Items
topic_interest is exactly
video games
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2020-10-03
Tsushima Island, my escape
This is a picture of the platinum I received for beating the game Ghost of Tsushima on October 3rd, 2020. This game came out on July 17th, 2020 and it became my Game of the Year. This was also the year of COVID-19, so I had a lot more free time to play the game and beat it in several months. The pandemic was a difficult time and I just wanted something fun to play. I wanted to forget everything happening in the real world with the pandemic and other problems by jumping back to 13th Century Japan. The game is set on Tsushima Island as the Mongol Empire took its first step toward invading Japan. Ghost of Tsushima is a beautiful, but a brutal game that I had so much fun with. The soundtrack is beautiful and there were foxes to pet! My main character shifted from a samurai who followed the strict Bushido code into a brutal assassin in desperate times. I can relate to this idea of shifting between jobs because I had to shift my job around to adjust to the desperate times I was experiencing. I had to shift from working in person to working online. I wanted to add this to the collection because I want to show how I could escape the reality of COVID-19 and have some fun. -
2021-12-03
Kaitlin Teniente Oral History, 2021/12/03
An interview with the Director of Esports at St. Mary's University, Kaitlin Teniente, discussing how the pandemic affected interacting with the students through esports and other casual videogame events. -
2020-07-25
A Different Online Meeting
Athletics has always been a big part of bringing together a school's community. It's an important aspect for not just the athletes but also the supporters. The complete cancellation of sporting events can be a jarring disruption to a school's morale and spirit. The rising of popularity of esports and competitive videogames though has been helpful in keeping people connected. Though physical, in person sports have been cancelled, classmates can still keep in touch with each other through their school's team by playing and watching the school's online games. The St. Mary's esports team has provided a way for people for people with similar interests to meet without actually ever seeing each other in person. A placement on the team isn't even necessary. Videogames have been an important outlet for me in the pandemic to keep me mentally happy. The closure of many places and the inability to see certain people in real life has made me rely on them instead. -
2021-05-25
Covid 19 archive entry (Starcraft Edition)
What this mainly shares my experience with my esports team during the pandemic and also how my social life changed during the pandemic. The object is to talk about how I made new friends and also how Covid 19 wasn't the only world wide issue, and example would be the crisis in Myanmar. -
2021-05-21
Help for envisioning the future
This website represents the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It's a pretty remarkable approach to thinking about how we will live in the future. A quotation on the site, from Buckminster Fuller, is a perfect inspiration for the call #SMhopes: an Archive of Hopes and Dreams: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -
2021-04-21
Enjoying the Chaos Wastes while I wait for my second Covid shot
On the twenty first of April, a new free DLC for the video game Vermintide 2 released called Chaos Wastes. Like a previous video game I posted about in these archive which has occupied my time during the pandemic, Vermintide is set in the Warhammer Fantasy Universe. WHF is essentially Tolkien high fantasy turned up to eleven, more over the top in every way. Vermintide takes place during the End Times, a narrative event from the tabletop game from around 2014. The venerable franchise with 30+ years of writing and stories by that point was destroyed in real life by its replacement Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and in the story the world was finally consumed by the powers of Chaos. In Vermintide, teams of four players team up to fight the horrors that assail the Empire of Mankind right at the beginning of the End Times. This new DLC, focusing on an expedition straight into the heart of the Chaos Wastes, takes the game in a new narrative direction and ties it in more broadly with the End Times narrative itself. The Ubersreik 5, as the protagonist group is referred to after their exploits from the first game, is primarily opposed to two elements of disease and decay: the Skaven, human-sized rats that live in a massive Under-Empire that seek to spread plague and take over the surface, and the Norscans, basically fantasy power-metal viking marauders who worship the chaos god Nurgle, lord of decay and disease. Our protagonists travel to a fortress deep in the reality-warped wasteland near the North Pole in order to contact their respective gods to seek aid to combat the End Times. While they are not fighting fantasy characters straight out of the 1980s, modern scientists and healthcare professionals have been fighting a virus which has threatened us all in a global pandemic. I go to get my second shot of Moderna tomorrow, and while I have been enjoying this new DLC and embarking on heroic quests with my friends online, others have worked to allow people like me to finally protect ourselves from Covid with a vaccine. -
2021-04-15
Video Games to Pass Time, Pt. 2
As time has gone on, video games have continued to be my primary outlet for entertainment. The one that has captured my attention the most ever since GameStop paid for my new computer is Total War: Warhammer 2, or TWW2 going forward. TWW2 is set in the venerable Warhammer Fantasy universe, first created in 1983 as a way for the British company Games Workshop to independently sell Dungeons and Dragons miniatures, has evolved into a vast setting including the original tabletop strategy game, over a hundred books, and various video game tie ins. Perhaps the most successful of the tie-ins is the Total War: Warhammer games, developed and published by Creative Assembly out of their own historical Total War franchise. These games are divided into two parts. First is the turn-based world map, where you can see beautifully rendered fantasy landscapes in ways fans of the setting never could until now. In this mode you do diplomacy, order around armies, and develop cities. The second part is the real time battles, which the included screenshot is taken from. In this you zoom down to see your armies directly, and command them in battle using strategy to gain the upperhand. This screenshot is of my current campaign, where I am playing the High Elves of Ulthuan. Warhammer and its science-fantasy counterpart Warhammer 40,000 are renowned for their 'grimdark' setting (a genre name that is taken verbatim from the opening scrawl of every WH40k book), so while the High Elves are definitely considered good guys by the broader narrative, they are still pretty mean and arrogant by ours. While I defend the shores of the magical island paradise of Ulthuan from invasion by the evil cousins of the High Elves, the Dark Elves, I am in real life distracted from the fact that I am stuck in my apartment because of the pandemic. This game allows me to both play by myself for entertainment, but also to share my stories with friends playing their own games. We are all a bunch of nerds, so segueing into in-depth discussions of Warhammer lore is also a good way to pass the time. -
2021-01-16
Falling Back On My Escapism
As the title suggests, this is a description of my favorite things that helped me through the pandemic. I think it's important to capture the pleasures we've fallen back on despite all the negatives. -
2021-01-12
My favorite things
This document contains several of my favorite things that have helped me get through the pandemic, such as video games, music, my banjo, cooking and my dog Dobbs! I submitted this from the ASU HST 580 internship course. -
2021-01-04
A present
This is a drawing of my friend and her favorite Genshin Impact character. I made this right before Christmas for an early Christmas present. It made them so happy they started to cry. It just shows how much a small gift can change someone's day. -
2020-11-19
The future of music festivals might be inside video games
There has been multiple online festivals hosted inside video games such as Minecraft, with Lavapalooza, or Fortnite, the infamous Travis Scott event. Many of these events proceeds have gone directly to charity regarding Covid-19 relief. These digital live music events raise the question of the viability of hosting a digital festival in a post-pandemic world. -
2020-09-23
Esports Tournaments Affected by the Pandemic
The pandemic caused this year’s entire season of the Smite Pro League to be played online. Last year they made the change to play everything in person. THe plan was for the World Championship to have been played in-person at the start of 2021. They decided to move it to an online format instead because of the pandemic. I was planning to go to the World Championship in January 2021. I have attended all previous championship tournaments that they have put on. I was looking forward to this one too. As the pandemic was raging on I was really considering if this would be the first year that I would not go. That decision was made for me. https://www.smitegame.com/news/an-update-on-hi-rez-expo-2021/ -
2020-04-14
Luke Burroughs's COVID-19 story
Throughout quarintine I went to scouts camp at Bartle Camp reservation. I also vistied Colorado with my family and went camping at truman lake. And last I played an older video game that I was wanting to play for a while. -
2020-06-06
I Broke up with My Boyfriend because, Quarantine, and Got a New Family
I broke up with my boyfriend because quarantine forced us to spend much more time together and the problems we'd been able to sweep under the rug became too apparent to us. It was time to make the break which would have been devastating normally but since I was able to move in with old friends and turn a negative into a positive. This wouldn't have happened without the Coronavirus.