The Distracted Gamer

Welcome, this is The Distracted Gamer.  Like the majority of gamers, I’m (well) over 18, I’m also married, a parent (of 3, soon to be 4), and an employee.  I’m also a freelance programmer & blogger. 

And I’m a gamer.

I love computer games.  I’ve been playing them for years and years.  I can still remember sitting down as a kids with my dad’s old monochrome (orange & black FTW!) Toshiba laptop playing Moon Patrol.  One of my favourite all time games was Wonder Boy 3 on the Sega Master System

A few years back when the first Xbox came out, I pretty much dismissed getting one, we couldn’t afford it.  But my wife, wonderful woman that she is, secretly organised with all my friends and relatives to put in and they got me the Halo pack Xbox for Christmas.  I pretty much didn’t get anything else that year, but I didn’t care, it was awesome.

We couldn’t afford for us to by heaps of games, but I’ve got a fair few, and praise the Lord for the local Blockbuster & Civic video still stocking Xbox games since the 360, PS3 & Wii came out.

The point of this site is twofold:

1. To talk about the hobby of gaming while trying to maintain a ‘real’ life.  Gaming is pretty disrespected as hobbies go.  A guy could spend an entire weekend sitting in a boat fishing & he’d get more respect than a 30 year old who says he spends a few hours a week playing Halo or Half-Life.
2. To review games in the context of a ‘distracted gamer’.  That is, how long does it take to start up?  Are there tons of un-skippable cut-scenes?  No save points or really dumb placement of save points that make you waste time re-playing levels because you die 3 steps before the checkpoint?  For someone that only gets a few hours a week to play games, these things matter.  Also, I want to look at the content of the games, for example, is this game ok to play in front of the kids, or can they play it?

So who’s this site for?  Well it’s for gamers, but particularly gamers who’re short on time.  I can remember being a uni student & spending hours & hours playing games.  Mostly Quake or variants there-of (Ninja Quake, Air Quake, Chair Quake, etc…) in the uni’s computer labs.  It probably wasn’t the best use of my time or their resources, but oh well   Now I really can’t do that (and not just because I’m banned from the university’s labs).  I’ve got other demands on my time.  People call this ‘a life’, but I’m finding that this ‘life’ thing really cuts into your available gaming time!

So if you’re a gamer who’s sneaking an hour here and their to feed your addiction, then this site’s for you, welcome.  Please drop a comment to let me know who you are and what you play.  I’m pretty much platform agnostic.  A lot of posts here will probably lean towards Xbox and PC games, because that’s all I’ve got, but I’m going to try and get as much varied content in as I can.

But who are you really?

The Distracted Gamer is Glenn Slaven.  My tech blog is Development on a Shoestring.  My day job is as a senior developer for Fairfax Digital on the Drive site.  You can follow me on Twitter or on FriendFeed & I’ve set up a room on FriendFeed for this site, which is powering the Gaming News linkblog on the sidebar.

Game on!