Introduction and thoughts

Good day to you all, and thank you for visiting my page.

This is an experiment of sorts. An attempt to create compelling content, absolutely, but perhaps also to give shape to the thoughts and ramblings regarding the gaming industry, the gaming community, game design and all of the other parts that shape my favorite passtime and hopefully my career. One day. For now, I am just a hobbyist with no affiliations, thinking and talking about an industry that is young, interesting, twisted and amazing.

I have been a gamer since I was 4-5 years old, as much as gaming at that age goes, with a slightly used Atari 2600 and a copy of Pitfall. I had a brief time as a content manager at RPGamer.com, jumping in on their podcast and even doing a couple of reviews (For The Last Remnant and Drakensang, if memory serves). I had an amazing time and I got a taste of what being on that side of the industry was like. A voice to discuss and maybe even in a small way affect gaming. I miss it. I think that's part of the reason behind creating this blog.

My name is Victor Balbian. I am a 27 year old guy living in Houston, TX. I'm a cartographer, a father, a husband and a gamer. It's the best way I know to define me. I have a lot of varied interests like anyone else. I love tabletop gaming, playing guitar, cooking, eating, fake documentaries, dark comedies, good fiction, low fantasy, hip hop, reality TV and a few hundred other things that I've done or want to do. I love to indulge, to experience each and every situation I find myself in to it's most satisfying resolution.

In theory, anyway. Most of the time I'm trying to balance school, bills, a relationship, a daughter, a very involved mother, several types of social circles and the constant threat of depression. Gaming is a lot of things to me, but it's definitely been an escape. It was a place to accept a set of rules and excel through them in a matter of hours. Minutes, even. It was a treat, a band aid and a cigarette all at once. Gaming interests me, there's no doubt about that, and I mean to make a career of it. But how often I used that as a syringe instead of a source of focus, I don't know.

Video games to me are important because they are the epitome of that very human ability to be creative. To imagine complex worlds and overcome challenges for the fun of it. A good book let you find a world to get lost in. A good movie made you feel like you were part of the adventure, all knowing and all seeing as characters we could relate to had experiences we could understand. Good music ties to a primal sense of emotion that at its best can evoke extreme and meaningful reactions from thin air. But they all lacked the one thing that games in general provide. The ability to change the course of events. To step away from that ethereal role of the watcher and become part of the experience. It required centuries of human thought and progress before the first games came to be, but their existence adds a humanity, a deep undeniable bond to those otherwise strange creatures that existed six thousand years ago. Out of all of the human activities, I think the most human is to have fun.

In the coming months I plan on trying to create some video content tied to a Twitch and YouTube accounts under The Pixel Professor. I'm not quite sure what I want to create yet. I have a lot of ideas. I find design interesting and important, and I think that exploring it would be both fulfilling and potentially very interesting. I was also a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and find the idea of doing a Let's Play very compelling, albeit possibly one that's somewhat scripted to provide a consistency to the format. And I will use this to document every step of the way. I need an outlet. There was a time in my life when my ideal life involved writing the next great American novel. I don't think that's where I want to go, but writing is cathartic to an amazing degree for me. I miss it, and I hope to use this platform to recapture what I've lost, to learn, to challenge, to explore and to analyze this industry, the games, the people and the art. 

Thanks for reading. Let the adventure begin!