The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

formerly on tigsource.com on the right side of the page we had small "spotlight game" feature that hilighted a game the editors were particularly infatuated with. my last game was up there (before i joined the staff) and cholo was there. when the site went down a game maker game called "street bike fury" was in the spotlight.

all of the editors were playing it pretty extensively; i know derek is on the online high score chart. it's on my desktop.

street bike fury was created by a high school student named shawn noel. i just found out that a week ago shawn noel killed himself.

i...never really interacted with him? he posted to tigsource a day or so before the site went down to say he was considering making street bike fury longer because a number of people had been able to finish it. aside from that i read an interview with him where he belittled his work and insisted he had no friends and no life. i wasn't sure if he was being serious. i'm really still not.

i played his game extensively probably the week before he died. it was programmed in game maker, the game creation system i am working with right now, and i remember being a bit jealous of the things he could make it do.

it's a really good game. think a konami gameboy motocross title crossed with a data east game like crude buster.

i've never been very active in the game maker community. everybody just seems to be asking "is he really dead? is he really dead?" over and over again.

this death feels oddly close, and i can't really figure out why. i felt the need to organize my thoughts, and here they are.
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[seryogin]

There's something fucked up about the society that we live in. If it forces bright, young, seemingly normal, people to take their lives.

I won't claim to know who this guy was, or what his mental hangups were, but whatever they were they weren't worth throwing his life away over. It was probably the same high school shit that makes losers bring shotguns to school to "make a point." And it's a point that deserves to be made, if the vile overseers of the American Dream think that the prison yard culture prevalent in most American schools is somehow "normal."

I mean, I was lucky to have gone to my high school. I went to a small Russian language school for diplomats that had one hundred and fifty students, so even the nerds (me) could get along fine with everybody else. It wasn't hard for me to find friends when I stopped being afraid of people and even the infrequent conflicts that I've had were smoothed over quickly.

I feel bad for the guy, I really do. I know the despair that grips someone when they see their lives stuck in an endless, hopeless loser loophole. It's soul-crushing to live your life with no hopes and illusions, knowing that nothing that you'll ever do will ever amount to anything. Some can either lie to themselves and go on living, some can lash out and find meaning in something (though that's a matter of luck as well as strength) and others still do the brave thing and kill themselves. "An honest man's honest death." Hmph, may we all be so lucky.
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[wourme]

I talked with Shawn frequently. In fact, it's eerie to think I might have been one of the last people to talk with him. The night before he killed himself, he was running short on bandwidth and needed a temporary mirror for his Street Bike Fury game, so I uploaded it to my site. But he never changed the link, and that was the last I heard from him.

Shawn was very talented, and is pretty legendary in the Game Maker community. I also considered him a friend, so this was very close to me--the closest of the (fortunately few) people I have known who committed suicide.

[Mister Toups]

Maybe you -- or, uh, someone else, if you don't feel comfortable doing it -- should put together some kind of obituary for the next issue? If that's okay with Matt? I think it would be the least we could do, and I don't think it would be innapropriate or anything.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[Lackey]

I knew Shawn vaguely at best, since I only spoke with him once online.

I've heard some people in the GM community are doing tribute games, though I don't know anything specific. I was asked if I wanted to participate but I thought it might be sort of strange, since I didn't really know him.

This is really unsettling, especially in something like the Game Maker community which isn't as detatched as some online communities can be.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |