playing Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

Moving On From Just Playing?

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Viljami

As a child I had my first touches to computer technology by playing video games. This sparked eventually my interest towards information technology. We might call it as well ICT or Information and Communications Technology.

Later in my life I chose ICT as my main subject to study. I learned a whole deal about programming. My dream back then was that I could be someday developing a video game by myself. I dreamed of creating games that would have a deep plot, a nice game-play and good looking graphics.

I actually did complete my studies. My story in trying to get a job as a fresh graduate isn’t very rare at all. I graduated back in 2016 and it was very hard to try to get a job as I also had only little working experience. It seemed like there was misunderstandment about what jobs I actually had the actual skills to be successful in.

I ended up getting a job that required skills in customer interaction. As I had no experience at all I had to start from somewhere. I didn’t get to work as a software developer. This was a bit of a disappointment for me but I just kept growing my working experience. I actually never gave up on my dream completely.

As I was studying I got to develop my skills in writing. In 2020, just before corona virus hit us all, I started to write this blog about video games. I chose to write in English as I hoped to reach more people and get to learn more English, also.

Today I am an IT Support Person. The choices that I made throughout my whole life are getting reflected in this whole blog post. I like sometimes to write also about my personal matters. Also I like to write about games, books that are somehow related and also about music and technology and computers while not forgetting programming.

That’s just how life goes sometimes. We make choices. We make some sacrifices. We lose some part of our lives and we do something that motivates us to go further and get to develop ourselves.

Today, I am also trying to learn something relevant every week if not every day. I haven’t forgotten everything I’ve learned especially from programming, computers but also about communicating with other people sometimes referred to as customers or players or users.

This text, this blog post, is for you here to reflect on where you and where we are going towards to. Are we just playing video games or is this actually a part of a larger picture we are dealing with?

Reasons to Keep Playing

Posted on September 24, 2023September 25, 2023 by Viljami

As I was growing up video games really made me feel like a hero. There was this combination right in front of my eyes of technology and excitement that made my imagination go wild. I remember how graphics looked like and in my mind they are hugely exaggerated. I can understand this today when I look at any NES game that I witnessed back then. My mind plays tricks on me and I just can’t make it stop even if I wanted.

Of course there has to be a balance in life in overall. You don’t want to play all your life as you don’t also want to be working or studying all the time. You have to keep yourself exercising enough and eating well so you stay healthy and also live a good life. There are many sides to life. And there are so many things you can do.

What brought me to gaming was the technology and also the entertainment that it offered. While I was a kid I started to learn things also in school. I was good in mathematics. When I was maybe nine or ten I figured that I wanted to be an engineer. They had to utilize mathematics to develop technical devices. Soon I found out how video games basically were made. They were constructed with a programming language. There are many other things about how games are made also, like generating graphics, composing music and sound effects among many other things, but this programming stuff seemed interesting to me at that moment.

So I am a kid that is good at maths and likes to play video games. Video games are made with a programming language. This is what made me to think that I would like to create games. I wanted to be able to create all these amazing worlds and characters and plots and schemes that I had stumbled on while I was playing video games. This is what sparked my mind and made me feel interested towards mathematics and computer science.

Now that I have already some knowledge of programming I can say that it necessarily doesn’t require a high level of understanding of mathematics. You can definitely start programming even if you are bad at maths. I have to say that nowadays there are many tools for you if you don’t like writing code. There are many game development engines that you can use. And there are also many other areas in game development besides pure programming.

How can games develop you? You definitely get some training with your motor skills. You get this sense of how what you are doing with your hands is affecting what you are seeing ans that is happening in front of your eyes. Of course when you are young your motors are stronger and keep developing faster than when you are older. You are watching something that is happening. This develops your visual sense and even your three-dimensional comprehension. When you are young these skills that I mentioned are fast to develop.

I also have to say that I learned a lot of English from playing video games. You are right now reading this text that I have written fully in English. I am a native speaker of Finnish. I have learned English in school and in my spare time reading and writing and to some extent even speaking. I haven’t studied or worked in any other country besides my home country. So, this is how I got started with my English. I am still trying to learn it today. No one is perfect.

Games are also very entertaining. When PlayStation was released it took only some years for video games to become also popular amongst young adults. Today people of every age are playing. There is just so much more that games can offer when compared to music, books or movies. I am not saying that games are better. I think they are different.

Can you learn programming through playing video games? I think you can learn some game design but you don’t directly learn it with playing. You need to study some programming to actually get to a level that you can achieve something as technically challenging as making a whole video game. Knowing how to program can give you some deep insight of how games are working. I have learned to understand more about games and what happens in the code and see it also while I am playing.

There are some reasons to not to spend all of your time playing video games. There are also other things in life besides games. You definitely have to keep doing your work or keep studying. You have to take some responsibility. You also have to eat and exercise to keep yourself happy and healthy. You can in a way be addicted to playing games. This addiction is very different from a drug addiction that deals more with a chemical addiction. If you can’t do anything else in your life you can actually be addicted also to games. Basically you are then addicted to your own habits and you might need to prioritize your life again. And I know that very few people are actually addicted to video games. There are way more people understanding the balance in life than there are people addicted to gaming.

There was a story about a guy that played a video game for several moths continuously. What happened to him is very sad. He lost his wife, job and basically all of other things in life that he had. This is what can happen. But I must stress that this is very rare and people tend to understand everything that they have in life and they want to maintain their physical and mental health,

If you are feeling that you have had enough of video games you can try to center your focus on to some other things. You can read a good book. Go do some exercise. Have a nice conversation with someone you like or someone you love. Watch a movie or a series. Do some work or study and don’t forget to eat and do it also as healthy as you can.

How Does The Business of Selling Used Video Games Work?

Posted on June 26, 2023 by Viljami

If you have been involved in gaming or playing or collecting video games for several years you might have faced the issue of not getting your money back from a game that you bought just some months ago. You are trying to trade the game and get a good price, right? Obviously this doesn’t work this way. Because the game shop you are dealing with has to make a living. You can get maybe 20 percentage of the money you paid for the game…if you buy a new game…with that money. Does this seem complicated or unfair? Let me explain this to you so we all can understand this issue better.

Of course if you are willing to sell the game yourself and directly to another collector or player you can get a decent amount of money out of the game. Game shops are facing the fact that they have to be profitable. There are lots of expenses. Shipping of products that are coming into the store, rent of the premise and or web services for a web shop and of course the subsistence of all of the workers. Now this is a business right here. You can make a living out of this. Easy it isn’t but possible it is (did that sound like Yoda from Star Wars?).

There are several companies here in my home land, Finland, that operate this type of business that I have described right here. They might have a shop, maybe even two or three shops, and of course a web shop. There are also many smaller shops that sell games here. You can also find some people that are interested in selling some of their game collections and we have platforms like Huuto dot net and Tori dot fi for someone who wants to sell any used stuff. And I must mention also re-use centers and flee markets whose prices are usually lower since they get the stuff they sell mainly for free. And this is where we get to people that take advantage of this and…it isn’t very nice as you can figure.

Where do you get games for a low price that you can sell to some collector? I know some people that have received an estate that has contained games. Usually there is a huge collection to be sold. And if you buy the whole stack you get it in a fair price, right? Now we are starting to figure this out. You can sell these games piece by piece. A game collector is someone that needs maybe one game or two or three games that he or she is missing from his/her collection. So you can sell a few game for a decent price and make a profit a bit by bit. This is the magic of selling used games. You buy a large batch and check the unique games prices and you will get a profit out of this.

What makes the used game’s price high or low? One important thing is the condition of the game. It can be a sealed copy. It can have a manual and all of the covers. Or maybe its a loose game with generic cover or no packaging at all. PC games can be packaged in so called “big boxes” that make them more valuable. And the condition of the box matters. It matters also how the labels look like and does the CD/DVD disc have scratches on it. Sometimes the condition of the game can be enhanced quite easily. I am not going into that so deeply.

Some games can also be rare ones. They might be so good that no one just wants to sell them. They can be rare in a way that they weren’t even so popular when they first got released. These types of games are just uncommon. Some games gained popularity and valuation only when some retro hobbyists noticed their true value. Some games are so amazing that they seem to define a whole gaming system. These types of games can be something like Super Mario for NES or Sonic for Mega Drive or something similar.

Should you sell your old games? This is a tough question. I regret selling my old PS1 back in the beginning of the 2000s. The system and all the games I had for it would have been so much more valuable for me today compared to the price that I got from them then. Like, I sold all of them for under 200 euros. If you consider only the money this is clearly a financial loss for me. And I would have liked to play these games still. I just didn’t seem to have such an interest for retro games back then. You have to consider how I got back into playing video games in 2006 when I got my original Xbox. And…it was 2017 when I started my plans for starting to collect older and retro gaming systems again.

For some years already I have been writing to this blog. It is very interesting. However this is only a way for me to express my thoughts. I am not currently getting anything financially from this. And so is the way also that game collectors necessarily don’t get anything from collecting games when it comes to money. Game shops do make profit. That is a good thing. Without them we wouldn’t have a place to trade and buy games.

What is it like to work in a game shop? Sometimes it is busy and sometimes there’s only a few customers. It can be a place to build your dreams and fantasies. It is definitely a technical job. I also got to write, of course, blog posts for the game shop that I worked in for six months. The biggest parts of my job were handling and shipping orders, responding to customer feedback and being a customers servant face-to-face and also in some other ways. It was a fun job. It was a busy job. And ultimately…it was barely profitable.