Joystiq blogger bio: Vladimir Cole
by night, student in Wharton's MBA program by day, corporate drone by summer. While an undergrad at Yale, I participated heavily in clan.elay, a team of hardcore FPS nuts that procrastinated on schoolwork by competing in Action Quake II and TFC ladders. Lazy stalkers can find the rest of my CV details on my public LinkedIn profile, so here's a brief gamer bio:
First game experience: Chutes and Ladders. I don't remember my first digital games experience. I think it might have been a game where you pop a tape in your VCR and shoot at planes on the screen with a light gun. Never owned a 2600, but snuck over to a friend's place to play Mountain King on his.
Games that changed me: Combat (Atari 2600), Qbert (Arcade), Space Invaders (Arcade) Zaxxon (Arcade), Super Mario Brothers (NES), Phantasy Star II (Genesis), Street Fighter II (Arcade), Populous (PC), Civilization (PC), Warcraft (PC), Starcraft (PC), Action Quake (mod) (PC), Half-Life (PC), Team Fortress Classic (PC), Everquest (PC), World of Warcraft (PC), Geometry Wars (Xbox 360).
Potential sources of bias and conflicts of interest: (1) I own shares in most major game publishers. It's a pretty broad portfolio that includes (or has recently included) EA, THQ, Activision, Microsoft, Take Two; (2) I interned in Microsoft's games division in the summer of 2006 and will return to that division in the summer of 2007; (3) I worked on games projects as an intern at ESPN in the summer of 2005; (4) I'm sometimes so thoroughly annoyed by rabid fanboys and fangirls that I find myself wanting to write mean things about their favorite console of the moment, just to watch them cry; (5) I will eventually work full time in the games industry, so may be less inclined to burn bridges to companies I might one day hope to work for, though that didn't stop me from writing a string of negative (but fair!) posts about Microsoft before I had landed a job with the company; (6) Because I was a Sega Genesis fanboy during my formative years, I've got inexplicably warm feelings towards Sega, even to this day; (7) I almost always root for the underdog.
Why I'm blogging about games: My primary motive for blogging is to educate myself about an industry that I plan to call home for a long time to come. Joystiq readers keep me sharp by letting me know when I've missed some angle on a story. Industry events help me meet future colleagues, partners and friends. And writing about games forces me to think about issues more deeply than I'd think about them were I a mere passive observer.
