I, as a child,
spent a lot of time reading and writing, but I also loved strategy games. This
meant I spent a lot of time running from larger kids who wanted nothing more
than to kick my ass.
This led to the
wonderful discovery of another hobby. I loved to run, jump obstacles, and climb
buildings. I discovered, in my adulthood, that a name existed for this
activity. Parkour.
I love the mindset
of parkour. I will run from point A to
point B no matter what. I will run over, under, or through whichever obstacles
I encounter. I will not slow down.
I joined various
parkour groups across the country (well, Seattle and Orlando, in any case). I
noticed that the other runners share a mindset. Whatever life threw at them, they treated it as just another obstacle to jump.
I met few runners
who whined about whichever hurtles life placed between them and their goals.
My hobbies today include
writing, reading, parkour (a.k.a. “free running”), climbing, weight lifting,
martial arts, travel, yoga, and activities that involve young women (once I work up the nerve to make my move).
I also love games,
from boardgames, to deck builders, to collectable card games.
I recently started
a small business called Darkwana Games. I designed, for my first product
(called Duelists of Darkwana—currently
in testing), a card game unlike any other, and I based it around my novel
series, Diaries of Darkwana.
I will, in the coming months, discuss this
game frequently in my blog, Darkwana.blogspot.com, which I
typically use to discuss my novel series.
You can find those
novels (based around Japanese mythology) on Kindle. I named the first book, Daughters of Darkwana (Never miss an opportunity
to promote, folks).
I love card games
for much the same reason I love parkour. I love the mindset it nurtures.
A situation will stand before me, and I
must, with the cards life literally dealt me, find a way to defeat that
situation. I can’t complain about the
resources I lack. I must win with the resources I hold.
People often deny
card games the credit they deserve. They hold wonderful, educational benefits.
You ought to encourage your children to play them.
Card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-gi-oh teach kids (and adults) a great
deal of math skills, to include probability and statistics.
They also teach
reading comprehension at an analytical level. When you read the near-legalese
rules of each card, you, as a player, look for loopholes, methods to exploit
those rules in ways that prove inventive, beneficial, and unpredictable.
I heard, on more
than one occasion, the concern that many of these games teach kids to gamble
via their booster packs. When people buy these packs, they hope to pull good
cards from them. They often don’t (some people claim themselves "amazing" at this, as if it involved a skill).
However, the
probability to pull the card you want from a pack sits printed upon that very
pack.
Like
scratch-off Lotto tickets, the buyer ought to know the odds. It seems better
that kids learn to calculate and appreciate such odds before they grow old enough to lose an entire paycheck in Vegas.
You won’t find
booster packs associated with Duelists of
Darkwana, which I’ll sell by the end of this year in multipacks of
“Character Decks.”
Some game
manufactures do take advantage of
their customers via cheap stunts One such
manufacturer might, for example, release every month or so an expensive,
overpowered card, only to shortly thereafter change its rules or ban it
outright from play.
The makers of the
Yu-gi-oh card game also made a cartoon show (actually, what happened there proves a bit more complicated, but
I won’t get into the details of the game-cartoon-comic relationship just now).
The cartoon demonstrated that kids could gain the admiration of their classmates,
celebrities, and people with ridiculously perfect bodies simply by playing
their game. That sort of brainwashing grows irksome.
The company,
Wizards of the Coast, who produce the card game, Magic: The Gathering, decided, a few years back, to start mass-producing overpowered cards for absurd amounts of money.
These sorts of gimmicks all but print money, but pale all those positive, aforementioned, education
benefits that come with these games.
Fortunately,
anyone who takes a trip to their local gaming store (a couple seem to sit on
every street in Seattle) will discover shelves that overflow with games that
rely on their balanced strategies more than on money-printing gimmicks.
I suppose that
brings us to the comparison of pay-to-play video games versus freemiums—which will serve as the subject of next week’s post.
I publish my blogs as follows:
Tuesdays: A look at the politics of
the entertainment world at EntertainmentMicroscope.blogspot.com.
Wednesdays: An inside look at my
novels (such as Daughters of Darkwana, which you can now find on Kindle) at
Darkwana.blogspot.com
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