What’s up Gearheads,

As of lately, after COG: Vengeance finished, I’ve felt like all eyes landed on me for the next big Gears 3 event.  Hypefestation 2 I believe was a great accomplishment for band of community members but it was anything but fun to work for. Hell I didn’t even get to play. I didn’t even have time to just chill with people I’ve wanted to hang out with in the community for a while.  I just worked and barely slept.  I wish I had more time to talk to Pete Nub and all the other great people at the event.

I promised a SoCal regional and I’m going to do it.  There will be a Hypefestation 3 sometime this year but I have to plan and analyze the best times to do things. I’m also a very busy guy with the work I do for BeyondGaming.com.  I am a full-time employee for BeyondGaming.com as their Video Production Manager.

Most of you reading this are gamers, and as gamers your mindset is to play play play.  Setting up one of these events however is all business and work and no play.  For those of you casually asking me constantly, “Hey when is the next Hype 3?” is more like asking, “Hey Barbosa, when are you going to put in a ridiculous amount of hours of work out of the goodness of your self being and spend a lot of your hard earned money on a bunch of unprofessional oblivious ungrateful self entitled wanna-be aspiring professional gamers?”

When conducting good business, the biggest question on everyone’s mind involving business is “Is it worth it?” Very similar to most of you gamers when you you decide to pre-order or purchase a brand new game on it’s release date, “Is it worth it?” Just multiply that feeling by 1000 and you have the predicament I’m in about running a Hypefestation 3.

The current answer is No.  Take an immature community, unprofessional gamers, a game that they can’t agree on how to play competitively, within themselves & the developers, and no offense to most of you, but also a demographic of young and financially challenged individuals.  This isn’t exactly a yacht show.  If it was, I know that my target demographic has money and has no problem purchasing 1st class tickets to the nearest airport and renting a Mercedes to head over to the marina to look at big things that float in the water.  Many of you are delusional as to being able to make a living as a professional gamers.  It’s not your fault though because most of you are young and just don’t understand the nature of business.  When I say young, I mean more inexperienced.

When I signed on with Caesar, Joey, Murray and Burger to be the media show guy for Hypefestation 1, my vision was to provide a show that the Gears community could be proud of.  It’s been my goal since 5 years ago, to help make competitive gamers feel like rock stars when they perform well.  Hypefestation 1 and 2 is the closest I have gotten to being in full control of making that happen.  I love the emotion and passion in the Gears community.  There’s a lot of high energy and it’s contagious.  I always say this but I do whole-heartedly believe the Gears game play provides the most exciting spectate-able experience in shooter games thus far and the people in the community add to that.

Is it worth it? In three paragraphs up I said the “current” answer is no. However, do I believe Gears 3 game play and a community like this can be amazing in the future? Absolutely.  One of our biggest obstacles is that the game you love to play is stuck in a rigid business model and a closed platform that is Xbox Live.  Many of you Xbox Gamers are “salty” that PC games are shining at the current moment with Starcraft 2 and League of Legends.  That’s because those games are on a free and open platform called “The Internet” and they have business models that benefit them the more they support their game as an e-sport.  What holds most of you back from experiencing that open platform feeling is the purchase of an expensive gaming PC.  

Purchasing a gaming PC is no different than guys racing go-karts and guys racing actual sports cars on a track. If you want to take your gaming seriously, the PC has many more options for that. [End Rant]

I just want to ask everyone reading this to look towards the future.  At the current moment we are “stuck” with Gears 3.  Love it, like it, or hate it, it’s what we have.  If we can make the most of it and show Epic Games, show sponsors, show the e-sports community that this game is worth competing in and all of you are having a great time, we’ll have a much easier time in the future when new things develop.

 I was very excited to see Mercenary Ops trailers created by Epic Shanghai.  I can tell by the previews that the game has covered all the short comings of the Gears 3 business model and if it plays as it looks, you’ll have your next iteration of Gears-like multiplayer and a purposely built multiplayer game which can host an e-sports community.

Keep playing Gears. Keep in touch with everyone and keep setting up fun Gears events online and LANs.  I don’t think Gears 3 will ever harbor a true professional e-sports circuit but have fun with what you have.  Cross your fingers for the next time around and check out Mercenary Ops. Start saving to upgrade your PC or purchase a new one.

I’ll have news for everyone as soon as I get a combination of things to fall in place to make Hypefestation 3 and Gears 3 WORTH IT.

Captn Out

A lot of people involved with Hypefestation were wondering how the Women’s Round Robin came into existence.  Some sources figured out I was the driving force behind it and asked me why. Well here’s the answer in essay form.  If anyone else asks why there was a Women’s Round Robin at Hypefestation, link them to this text article.

Video games are a medium just like television, radio, movies, and the Internet.  The reason we as gamers enjoy the video game medium so much is because of its interactive nature.  It’s a brand new exciting medium that allows people to do thing virtually that we would NEVER get the chance to do in real life.  Saving the world, flying planes, getting into firefights, exploring uncharted terrain, and now thanks to new technology, we can share these experiences with our personal friends, online friends, and strangers thanks to the higher speeds of the Internet.

Going to concerts is a great experience to listen to your favorite musicians live. Most of us human beings enjoy some type of music and you enjoy it more with people that are also appreciative.  Wouldn’t you feel there was something wrong if you went to a concert and the whole crowd was males?  What if while browsing your Netflix, every movie you searched for only consisted of male actors?  If you went channel surfing and every news channel and television show had only male figures on?  Something would feel wrong and unfair right?

Video Games have evolved to provide experiences for gamers that are normally not accessible to them.  A lot of young gamers take their health for granted.  A person bound to a wheel chair can walk and run around and enjoy the functionality of virtual legs.  Take Broly for example.  Watch this video. http://youtu.be/83nSodg-HTU He’s a Super Street Fighter 4 competitor who has a condition called arthrogryposis.  (watch the video and then come back)  Broly is encouraged to compete by many people in the fighting game community despite his disadvantages but why is there so much disdain when women show up to compete by a majority of the male community?

The video game industry is obviously male dominated.  This is a very broad and complicated gender issue to discuss but if you look at typical media on television, we as children are genderized by the media.  Times are changing but extremely slowly.  There’s that old stereotypical notion that boys are supposed to be tough & masculine while girls are suppose to be pretty, mannerly and feminine.  As a mature adult, I can recognize what the media has done to me personally in retrospec, but individuals younger than myself don’t realize how they are genderized by the media.

In competitive gaming, the gamer is NOT the athlete. If you control an avatar in game like Marcus Fenix or Anya Stroud, that avatar in the game IS the athlete, and you as the gamer are simply the controller.  This is the MOST FAIR and BALANCED competitive atmosphere to practically exist (except if you’re blind).  Why does this fair and balanced competitive atmosphere have extremely low representation by half of the human population?!

In my personal experience, the Captain Obvious answer is simply sexism.  In real life sports, men & women, girls & boys are separated from athletics because we are naturally physically different.  Men can potentially possess greater strength in larger numbers over women in encounters in sports which would be extremely unfair and unbalanced.  Men have to compete with each other and women have to compete with each other so that the potential for ability is balanced. (yes I know a lot of obvious information)

The CATCH here with competitive video games is that since men & women CAN compete in a fair and balanced fashion, now we, as gamers, have to include our social interaction with each other competitively.  This social interaction threatens emotions during gameplay.  It really threatens emotions within younger immature individuals that are still trying to identify who they are even to themselves.  With a brand new industry like video games, and most of the active members being young people vulnerable to threatened identities, this provides a competitive nightmare for rampant sexism.

I brought up the notion of having a Women’s Round Robin at Hypefestation for a few reasons.

1) Why Round Robin? Statistically, female gamers are a minority and even further so are competitive female gamers, and even further are competitive female gamers willing to invest in a traveling trip to a competitive event.  I chose the round robin format because I predicted there wouldn’t be enough teams to actually hold a bracket.

2) Exposure.  After Hypefestation 2, there are now officially 12 competitive females we know that are interested in competing and have had exposure to what the general bracket teams do when they compete.  They can now advise their own future teammates, male or female, how strats work, how a LAN event runs, and how to prepare for the next event should they want to compete in the future in a GENERAL bracket.

3) Mainstream Appeal.  Esports in general have a big misrepresentation in male to female ratios.  It almost seems as if women are blatantly being omitted from eSports but that is not the case.  At first glance or first impression, any casual by stander would get the impression that only men generally compete in eSports.  If the Gears of War community can be the first community to handle female participation in a mature fashion, we may very well have a healthy string of Hypefestation events on the way with spectator and community support which this community desperately needs.  With mainstream appeal, we can grow and support our competitive ambitions within the Gears community at a much faster rate.

DukeSkillz on Active Reload on Monday, January 23rd said the fact that Hypefestation held a Women’s Round Robin was sexist.  To debate that notion, I consider it a boost to having healthy representation in the community.  I agree with the notion that men and women shouldn’t be separated in eSports because there is no reason to since fairness and balance exist within the game.  At the current moment, the eSports environment is aggressively sexist and in order to not discourage females from participating in eSports with a potential horrible first sexist experience in a LAN general bracket, I wanted to provide an opportunity where women could compete at a LAN without having to deal with overly sexist remarks but still get competitive exposure like I mentioned in my bullet point above.

I hope the Women’s Round Robin was a worthy effort even though other gamers disagree.  I hope they are enlightened as to why it may potentially be a key booster in getting competitive Gears of War more support from a broader spectrum of demographics.  It would be great to not have to host a women’s exclusive event, yet get more participation in the general bracket with women through co-ed teams and full female teams.  I also hope the females that attended share their experience at the LAN and mentor other competitive females.

-CaptnBarbosa

Right now, I’m waiting to board a flight in Philly so I can start my amazing little video game journey to Columbus for MLG.  Once that’s finished, it’s business time immediately with a flight to Los Angeles for E3! 

I’m looking forward to MLG because half of the people I follow on Twitter are somehow affiliated with MLG.  Whether they are media people or the “Professional” gamers, I think they are all interesting characters when it comes to gaming.  I love meeting tweeps (twitter peeps, people lol) because you tend to learn so much about each other without evening meeting, or directly communicating with each other.

Right after MLG, it’s E3 time! I work full-time for BeyondGaming.com and they were nice enough to think I was worth it to send over to E3 with my HD camera and get some awesome event coverage for the site.  It’s been a mini-dream of mine to attend E3.  I remember when I was a little guy, I would be reading my magazines like GamePro, Game Players, and Nintendo Power and I would just be amazed by the articles they wrote and the pictures they had.

There were mega booths with huge screens, hot girls in costumes, and best of all, games that weren’t even OUT YET! I grew up as a video game child so naturally, attending this event is the culmination of ambitions and interests in my life.  I’m finally going to attend!  To me it’s a sense of accomplishment because I’ve been trying to make a way of life for myself in the Video Game Industry and this is one hell-of-a-way to legitimize myself. (hella in NorCal)

Go ahead and subscribe to me on YouTube at youtube.com/thecaptnbarbosa and be sure to check out Beyond Gaming for all the awesome video content I’m going to edit and speed upload to the site.  

I hope I get to meet some of you reading this! 

-Jason

swoozie:

Just got booked for the next DOA tournament in Dallas // June. As of Today, Team Ninja THEMSELVES (the makers of the DOA franchise) are 100% confirmed to be at the tournament mingling, doing panel and getting on a personal level with any and all players in attendance— even the head honcho Hayashi- San himself so if you want to link up with me or and of the game developers or even enter into the tournament… more details here

swoozie:

Cheating in High School: Its not cheating… its giving yourself a successful advantage