The environment at Blizzard is, to be blunt, a nerd haven: from league of legends teams at lunch to the video game / anime collectibles filling the office space. There is even a library where D&D campaigns are regular and the books, video games, as well as board games are all available to check out for a week or so. All this does not, however, compare to how awesome the creative atmosphere of Blizzard was! The process of writing for the game was incredibly specialized and therefore completely outside my comfort zone. But with my mentor, I quickly learned and have become almost competent at game writing.

My twin and I in front of the blizzard sign.

I then got to meet the rest of my team. My supervisor was Brian Kindregan, Lead Writer of the Diablo team at Blizzard. I also worked closely with Leonard Boyarsky a senior world designer, Valerie Watrous an associate writer, John Chambers the story editor, and Skye Chandler the producer. These guys were the coolest, most fun people to work with!

Me @ the annual Blizzard Summer fest!

Now not only did I have awesome co-workers but while hanging with the other interns there was never a dull moment! I could begin to list everything the cool University Relations Reps did for us but I’ll just elaborate on the best one! We had a campus raid where all interns participated to earn swag. There were water balloons, basketball, hula hooping, trivia questions, photo ops, and dancing all in the confines of the Blizzard campus. My team, being way too into these activities in the coolest way possible, won collector’s editions of WoW: Catalyst that were also signed!

The highlight of my first day at Blizzard was not the amazing Orc statue outside the main buildings, nor was it receiving literally a massive bag of free swag, it was meeting my mentor, Michael Chu, a Game Designer on the Diablo team, and having ramen with him for lunch. Now I was terrified when I shook his hand, but after that lunch, I realized that at Blizzard, that I had nothing to fear.

Now most internships usually have you doing mundane, or menial tasks. That is not how it flies at Blizzard. They put me to hard work day one. In the end I can say proudly that I wrote lots of monster lore books, drafted an event, emoted lots of scenes, and wrote some legendary flavor text.  I also no longer fear commas, or writing knowing others will judge / tear it apart!

The epic orc statue.

Those activities, the people, and the environment made my summer at Blizzard truly epic!  I couldn’t have asked for a better team to help me learn and grow as a writer. I couldn’t have asked for more cool interns to hang out with that summer. It was a remarkable experience, and to those who wish to pursue a similar experience I say in the cheesiest way possible, shoot for the stars.

There are games like the RPG action in the game Last Stand: Union City on Kongregate where the player fights the zombies in order to survive and gathers supplies such as ammo, food, and medical supplies whilst journeying to Union City to evacuate the infected area of the world. It’s basically a simulation in other words where the player makes decisions that affect the game play immensely as one can lose other survivors or supplies based on the player’s decisions. Depending on what difficultly the player chooses they may need to eat and sleep whilst killing zombies at the same time. Other games in that same saga of Last Stand are more FPS styled and focus less on story or those other in game features.

On the other side of the spectrum on the IOS there is Zombie life where in the player is a zombie trying to survive in a human world. In the game you find a job to make money to buy things that disguise you as human such as deodorant in order to hide that awful decay smell or clothes that aren’t also rotting. The humor and bright colors mock the whole kill the zombie mentality of the Last Stand game but is in itself a simple simulation game that can stand on its own in its well organized game play.

The apocalypse has become an obsession in gaming culture whether for bad or for worse. With games like Nazi Zombies in Call of Duty and even to IOS / Flash games as the aforementioned our culture consumes the myth of the rumored “inevitable” scenario of our world coming to an end. The world is changing and so is the world of video gaming. With new revolutionary technology could we possibly reach a moral dilemma in gaming where simulation becomes too real? Is there a point where the virtual becomes all too real when one pulls the trigger in Call of Duty?