’t say that I speak for everyone, I mean, there are still some hold outs yet to be converted to our cause (I’m looking at you Division and Far Cry preorders), but video games affect far more than just what I do in my spare time. They influence the music I listen to, the exercises I do, the language I use, jobs I pursue, and ideas and values I hold paramount at any given time, and I believe that if you look deep into your hearts you’ll find, my Team, that you will see something similar in your lives as well, but you don’t want speculation you want specifics. You want to peel back the layers of mystery and enigma surrounding this champion of justice, yours truly, so here’s a couple of stories where video games have influenced my music taste, my work out programs, and my means of gathering food.

It was some years ago. I was still a young and hopeful lad in high school, senior year to be exact, and aside from the normal whimsical and wonder that such a young age brings I was playing World of Warcraft with several friends. We were so young then, so green. We didn’t know what gear scores were, we thought purple items were the end all be all of gear, and that every profession had its merits. This was the mindset I would have daily coming home from school and logging on, waiting patiently while Limewire blasted a series of songs specifically designed to enhance my time in Azeroth. Then it happened, I hit level 40 and I got a mount. A black nightsaber. 500 pounds of sleek fury and speed. I tried a wide range of Andrew W.K. songs to make my extensive rides on my battle cat even better, but it was for naught, something was missing, something obvious. Ronnie James Dio. Holy Diver. “Ride the tiger”! This was what I needed to not only complete my WoW experience, but my life as a whole, and so it began. 6 months I ran around the world of Warcraft blasting Holy Diver into my headphones and yelling in global chat “RIDE THE TIGER” forsaking all guild duties and questing responsibilities. Dio quickly become the favourite on the iPod, even though I only listened to the one song. I became obsessed. Any time I would pull up to school my arrival was marked with the pounds chords and face melting solos of metal, and most likely would have gone on for much longer than six months if I hadn’t of gone to college to discover what poverty truly was.

I wasn’t always the survival savvy pinnacle of masculinity that I am today. There was once a time where I wouldn’t have lasted 20 minutes out in the wilderness on my own, but all that changed the day the survival games attacked. It started modestly, watching streams of Day Z until I heard of this new survival game called H1Z1. Not wanting to invest in a game I heard had very difficult controls and being new to survival games as a whole I found it the perfect match, so I bought my first Early Access game and started my journey to manhood. Like many, I was almost overwhelmed by the concept of survival in a game. If I died, I didn’t just respawn, I started over. All those berries, all those branches I had collected, gone, but I soon started to get the hang of it, and before long I was starting each session with a handcrafted bow. It went slowly for many weeks until I was unable to resist and Googled “Survival Tactics for the Wild”.

The amount of research I did in a short amount of time was ground breaking and I learned more in a three month period about outdoor survival than I forgot about surviving the periodic table. If there was a particular trap I used in game, I would learn that trap in real life and apply it to the various creatures that inhabit the local parks. Only when I was able to eat three times a day would I then take my knowledge away from urban survival and into the wild for a true test of practicality. It has now become a tri-annual tradition for several friends and I to go into the Colorado wilds bringing only the tools required to capture and make what we need, and enough climbing equipment to start three or four gyms, and speaking of climbing…

I was playing the last Assassin’s Creed game, Black Flag, with a roommate I had at the time. Easily one of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had. Naturally I wanted to be Edward Kenway. I was doing a workout that consisted mostly of Muay Thai in the morning, then either some boxing or rock climbing at work when I got off at night. After ACBF, I stopped everything except the climbing, and I got to say, I came pretty close to my goal. I’ve been climbing for years, but I never made the progress I did when I started doing it twice a day every day. It went so far that I even went to the local thrift shop to buy cheap clothes to modify into a more piratey looking ensemble to wear when I would climb. As some of you may know it’s common practice to listen to music when working out, usually something to get you in the mood, get the blood flowing, get you pumped up. The Pirates of the Caribbean theme was what did it for me at the time, and I had enough pull at the local climbing gym to put it into playlist.
So, there are just a few instances of where gaming has…influenced…my li…DAMMIT DAN I TOLD YOU TO STOP LOOKING AT ME WHEN I’M TRYING TO WRITE!