Polygon Wizard

Video Game News, Reviews, and Retrospectives

The first thing you need to know about me is I am an animator for a small studio in North Carolina, and I feel very lucky to have my dream career. Ever since I saw Toy Story, I knew I wanted to be an animator. I live for the days when I feel like a great puppeteer, and every decision I make breathes life into the character on my computer screen. It makes all the extremely frustrating days when all I do is curse my computer for crashing too much and the characters for not doing exactly what I want disappear like a bad memory. I wouldn’t trade this career for all the money in the world (which is good because I actually don’t get paid all that much).

I could probably point out many things in the latest animated movies that most people will never see. I could bore you to tears talking about proper animation rigs, inverse kinematics, sub-patch modeling, motion paths, and the frustrations of tweaking dynamic calculations. I could tell you why it can be much harder to animate a subtle facial expression than a character falling down the stairs.

However, that is not why I am writing here.

Apart from my day job, I have many different “geeky” interests. I have read Lord of the Rings a countless number of times. I can just about quote The Princess Bride at will. I love Star Wars, and I was even a band geek back in high school where I played the alto saxophone in marching band, symphonic band, and jazz band. I really enjoy watching movies and television (and I love a good book), but the reason I am writing here is because I also love playing video games.

I grew up playing basic computer games (even some written in BASIC), starting on my dad’s old IBM. I played everything from QBert and Commander Keen to Myst and Wolfenstein 3D. When I got my first computer, I broke it in playing Thief: The Dark Project and Starcraft. Growing up, I was only able to play Nintendo at friends’ houses, so I didn’t get hooked on playing console games until I got to college and discovered the drug called Super Smash Bros Melee. My roommates and I would play Melee until the wee hours of the morning, with many a noisy outburst. We would also play other games such as Halo, but it always seemed to come back to Smash Bros.

The first console I owned myself was a GameCube, and I still love the little purple lunchbox. I currently own a Nintendo Wii, a Nintendo DS, an XBox 360, and an outdated PC. I enjoy each one of those systems, and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to write about my favorite hobby.

I’m not sure if I can be pretentious enough to claim that video games are art. I’m not even sure if it really matters. All I know is that video games capture my imagination, and they are a whole lot of fun to play.