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Dr. Jeebus is a notorious Twitter personality, streamer, and owner of MtgBroDeals.com. Explicit language ahead!
Name: Dr. Jeebus
Screen name: Dr. Jeebus, Dr_Jeebus, or DrJeebus, in that order (depending on what characters the site or program will allow). For League of Legends, I had to resort to DrJeebusActual, as someone ganked DrJeebus from me.
Avatar of choice: Dr. Vink (Aron Tager) from Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Years gaming: All of them (30). If you discount peekaboo as a game, then 29.
How much time do you spend gaming in an average week? Thanks to my insane schedule, featuring four whole hours of sleep a night, I probably average about forty to fifty hours of gaming a week. There is also nothing in that sentence I'm terribly proud of.
Favorite male game character of all time: Ertai, Wizard Adept. Dude is brilliant, super-talented, and a total, arrogant douchebag who makes very important life decisions with his dick. I don't know why, but for some reason, that character just speaks to me.
Favorite female game character of all time: Ivy Valentine. Ertai aside, my fondness for specific characters is generally based on how much I enjoy playing them rather than any storyline considerations. After all, games are made to be played. Ivy is one of the more skill-testing characters in Soul Calibur, which is the sort of gameplay I always gravitate toward. The snake sword is extremely cool despite defying physics, and I find the character very visually appealing both because of the general motif and because purple is my favorite color. Also, her dad is a fucking pirate.
First gaming console you ever owned: Atari 2600
To what game have you been most addicted lately? Excepting Magic, as it is not a recent addiction but rather a prolonged one, it's a tossup between League of Legends and Brain Age: Concentration Training.
What game have you played for the longest time, and what about it keeps you playing? Definitely Magic, as I've been playing for about nineteen years now. I keep playing because it targets pretty much everything I'm interested in: strategy, collecting, hanging out with friends, and shiny objects. The only game-related thing I would rather do than play Magic is help design Magic.
I do feel I need to give an honorable mention here to Dungeons and Dragons, as my friends and I played a single campaign for ten years.
What game did someone convince you to try that you just hated? Phantasmagoria. Fucking genre-destroying piece of shit. It's not even a game, it's just a fucking movie that occasionally demands you click a button. Worst part? It's not even a good movie. Sure, it's presented under the guise of like a horror/puzzle game, but there's a goddamn little skull in the bottom corner you can click on for a hint, but that "hint" is just telling you exactly what you need to do. And worst of all is this game was format-warping, so to speak. Most games are barely games anymore, but rather just movies with occasional interaction aimed at a preschool difficulty level, and I blame this game for all of that.
What game causes you to rage or tilt the most? Any cooperative game in which my team is functionally retarded and incapable of following the most basic instructions. It's a miracle I even tried World of Warcraft after being a raid leader in Guild Wars, where it was nigh-impossible to get seven people to follow orders; I had no idea what a fucking nightmare it would be to try to coordinate twenty-four other people. If I played it back when raids required forty players, I may have actually blown my brains out in frustration.
Do you have any gamer regrets? Maybe it’s a misplay or chance not taken. A misplay? I seem to remember playing the worst Magic match of my life on camera, so there's that.
Trash talk: mandatory or unnecessary? Depends on your relationship with the opponent. There are some people I'll play against with whom I trash talk constantly because we both understand it's all in good fun, but with players you don't know, it's unnecessary unless it's really, really funny.
Which one do you prefer? Video games, TCGs, or board games? I disapprove of these categories. The games I prefer most are strategy and puzzle games; I am more interested in the type of experience than the delivery mechanism. Action/platformers are a close second for me, and those can't really exist in tabletop gaming (although the Centipede board game does a damn good job of trying!), so, especially as a kid, I gravitated heavily toward video games.
If you could go pro in any game, what game would it be? Magic, without a doubt. Although, as previously mentioned, I would rather be a professional designer than player.
Tell me about the game you would create if I gave you unlimited resources. Given that my favorite types of games are strategy/puzzle games and action/platformers but that I also enjoy the real-world/social aspects of gaming, the game I would create would be . . . have you ever seen the movie The Game with Michael Douglas? It would basically be that, except with a mortality rate akin to King’s Quest I.
Whom do you consider one of the most sexually attractive characters (male or female) you have ever played? Was this based on pure artistic design of the character or overall character traits? I am proud to say I have given absolutely zero thought to this subject prior to reading this question, and I don't want to break that streak now. I have enough actual girls to fuck, so I'm not concerned with which 3D rendering of a porn star some sweaty programmer saw in a magazine once has the sexiest digital reproduction.
If you could be any character from any game, whom would you morph into? Whichever one has enough money to pay off my student loans. Beyond that, I'm ridiculously awesome, so I don't spend a lot of time fantasizing about being other people. It's the same reason Halloween does not excite me in the least.
Do you see an issue with the portrayal of women in games, and why? Their breasts are too small, and they spend too much time out of the kitchen.
Describe what makes a central character in a story-driven game appealing to you. Story-driven games do not appeal to me. I play games to play games. If I want a story, I'll read a book or watch a movie. The story for Super Mario Bros is, "Bowser stole my girlfriend? I'll fix his little red wagon!" And that's about all the story I need.
Have you ever cosplayed a character or could ever see your future self cosplaying a character? I never have cosplayed before, though I have seriously considered doing Commander Greven il-Vec, Alucard from the manga/anime Hellsing, and/or Ertai.
Have you ever related to any characters from a game you have played? I mentioned Ertai a couple times now. Beyond that, I'm sure I have, but I am so much more interested in gameplay, so I don't really remember that aspect of most games.
If able to choose a gender during gameplay, which gender do you usually choose? Depends on the game. If it's something where you're "creating" your own character, like Pokémon or Animal Crossing, I'll always choose male because I am male, so why wouldn't I? In games in which you select from premade characters, my decision is based on gameplay. For example, in games like Tekken and Soul Calibur, the gender of characters I specialize in is about fifty-fifty; however, in League of Legends, I have only played female characters, and none of the male characters are of any interest to me because of their move sets and play styles. Going even deeper, if it's a game like Goldeneye, in which you select from premade characters but your character has (almost) no relevance except for your appearance, the decision was always based on how camouflaged the character's outfit would be in the level we were playing. Boris's goddamn Hawaiian shirt may have made you a real easy target in almost every level, but he may as well have been invisible in the caves. I play to win, mother fucker.
Look, I'm not playing games to keep women in the kitchen or to strike back against an oppressive patriarchy. I play games because they're fun and make me think. Why can't that be enough?
Did your family every have game nights? Do your parents like any type of games? We didn't have a consistent game night, but we would play board games and card games frequently—and occasionally video games. Having a brother of similar age to mine meant they didn't need to as often since we could just play games together.
Can you play games with your significant other or do you find it ends up being too competitive between you? While I'm single right now, I have certainly played games with every girl I've dated. I don't think the deciding factor is competitive nature but rather how well both parties handle losing. I'm not going to insult a significant other by going easy on her or by letting her win, and I would expect the same treatment. As long as neither person is a sore loser, there's nothing wrong with two competitive partners playing games together.
Do you play any cellphone or Facebook games regularly? Cellphone games are great. Gotta do something while I poop!
What was your favorite game to play as a child? It can be any type of game, such as red rover, marbles, tag, or whatever. Christ, I don't even know how to describe this. So, my favorite game to play as a child was actually a game I designed that my friends and I played. A common theme in various schoolyard games is that if you touch the ball or Frisbee or whatever but fail to catch it, you're out. So, the game was basically a combination of that rules device and a variety of abilities that players had. Some were derived from Final Fantasy spells because elemental magic is utterly amazing when you're seven years old, and some were created based on the game mechanics, such as reversing turn order, target player may only catch with his or her off hand, and the like. You had three lives per game, and you had a character level, which carried over from game to game and could go up and down levels based on your performance (your level obviously determined how many and which spells you had access to each game). It sounds complicated, but it was surprisingly simple. Best part is that because the main rules mechanic was known, anyone could jump right in, and we'd just explain the other rules as it went. Oh, and we used a Koosh ball—'cause it was the 80s. So, yeah . . . did I ever mention I really like game design?
What kind of impact do you think MMOs are having on society. Would you change anything? They are removing people from society. The only reason I ever played World of Warcraft was that I had the option to either play or never see my friends again. I changed the only thing I can change by quitting the game. The free market says there is demand for these games, so who am I to say they can't produce them?
Do you believe there is a correlation between violence in videogames and violence in society? As long as videogames were invented four thousand years ago in the Middle East, absolutely. If they weren't, then no, there is no correlation.
Can you rank what you would consider the the top five games you have ever played? Nope! This is extraordinarily hard, and I'm sure I would give you a different answer every hour, but here's my attempt at it:
- Magic: The Gathering
- Baseball (Yankees suck)
- Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- Goldeneye 64
- The Island of Dr. Brain
