About

Updated 3-25-2007.
noob aka William Mackie. Bass River, Cape Cod MA.
Welcome to PermaNoob.

Noob is not a video gaming industry insider, far from it. In fact, so far from it that he can’t quite even see where video games are made even if he stands on top of his snow-covered, propane grill and squints into a monocular, but he has been an avid video game player since the first days of the Atari 2600. Of course, his parents did not buy a “real” 2600, but a Sears Telegames console. Nevertheless, he’s been hooked ever since.

Why call yourself noob? Why the site name permanoob?

Noob (or noobie) is a term, usually a derogatory one, for someone who is new to a particular game. Noobs have a lot of questions as they are seeing things for the first time and they are the ones which are trying to sort out the game they are playing without the benefit of experience. In my case, I am noob to game design realities. I have no idea what it is like for a publisher to be pushing for certain things, fans to be pressuring for things, a bottom line looming, worrying about how design concepts can be implemented by the code and having to balance all that. “Permanoob” will hopefully be a state of just that kind of ignorance, exploratory thinking and questioning of the game systems in place no matter how much “knowledge” I accrue between now and when I stop this little blog project. All that and, of course, the domain name was available.

In writing this little blog, noob (that’s me) has a few modest goals.

  1. Learn to write with a minimum of re-edits, corrections and indecision. Also, some writing about the video games industry which doesn’t suck would be an added bonus.
  2. Be mentioned, or appear in the links section of Raph Koster’s, Scott Jennings’ or Curt Schilling’s blogs. If Sid Meier has a blog, a link on it would ensure that I die happy.
  3. Graduate from simply writing about video games to actually being a part of creating video games. I’ve got some ideas and not all of them involve extra-terrestrial, robotic, zombie ninja pirates with rocket launchers, but admittedly I think most of them do.

To achieve those ends along with the accompanying accolades, endowments and wheel barrows full of gold-pressed spacebucks, I’m going to throw the conventions of the video gaming world up on the autopsy table and fire up the bone saw.

Expect contradiction, hypocrisy, poor grammar, incomplete thoughts, occasional foul-language, shlocky cliches and lack of an overall direction, sort of like a Hallmark card written by an angry drunk lawyer.

For those of you who might be more comfortable knowing who “noob” is, or don’t give any weight to the rantings of net-anons without the stones to give their real names: mine is William Mackie.

Contact the site author at: noob/at/permanoob/dot/com


 

 

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