Games are great.

Computer games are an artform. People seem to overlook this fact. They are the cutting edge expressive entertainment. There is nothing more rewarding for me than sitting in front of my PC or my Xbox 360 and spending a couple of hours in a well-crafted world, actively bringing a good storyline to its fruition. The sort of games I'm talking about aren't your FIFA's or your multiplayer deathmatch FPS's. I'm talking about games like Oblivion of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Games like these have storylines that draw you in and can make you forget about the passage of time completely. They compel you to play them.

I have always been a solitary gamer. I do enjoy multiplayer Goldeneye or Mario Kart but, for me, the real meat of gaming comes when I can sit down on my own and play some deeply involving game. I remember, quite vividly, the day I completed Deus Ex. It was a Saturday and I sat down about 2 in the afternoon. As the levels progressed and I was drawn deeper into the conspiracies that Ion Storm had layed out I forgot about the outside world. I completed it that night and viewed all three endings. It was most exhilarating. I looked up from my screen and noticed that it was still daylight outside. Then I looked at my watch and realised to my amazement that it was 5.30am! My point is that, like a good book, you can get drawn in and you don't want to put it down until you see what happens next. I find myself saying, "I'll just finish this next level..." then 3 hours have passed and whatever I was going to do has fallen by the wayside. One of my crowning achievements was the day I completed Neverwinter Nights. Bioware games are amazing and they're excellent value. Bioware are the Amish workers of the computer game industry. They build their games better than most others and they make them one and a half times longer than other developers. There is nothing worse than getting to the end of a game and going, "Is that it?". Games cost a lot of money these days and so I want a game that has a long life. I want 100 hours of gameplay in rich environments. I want Baldur's Gate or Morrowind. Games like these are amazing examples of my parallels with a good book but they're so much more. The character in these games is customised and personalised so it is you and you decide how the story pans out. With these games the stories are fairly linear but not two gamers will have the same experience when they play it. Its better than a book because you're not just told what happens, verbatim. You decide how it happens. The journey is yours.

The artistry is in the construction. It is bringing life to stories and environments that draw you into them. We need developers to keep pushing the boundaries of their imagination. That's where the art is. The creativity that draws you into a story and makes it unfold around you is what we need more of. We need developers like Bethesda, Rockstar and Bioware to keep doing what they do. These guys make games art.

The beginning.

So I've started a blog. Thanks for the advice Mathew.

Right now I have a problem. This problem is one that most geeks and indeed most people will experience at one time or another. Money. Not every geek is Bill Gates and most of us have to make do with meagre scrapings from minimum wage jobs to keep us in comics, cult movies and videogames until we find that amazing golden goose of an ideal job. So I'm poor, largely to do with the large credit card bills and minimum-wage-job hopping.

Currently, to alleviate the situation I chose to settle into a job as a chef in a new restaurant in the West End of Glasgow. Its a very trendy bar/restaurant affair with a menu comprising of brunch, the ubiquitous sandwich and soup combinations, some tapas, a crazy vegetarian, uber-healthy salad, and the usual selection of steaks, burgers and a fish curry thrown in for good measure. The slightly over-ambitious nature of the menu is complemented by the ludicrously tiny kitchen which make service anything but easy unless one's setup is perfect. Here we discover that I am, at least in part, one of those very annoying types of geek, a food geek.

Allow me to explain, food geeks, I mean proper food geeks, are a special breed of geeks. They comprise, mainly of chefs of an above average skill level, who believe that their culinary talents elevate them to a god-like status as far as food matters are concerned. In other words, we are a bunch of snobby know-it-alls who like nothing better than eating good food and criticising it in the minutest detail. The only sort of person who is worse than a food geek is a restaurant critic. Food geeks can be found in the kitchens of pretentious bars and restaurants in the parts of towns where rich, trendy and quaint all meet to form and environment so wanky and pretentious if it were a person it would form some sort of perverse ouroboros loop with its head firmly and decidedly lodged up its arse. Everywhere you see a menu item accompanied by a herb jus of a soup named after some exotic region of the world then there is bound to be a food geek in the kitchen. Anyway, enough of that nonsense.

I should have used my powers for good but I became a chef by pure accident. Here I was looking for a summer job while I was at university and thought, "I could be a dishwasher".Next thing I know I'm throwing together sandwiches and piling salads high enough to rival the Empire State Building. A pasta here, thai curry there and next thing you know I'm working full-time at an award winning restaurant whilst trying to finish my final year at university. It could only end in tears. And it almost did. One year and almost £20,000 worth of debt have pinned me to a life of sevitude until I can pay penance for my sins and rejoin normal life. One day perhaps I will look back on this moment fondly and say, "Ah, those were the days". Probably though, I'll be thanking whatever lucky stars that have shone upon me that I'm not in a bloody kitchen any more.

Anyway, back to the point. The point of my blog is to discuss my various geeky interests with anyone who is unfortunate enough to read this blog. I'll probably end up talking rubbish about the latest storyline in Punisher or complaining about the price of the latest high-end graphics card. But hopefully I might just say something interesting every once-in-a-while.

Welcome to my world. I'll pass out the Koolaid at the end. You first.