Wooooow…
For some reason I have not been able to come up with the motivation to write about my trip to Las Vegas, partially because I have told it to so many people and partially because I do not believe that the people that might be reading this are from the same crowd as I am.
To sum everything up, very few teams actually attended MLG Las Vegas. Where there should have been in the neighborhood of two hundred, four man teams in attendance, there was about fifty. Keeping that in mind our placing is not what it would have been had there been a full crowd.
The first day was FFA aka Free for All (every player for himself in a race to amass the most kills in fifteen minutes).
I am pretty bad at FFA and I was not surprised at all when I got knocked out first round (still disappointing!)
The next day was the team games and that went ok for us, out of fifty teams we made thirtieth (semi pro bracket.)
Even though I don’t count it due to the lack of people technically we can say that we went to an event and got semi pro, which is about the top two hundred players in the world.
What did count and that thing I am the most excited about was playing against a Halo 1 pro (keep in mind that we have been playing Halo 2)
Halo 1 definitely is where I excel and it is my favorite game; getting to play it against someone who was a Halo 1 pro was a dream for me.
What happened next blew my mind. We agree to play 1v1, first on his host, then on mine (host plays a very large role.)
Both games I won with relative ease. A day later I we played some 2v2s (again on the Pro’s host) and we won four out of the five games we played.
I knew that I was good at Halo 1 but I never would have guessed that I was good enough to beat a Halo pro. The only thing that makes me sad is that I never had the opportunity to play Halo 1 while it was being played competitively or else I too could have been a Halo pro. Partially this is because of growing up in Alaska, cut off from the rest of the world. Another reason is that my mother did not want me to play “killing games”. Because of these two reasons I missed out on having something that few people in the world have the skill to take, a pro contract. That would have changed my life in such a huge way.
Parents, I urge you to really think before you stop your children from doing something. I have been playing “killing games” for years now and I have never, nor ever will without sufficient reason kill another person. This is because of the morals that were instilled into me by my parents, not because they stopped me from playing video games.
If anyone really wants to know more about my trip to Las Vegas or pretty much anything concerning video games, feel free to come talk to me.
-Jason
sadieak said,
November 4, 2007 at 3:59 am
Ok, so you say you’ve been playing “Killing Games” for years (I call them first person shooter games). I truly hate them. Gun safety’s first rule, is never point a gun at anyone….not even your dog, even if you have stapled him….hey that’s not nice!
My kids have grown up just fine, but they do have the same argument as you, I just don’t buy it. Look at the level of violence in our country, and you can’t chalk it all up to hormones in beef.
Read a book, talk a walk, talk to a friend, volunteer at the food bank, there’s lots to do, than shoot your poor stapled dog.
stapleyourdog said,
November 6, 2007 at 3:03 am
First off I would like to say thank you for taking the time to post your thoughts here, it shows a lot about you that you can disagree but still keep things civil.
The reason that I called them “killing games” instead of “first person shooters” or “fps’” simply to avoid confusion with the older crowd and other people that tend to be a little less knowledgeable about video games.
I agree that there is a high level of violence in our country, it is my opinion, however, that this is due to poor parenting rather than allowing children to play fps’, or even (I am loath to admit) watching overly violent movies.
I personally have never watched the any of the Saw movies, I am rather horrified not only that someone would create a movie like that, but also that it would be so widely accepted.
At first I would be temped to think that if someone were to watch those movies, it would not cause them to do violence, but they would already be open to the idea of using violence and that is why they would not be as affected by those movies.
However, I realized that that was to broad of an idea. My best friend has watched all of the Saw movies, but you would never know that from just meeting and being around him. This guy is somewhat renowned throughout our group of gamers because of how in control of himself he is. He rarely ever loses his temper and when he does it barely shows. I am not saying that he bottles all his anger up, something will happen that will make him angry then he will just let it go and move on.
Also may I point out that this picture http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/imagerepository/LR_child_gun_250.jpg
was not taken on the streets of America.
I would also highly recommend reading this page.
http://hrewiki.pbwiki.com/Child+soldiers+-+points+for+a+talk
I read the whole thing, it should only take a couple minutes of your time.
Well, I am sorry that I dragged that so far out. I tend to talk a lot when I am defending something I am interested in.
In closing and to sum up my main points (which is the proper way to end a paper) I do not think that video games make people violent, I think that lack of proper parenting creates character defects which people like to pin on violent video games (whether fps or not). And while I do believe that violence is a present and escalating problem in America, I believe that it is a much greater problem in other countries where practically none of the people get to play any video games.
-Jason