Hello World

Welcome friends, allies, and dissenters. This is Pixel Plated Heart, my first attempt to create and contribute something positive to the videogame community. Before I brief you further on my mission objectives, I feel compelled to introduce myself; after all, vanity lurks at the core of any true blogging initiative. My name is David Ayala and I reside in Los Angeles. I'm 23, fresh out of the liberal-arts-college-factory, and attempting to navigate a new world full of responsibilities and decisions. The learning curve is steep.

And I'm also a gamer. As a lifetime owner of that label, I've witnessed every possible reaction to that declaration. Oftentimes I've shunned my gamer identity, angry at it for revealing too much about my personhood and how I spend my precious hours on other more interesting, yet imaginary earths. One day, when I was about 12 or so, I made a desperate attempt to cleanse myself of the bits and grime, and sold off all my videogames at the pawn shop. I got about $80 for my SNES, NES, and what would have been known then as a "gripload" of games. With a saved soul and heart, I devoted myself to a more dignified existence, pursuing physical activity as a hobby (imagine that!) and collecting baseball cards, not pokemon.

But as the expression goes, you can take Mario out of the Mushroom Kingdom but you can't take mushrooms away from Mario...or something. Soon enough I was back in the game. Nintendo 64, Ocarina of Time, my first issue of EGM: I finally began to play and see games in a different light. They were more than toys, more than a simple diversion. Videogames became the sibling I never had, an escape from a less than dependable home life. They were art to me. Beautiful expressions of joy and success, cunning and malice. Buried deep in the cold bits and bytes of a programming language few can understand, lay the ability for human experience to manifest and grow. In my games, life was mirrored, challenged, vindicated, and validated. They didn't speak to everybody this way, but for me they did something special. My passion for the medium lies in my everlasting conviction that videogames possess the ability to affect individuals in a deeply personal manner. It is with this ideal, held tightly in my heart and channeled through my keyboard, that I move forward with this writing project.

I intend for Pixel Plated Heart to be a place where I can synthesize the videogame life I've nurtured for so long with the experience of living in our complicated modern world. I will engage analyses and criques of videogames in relation to race/class/gender/intersectional discourses. Furthermore, I would like to construct and execute research projects that ask serious questions about games, gamers, and society at large. If I get too boring, let me know. As the medium progresses into a realm beyond big budget entertainment, these kinds of discussions will become necessary for videogames and the industry to exist in a healthy, sustainable manner.

--david