Hello!  Welcome to my Awesome Blog Thingy for Film 248 at Middlebury College.  This blog will consist of all things related to video games that pop into my head 😀

First things first, a little background about myself:

My name is Ruben Gilbert.  I’m a junior Computer Science major.  I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember.  My brother and I got our first console when I was 4–a Sega Genesis!!!  The first games we owned were a bunch of Sonic The Hedgehog titles, Power Rangers, and Paper Boy.  From our first system, I was hooked on games.  Over the years we came to own a Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Playstation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360 (multiple…thank you RRoD!), Wii, and, of course, many PCs.  I have always enjoyed gaming casually from strategy games to RPGs to sports games.  You’ll notice, though, that I titled this post “The Gaming Lifestyle”.  A long time ago, gaming became more than just a hobby for me.  It became a way of life.  With the launch of the Xbox, Microsoft and Bungie also released a first person shooter called Halo (which I’m sure most people are familiar with).  I fell in love with Halo from the first time I played it.  With the onset of Halo 2 and Xbox Live, I began to compete against players from around the world and realized that I was actually pretty good at the game.  When Halo 3 was released, I began to take competitive gaming very seriously.  By the end of Halo 3’s lifetime, I had achieved the max online ranking in every playlist and had competed in many local and regional tournaments.  I lost interest with the Halo franchise with the later titles (Halo: Reach and Halo 4) simply because they were inferior games (this could lead to its own blog post about the Halo games).  While competing in Halo, I had still been playing other games casually on the side, but I had definitely developed a proficiency with first person shooter games.  When Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 had created a large competitive scene, I tried my hand at competitive CoD, reaching an online ranking of 14th at my prime.  I didn’t pursue much CoD after that (as with Halo, the next CoD game “Ghosts” was inferior).

For the past couple of years, I have streamed gameplay to TwitchTV.  This is part of what I meant that video games have exceeded being a hobby for me.  I’m definitely a gamer at heart and hope to pursue a position in the gaming industry (or streaming!!!) for a career.

Nowadays, I still play games competitively.  Currently, I’m playing an MMOFPS on the PC called Planetside 2 as well as League of Legends (haven’t played it in years, but have started playing again).  I also have been playing Hearthstone since its early beta (it’s in open beta now, I highly recommend trying it!).