Blog Thingy 04 : A "Game" Changer (Patreon)

Been a while after the last blog. I just focused on working the rewards out and had some rough days within the past week so I wasn't in the mood of writing fun things but I kinda need it now myself after all that.

Last time we talked about childhood games, and I promised to talk more about a certain game from that, and here we are, Warcraft III.

I could call this the game that changed my life. Well, how I view life actually, and I will explain why it changed my perspective completely on things and it's the beginning of my "creator" path. This game forged me into an artist by giving me nothing relatable to drawing. Strange, but you will see how.

I was a big Blizzard fan back in the day. I still am, but far less invested into playing games as you know why. I mostly spent my highschool days playing games, and playing games is considered a cool thing to do for anyone in my country. I know it's considered geeky or nerdy in Western cultures, but as teenagers in Asian country, it's different here. Every teenagers I know play games of some sort no matter which genders, and you guess the era of the game genre, DotA was a big thing back in my highschool - early college years.

So every kids on the street knows how to play DotA. They would have to find a gaming center/shop to learn how to play it if they don't own a computer. If they don't know how to play that, they're screwed on making friends, or at least they'd have to find some game else trending to play or they will really could be considered that weird kid, and I'm not over exaggerating this. You would know this is real if you share the same childhood with me.

I was surprised learning the pop culture of the Westerners considering gaming kids as losers. We all went like wtf? Playing games are cool as shit! If you're from a Western cultures and found this really strange, I'll have you know we found yours different, too lol

But I was a bit different. My father got me into RTS and strategy games really early so I was way familiar and into Warcraft, Starcraft, C&C, KKND, Age of Empires, etc. before the DotA wave strikes so as much as I love DotA as a MOBA game, my attention brought me into the deeper side of Warcraft III, the World Editor.

If you're new to this, all of Blizzard's RTS games come with a mod/editor of their own which allow players the make entire whole map/mod from scratch. It's a game changer, and a life changer to me.

I dived into World Editor's community and spent days, months, and years learning about making maps. There wasn't that many people into map editing and stuffs in Thailand, and my English wasn't decent enough at the time so I kinda missed out the opportunity for joining the English speakers' community but that's ok. We have like 20-30 people constantly playing custom maps and enjoyed our days just doing that. I'm glad DotA brought people's attention back into WCIII again. I made soooo many maps. Some of them were seriously planned out and some just for the sake of luls but we enjoyed every bit of it. I could say it's the most precious moment of my teenager years. We were such a tiny community, but all of us really had fun time.

Too bad I searched my parents' house's computers and the files were already gone since it was so long ago, but I just found out after all these years, there are still people playing one of my unfinished masterpiece of a MOBA map called Swords and Scepters I made since 2007 and that is freaking awesome. I cried a little knowing that it still exists...

Here is the map's download link on Hiveworkshop.com if you happened to want to check that out. My name was Tempopopoback in the gaming days  ►  https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/swords-and-scepters-v-2-44.81391/

You might be at this point confused how this is related to my artist career at all.

The thing is, after spending my days on World Editor and WCIII in general for 4-5 good years, I came to realize that I have spent 80% of the time playing the game on World Editor and having fun just watching the others' replays of the maps I made. I hardly even played my own maps due to the amount of time provided.

It made me realized that I had so much fun as a creator. Even more fun than playing the games themselves. The moment of me seeing people enjoying what I made, giving critics, recommending them to the others, and seeing the amount of people joining the community because of this tiny thing I made bit by bit, was the moment of bliss. I would not find that kind of joy anywhere if I have not spent time creating those maps, and I found myself having fewer good times playing them myself. It was more enjoyable seeing the others playing them. 

That totally blew my mind, and changed how I viewed myself. I found out that I found way more happiness being the one creating things then being the consumer.

Since then, even after the whole community was gone as WCIII is not played anymore during these days, I always look back to those moments that crafted me as a whole. Because of that moment, I made up my mind that whatever I do as a career in the future, it would have to be related to creating stuffs, not just a job that involves doing what routines said. I would rather die to take that kind of job for a living.

That idea sparked my Patreon career as I somewhat ended up getting into a job that involved drawing as a routine and had no freedom of creativity almost at all (which I might also talk about that another day). Without WCIII and the World Editor community, I would no way have realized such mindset that developed the whole me today.

Sorry for such a long and almost unrelated to drawing topic today. If you guys managed to finish reading the whole nonsense, kudos to you!

Ya'll have great days.