Serendipity is a word that I never get to use ever in a sentence. It is a term that means a "pleasant surprise" or as I like to call it, a "happy accident". When it comes to games, I too had my fair share of happy accidents, enjoying games I got in some giveaway or coerced by a friend to try it, games I would never have decided to check out for myself.
This happy accident, the joy of trying new things, this is something I want to share this Christmas season. And I wish for you all to experience and share this feeling too.
This is inspired from a dumb thing we used to do in school as to assure that everyone in class gets a Christmas present. Yes, even that weird kid that no one likes who eats lunch alone.
What if I was that weird kid???
[Insecurity Intensifies]
...
So our "Secret Santa" was a little bit different. What we would do is buy our gifts prior to knowing who we'll give it to. That's because you'll pass your gift to a random person. It lead to scenarios where a guy gets an NBA jigsaw puzzle when they don't even like Basketball, or getting girls cologne but you're a guy. While it sounds awful on paper, I think if we do this for videogames it can be quite interesting, discovering games you've never heard of or ever thought of playing. And through blogs, you can share your experience with this newfound game.
We will follow a similar format:
1. Buy a game you want other people to suffer through experience. You're free to pick any game, but I would suggest something relatively obscure and not a lot of people have tried yet. Since this is just for a fun little blog thing, I would advise not to spend too much on it. I myself am planning to spend no more than $10-20 for my gift.
Digital games, by the way. Like Steam or whatever.
2. Everyone will be assigned a random person to give their gift to. You'll find out later how we'll go about this random draw.
3. I (or to not spoil the surprise for myself, some third party, who will also handle the random draw) will PM each participant with:
a. Who to give their gift to; and
b. Who to expect a gift from (just to make sure you don't end up adding some random stranger on Steam)*
You're then free to send your gift anytime once you receive the PM.
*We can also do what we decided in the forums (which follows the more traditional format) where there would be a "deliverer" of the gifts as to keep things more "secret". Everyone sends their gifts to that person and they'll then send it to your target recipient.
4. Once you receive your gift, you'll have to play it no matter what it is. And because we're a blogging community, you then have to write about your experience with said game.
We'll start on December 1. Next week, I'll make a last call for anyone else who wants to sign up.
___________________________________________________________________________________
- Intermission -
As an update to my previous post, two days ago,
WE PASSED OUR FINAL THESIS DEFENSE!!!
Well conditional pass. Still a ton of revisions to the document (as expected, really), but the hard part is over. It's as good as done. This means I'll finally graduate from college early next year! Just 3 more leftover classes to finish.
While I'm not quite fond of using internet memes and image macros, this one in particular I believe is a close approximation of how I feel right now. That burden you had to carry these past four (almost five) years, (almost) off your shoulders. Those groupmates of mine and our adviser are trully unbelievable in every sense of the word and I literally wouldn't have made it without them.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Current list of participants:
Agent9
Cannibal Steven
El Dango
FlanxLycanth
GajKnight
GoofierBrute
Hyper Lemon Buster Cannon
Luckrequired
Luna Sy
Occams Electric Toothbrush
ooktar
Retrofraction
Robo Panda Z
Script
ShadeOfLight
Sir Davies
Solar Pony Django
TheAngriestCarp
Tonich
Zer0t0nin