Scott played his first game when he was just three years old and has been devoted to them ever since. In fact he is so super keen about gaming that he met and ended up helping out Ready Up editors Dan and Kirsten when he showed up to a Video Games Live concert five hours early for a signing with games industry guests that turned out to not actually be happening until after the show!
As well as being a part of the Ready Up team for over four years now, Scott is pretty active in the Backloggery community, a website for keeping track of your gaming collection and what games you’ve beaten. It suits his slightly-OCD personality perfectly.
Scott: It turns out that many of us enjoy watching people play games as much as actually playing them. Who knew? While I would never be so audacious as to suggest that, way back back in 2009, I solely predicted a major shift in the way we interact with games (especially, as pointed out my blog, the signs were clearly already there), seeing this concept become realised over the last couple of years has been very, very cool.
Over the span of a single console generation, entire YouTube empires have been built upon this very idea: just look at the runaway success of the Yogscast team (and their rise to fame linked with Minecraft), or the the hyper-popular Internet personality John “TotalBiscuit” Bain, who commands just under 1 million subscribers on his YouTube homepage alone. Heck, even we’re at it: team member Johnny frequently puts out Let’s Play videos of his streaming shenanigans, while a recent piece by Ryan highlights the importance of watching expert play – something I mentioned in my original article.
As a self-confessed total-dork who enjoys a lavish life-style sidelining as a professional-bum (read: unemployed), I don’t spend a lot of time boasting about things. But I will say that I’m proud of “A Casualty in Mod Warfare”, an article I wrote in reaction to some controversial decisions taken by Activision to restrict the typically-open nature of PC games.
It’s probably one of the most well-reasoned and balanced arguments I’ve made in my time on Ready Up, and likely the closest I’ve come to “professional” journalism. I received quite a bit of positive feedback in response to it, including a comment from the dreamy talented ex-Ready Upper James, which made my day.
There came a point near the end of my University tenure when I figured-out I wasn’t coping well with the work-load or commuting anymore. It would later become apparent that some health issues were likely to blame, but the other reason was my sapped motivation – I yearned for something else. Games are my main passion, and the idea of being a real game developer seemed like an exciting prospect.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that since writing that blog, I haven’t finished a game or become a multi-millionaire Indie sensation. But what I have done is explore a number of development options across several platforms. I now have experience with Unity (including visual scripting environments like PlayMaker and Antares Universe), Game Maker, Stencyl and Construct, as well as knowledge of a couple of cool modelling-tools, like GameDraw, Qubicle and Blender. Not bad for a pretty mediocre Java coder!
You can check out all of Scott’s Ready Up blogs, features and reviews right here.
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