News: Slow-moving reptile gets online, starts a blog about videogames

Hey there, visitors both real and imaginary (mostly imaginary)!  Welcome to the Power Leveling Turtle, a blog by and for a “casual”, “hardcore”, “25-34 male”, “American”, “console/PC” gamer who never has enough time/cash to play everything, and, well, gets there when he gets there.

Seriously, there are too many labels for whatever kind of gamer you are, and they’re all inadequate.  Every single demographic modifier you can imagine, whether it’s gender, location, casual/hardcore, genre, etc, is waved around like a flag whenever a media outlet wants to talk about “who this game is made for” in a 200-word, page 18b, review of a game they played for an hour.  It’s much easier for them to throw up a couple trite adjectives than to ask questions like how did Blizzard design World of Warcraft to appeal to both gamers who liked spending 6-8 hours per sitting on a single game and gamers who preferred their gaming in 1-2 hour segments? Or on what player metrics did EA choose to make their sports franchise games based around stat-maximization over interface innovations? Or why the heck did John Romero make Daikatana?

Okay, maybe that last one doesn’t quite fit (though it’s a good question).

Anyway, if you like talking about not only games old and new from the perspective of an occasional player who likes to muse on the motivations of the developers or publishers, or about the directions that industry is or should be moving in to attract new gamers and maintain themselves in a period of economic downturn, I hope you’ll tune into this blog, and maybe even comment at times.

Take care (to have backups of your save files)!