I’m your host, Maikerukun. This column is going to venture off the beaten path a bit, so let me take a minute to introduce both myself and what this editorial is going to be all about.
Well, i’m not your stereotypical gamer first of all. I was 1st team all state in high school for basketball, I played at Ferris State University and Olivet College as well. I moved to Los Angeles, and joined the Screen Actor’s Guild, started my production company, and have been playing bit roles on television and making my own short films ever since. I am also a photographer, director, writer, music producer, and model. But my underlying link through all of that? GAMES!
Games are what got me through everything. They have always been my number one form of escapism, and they always will be. I told my ex girlfriend that when I have kids, they will always have a chance out of punishment. They can accept their punishments as is, or they can challenge me to a vid game of their choice, double or nothin’! Now THAT’s good parenting!
I get so annoyed by the stereotypes, ideas, and general collective thought of what a gamer should look like, think, and act like in order to be qualified a gamer, and while this may sound stupid to some of you, I am just as offended that people like me “the supposed cool kids, the popular ones” aren’t allowed to geek out and be nerds too. I was born a nerd and I’ll die a nerd, just because I have other qualities outside of that doesn’t make me not a “real nerd” as some people like to say.
In Uni I started a club and a lot of the cool kids joined. It was a gaming club, for nerds only…you literally had to beat the top 3 speed runs in the original super mario bros in order to join. Most of us were basketball players, golfers, cheerleaders, dance team girls, and volleyball girls. I would invite the stereotypical “nerds” to come join and hang, and none of them would take the club seriously.
They didn’t think my friends would accept them, want to hang out with them, want to play games with them, and they really thought we weren’t gamers. That’s what hurt the most…they naturally assumed someone like me couldn’t whoop their ass in some Perfect Dark, Jet Grind Radio, Crazy Taxi or Powerstone. “Most of you are probably too young to remember the unbelievably awesome Powerstone, Jet Grind Radio, and Crazy Taxi.”
So my goal in life is to become this super famous actor/celebrity type, but through it all stay %100 true to my gamer roots and be right here with you guys still writing and arguing with you all on the message boards. I will never change in that aspect and I will always be an advocate for the gaming community and what I believe in.
So, moving on…why “Beautiful Madness”? I titled my editorial section Beautiful Madness because that is exactly what this section will be covering…all the weird random shit that goes on in my mind. I am a gamer, and I have been quite literally since birth. My dad played videogames before me and his father card and board games before him. Gaming is in my blood line. Sometimes, when there is a full moon, I wake up almost naked in shredded clothes and bloody and later that night on the news, there are stories about dead Toys R Us employees and random Wii games missing from the middle of the night, and tucked snuggly inside my Wii will be a blood smeared disc.
So I thought it would be quite fun to have a column that has nothing to do with games, but shows the kinds of things I think about on a day to day versus what a normal person might think about. Let me rephrase that, we might both think about the same things, but we do so on extremely different levels and from very unique points of views.
I will be posting my first full and complete article sometime tomorrow, probably a few of them actually, one pertaining to girls, and the other pertaining to a missed tv series I loved that just released on netflix :), and appreciate your taking the time to see what i have to say. i hope it can be fun and informative just as much as I enjoy writing them!
-Maikerukun
