My name is Stephen Venables and I’ve been a gamer for pretty much as long as I can remember, often under the name “charl8tan”. For the past 8 and a bit years I’ve also been working in the Games Industry in a variety of roles from Tester to Producer. I’m also trying to write a book (or should I say a few books) and as I get further along that path I may post segments here on the blog.
My History
For many years I was a very avid, hardcore gamer. Beginning early on with my mighty Spectrum 48k (rubber keys and a horrendously ugly separate tape deck) and progressing through quite literally all the consoles and more than a few computers, until solidly returning to PC gaming in the mid 90’s (though I still enjoy a bit of console gaming even today). Although I was always a bit of instant gratification junky, spending most of my gaming time playing FPS titles, I always enjoyed a good solid RPG (Baldurs Gate and the like) and so found myself slowly entering the world of MMO’s. Dark Age of Camelot was my first foray into that world, followed by a sojourn through space in Star Wars Galaxies. Inevitably came World of Warcraft which I was thoroughly addicted to for a good while, even going out to work for Blizzard in France as a GM. That came to a close with the release of Warhammer Online (which left me disappointed), followed by a trip into Aion.However, back during my time at Blizzard, a colleague of mine introduced me to a rather intriguing title, EVE Online. Immediately I was taken aback at how complex this game was, it made every other MMO I’d played seem almost childish. This here was an MMO for the serious, mature player. A game where your success (or failure) was directly linked to not only your ability to hit the right buttons, but also to apply your mind and make calculated, intelligent decisions. This applied to everything, even the offloading of “trash” loot, for were you foolish enough to just do a quick sale, you could find yourself missing out an a large amount of cash for just a couple of minutes flying.
That was back in 2005, my friend funded me and insisted that I get my Learning Skills done before anything else. Of course I had my eye on the mighty Megathron (the reason my first character was Gallente), but I toiled away at those skills and eventually lost interest as I paid a subscription just to sit in station training. I returned to EVE a couple of times over the years, but never really got into it fully until my time in Warhammer was coming to an end. I realised that I’d been left unfulfilled by my MMO experiences, and that EVE was where I wanted to be. So I came back, started another new character (on a second account) to learn the ropes again and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my time ever since. I did have another pause fairly recently, but during that time I managed to keep my accounts active for skill training, I’m also in a Corp this time around that I thoroughly enjoy. The people are helpful, friendly and best of all a real good laugh, beyond that they also know a lot about the game and help me often with what must seem silly questions.
These days my time for gaming is somewhat limited, I’m definitely more of a casual gamer now. Instead my time is occupied most often by my wonderful wife and two amazing kids. It definitely has moments that are more stressful, but it is also infinitely more rewarding and I am certainly more than happy to no longer be a hardcore-gamer.
Why Lab Utopia?
I decided to create this blog as I would like to share my experiences and opinions on gaming, EVE, programming and other things with the world. I read quite a few blogs myself and have learned many useful things (not only to do with EVE) from them. This is (I hope) a way of me giving something back.Coming up with a name proved to be a bit of a nightmare, and I'd like to thank my wife for her help in that as everything I came up with was either really terrible, or already taken!
I hope you find future posts interesting, and enjoy reading this blog.
~ Stephen Venables
