I’ve had a whole lot of thoughts swirling around in my head for some time now about various matters, and I feel as a therapeutic exercise — not to mention an opportunity for some of you to get to know me a bit better — it’s important that I express them somehow. I know all too well how frustrating, stressful and ultimately unhealthy it can be to have unresolved emotions and thoughts surrounding things that have happened to you — particularly bad things — and so this is my attempt to reboot my mind and try to move on a little.
Consequently, certain aspects of this post are more than likely to rub a few people up the wrong way. To those people whose jimmies are rustled I say simply: fuck you, I don’t give a shit, and if you really cared you wouldn’t have done the things you did in the first place.
In the interests of at least a facade of professionalism, I will not be naming individuals who have had a negative impact on my life in this post, though it will doubtless be extremely obvious to anyone who has been following me for a while who the people in question are. I will, however, be naming the companies involved, since that is less personal; everyone knows how unpleasant it is if you Google your own name and find something not terribly complimentary, whereas, unless you own a monolithic corporation, you probably care a little less about someone talking smack about your monolithic corporation. That’s how I’m going to attempt to justify myself about this, anyway.
Also, this post is crazy long, so for the benefit of those who only read on my front page, here’s a Read More tag.
Okay. The last five years. Why five years? Well, in 2010, as those of you who have been following me since then will already know, my life fell to pieces. My first marriage ended, I lost my job and I ultimately found myself moving back home to live with my parents for a while. I love my parents a great deal and I’m forever grateful for what they did for me in this particularly difficult period of my life, but I feel I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who has had a taste of the freedom of living your own adult life out in the world who would relish the possibility of returning to your childhood home, however much it may have changed over the years.
While I was living at home, the depression that had been gradually consuming me for the past couple of years — ever since I’d got into teaching, found that it really wasn’t for me and ultimately suffered a nervous breakdown a couple of years earlier — came to a bit of a head. Or, more accurately, it came to a head before I moved back home. I felt completely and utterly betrayed and abandoned; I’d spend days in my apartment just doing nothing, sometimes hurting myself by punching the floor so hard my hands and wrists started to ache, sometimes breaking things that reminded me of my previous life, often not getting out of bed until 5 in the afternoon having messed up my sleep schedule thanks to the stress.
There were a few lifelines at the time that stopped me going completely mental, however. I’d started writing for a small games site called Kombo — now sadly dead — and was enjoying the experience a great deal. Even better, it actually paid, though not that much. Mostly I was grateful for the virtual company writing for this site offered, and I’m still in touch with the vast majority of people I worked with there even to this day.
I also had friends who looked out for me, and I’ll be forever grateful to them for listening to my woes and not judging me when I erred somewhat on the side of hysterical, which was distressingly frequent for a while.
Between those two things, it’s fair to say that the darkest of the dark thoughts — the ones that would have culminated in me not being here to write this post today — were pushed back just far enough to keep me hanging on, even as I could see pieces of my life crumbling before my eyes.
Time passed, and eventually through a convoluted series of circumstances I found myself working for GamePro, the website of the magazine that my brother used to be in charge of over in the States. Working alongside British industry legend Jaz Rignall, my main contact AJ Glasser and the managing editor Jason Wilson — whom I swear did more to improve my writing in my time with GamePro than any English teacher or other editor has done since — I had a great time and did a good job covering the news beat. I successfully made GamePro’s news coverage unique: instead of rehashing the same old news stories and press releases you see on all the other sites, I deliberately went out of my way to cover things that other sites didn’t seem to be paying much attention to. And it worked! Page views went up, commenters appreciated the interesting articles and all looked good for a while.
I enjoyed working for GamePro. I felt like part of a team, despite that team being thousands of miles away in San Francisco. I felt like I was contributing to something good, and having the opportunity to express myself. Wilson was a great editor in particular; he allowed me the creative freedom to cover stories how I saw fit — including editorialising where appropriate — but also offered helpful, constructive feedback when necessary. I am, to this day, grateful for the opportunity I had there.
As my work at GamePro proceeded apace, I started working more and more for the site until I was effectively working full-time from home, and was on a wage that would actually allow me to move out and get my life back on track again. It was around this time that I met Andie, too — initially via Twitter and subsequently in person — and it was surprisingly quickly that we decided that yes, we wanted to live together. Andie was in a similar situation to me at the time, since she was living at home with her mother after a difficult period. Both of us were keen to get back on our feet, which could have been a recipe for disaster if we’d rushed into anything, but thankfully we were both very sure that this was what we wanted to do before we committed to anything. And now we’re married. Woo.
All was well for a while. Andie worked in the local area, while I stayed at home and continued working for GamePro. Life was good, and comfortable. I was happy for the first time in quite a while. There were little blips and bumps in the road along the way, of course, but yes; for the most part, I was genuinely happy, and satisfied with what I was doing.
Sadly, the old adage about all good things proved itself to be true once again, as one morning in December I awoke to a string of panicked-sounding emails from several members of the GamePro team. None of them were making a lot of sense, but I got the impression that something bad had just happened. Sure enough, when I managed to get one of them to actually talk some sense, it seemed that GamePro’s parent company IDG had decided that the site and magazine were no longer viable things to keep running, and unceremoniously booted everyone out. To add insult to injury, too, the GamePro site simply ceased to exist shortly afterwards, too; some of the content was archived on IDG stablemate PC World, but certainly not all of it by any means, so much of all our work was lost.
I was fortunate in that I’d stayed in touch with AJ Glasser after she moved on from GamePro, and had been doing some occasional freelance work for the sites she was now involved with on the side. Collectively dubbed Inside Network, the sites in question focused largely on mobile and social games, and the work I had been doing involved taking a look at various titles from a business perspective, and penning reviews of a sort about them. Being a business-facing publication, the readers were less concerned with whether these games were actually any good or not — if you’ve ever played a social game, you’ll know that more often than not, they are absolutely not very good at all –and more interested in figures like monthly active users, daily active users and conversion rates.
It was, I’ll be frank, soul-sapping work due to the ruthlessly mercenary and exploitative nature of most mobile and social games at the time, but it paid well. It paid extremely well, in fact, so I was more than happy to keep doing it for as long as I could.
You know what happens next: a string of mysterious emails from the people I’d previously been working with, then the sudden discovery that no, I don’t have a job any more because, in this instance, the people who had taken over the site were complete douchebags and had sacrificed a great deal of editorial integrity — particularly from a technical perspective — in favour of getting cheap-and-cheerful articles up on the site as quickly as possible. My former colleagues wanted nothing to do with this and earnestly recommended that I jump ship as soon as I could, too.
I needed work. In desperation, I searched around in my contacts to find people I might be able to wangle some employment out of, even if it was only on a freelance basis. Former GamePro bossman Jaz Rignall eventually bore fruit when I emailed him; he promised that he had an exciting project of some description in the works, and that I was earmarked to be involved when it did launch. That project turned out to be USgamer, an addition to the Gamer Network umbrella best known for Eurogamer.
USgamer was supposed to be a different type of site. Rather than providing the usual news, previews, reviews format, all of us on staff — and, aside from me, there were a couple of other industry veterans involved, one of whom in particular I was especially excited to work alongside — we were encouraged to use our own individual voices to write about the things that interested us and were important to us. Since all of us had our own specialisms, ranging from driving simulators to retro games to niche Japanese releases (guess which one was mine), we all had different things to say, and there was a very strong feeling of “old-school 1up” about the site, with the aim being for visitors to come to USgamer for the authors, not necessarily for the articles.
It worked well for a while, but it seems that the top dogs at Gamer Network were unhappy with the traffic USgamer was pulling in. It wasn’t poor by any means, but apparently it wasn’t enough to make a decent amount of revenue from the advertising on the site. You know what this means, don’t you? Of course: clickbait. Our original editorial remit went out of the window, and I went back to covering the news. Unfortunately, in this case I didn’t have the freedom I did when I worked on GamePro, since the aforementioned person I was previously excited to work with turned out to be a bit of a control freak when it came to the content appearing on the site: I had to run each and every news story I was thinking about publishing past him, with anything he didn’t deem interesting enough being rejected outright, even if I’d have plenty of time to write about it and had given an interesting angle on it.
This is not an unusual way to run a publication, of course, but it was massively inconvenient for me as the sole European employee of the site, since it meant I had to do a bunch of research before America woke up, then potentially find that my time had been completely wasted. Moreover, it made me feel like I wasn’t trusted to find interesting things to write about by myself — particularly when I was outright forbidden from even mentioning certain titles such as Monster Monpiece. Even worse than that, it diluted the unique editorial voice that USgamer had, making it more and more like pretty much every other site out there on the market.
Over time, it became clear that all was not well. I chatted a bit with Rignall about the situation, since I was seeing fewer and fewer of his contributions on the site. It seemed like he was being sidelined in favour of the aforementioned veteran, despite his extensive knowledge and experience. I started to get a bad feeling about what was going on.
This bad feeling only grew when I started getting rebuked more and more for certain things I wrote, while little to no appreciation was shown for the “good” things I produced. For example, while covering the Eurogamer Expo in London — single-handedly, I might add, and churning out a whole bunch of articles each 12+ hour day — I was not praised for the variety of interesting games I covered, nor the unusual, unique angles on coverage I presented. No, instead I got bollocked for headlining an article about Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII “Lightning’s More Than Just Jiggle” — a provocative headline, yes, but one that was directly poking fun at other publications who, around that time, had been focusing exclusively on the fact that the aforementioned heroine appeared to have somewhat enhanced boob-jiggle physics in her latest release. My intention was to show that there were many more interesting things to talk about when it came to Lightning Returns than whether her boobs wobbled, but no; this was around the time the whole “social justice” fad had started to rear its ugly head, and so any mention of something that might be interpreted as “objectification of women” — regardless of context — had to be censured and thrown out of the window. I changed the headline for a quiet life.
My bad feeling grew over time. Other incidents occurred. On one particularly memorable occasion, a freelance reviewer posted a review of the excellent rhythm game Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PS3 and came to the conclusion that it was for “creepy degenerates”, having spend over a thousand words decrying how disgusting it was that anyone could possibly like this sort of thing. My then-colleague Cassandra Khaw and I — both of us fans of niche Japanese games — made very loud objections to our lord and master, and ultimately it was agreed that I’d be allowed to start a Japanese gaming-focused column, opening with a rebuttal to the Project Diva F review, since we all thought that changing review scores post-launch a la Polygon was somewhat bad practice.
JPgamer was born. Naturally, I got into trouble again, this time for “throwing [reviewer] under the bus”, even though my article, as you’ll see if you read the archive link above, was more concerned with starting a discussion rather than attempting to pretend things never happened. The thing I shouldn’t have done, it seems, was apologise for the tone of the review making people uncomfortable. I would insert that ASCII shrug emote here if I could be bothered to look it up and copy-paste it.
Things quietened down for a bit after that. JPgamer drew a small but passionate audience of followers and commenters, many of whom I still speak to on occasion today, and at least one of whom I now count among my best friends. Things looked like they might be settling down for a while.
Then came the guides. Apparently top brass were still unsatisfied with the traffic USgamer was providing, so our big, new thing was to be reposting content from the Prima Games site — also part of Gamer Network, we weren’t stealing content, I hasten to add — and cluttering up the main feed with multi-part guides to the big releases of the hour: at the time I was putting these together, it was stuff like Dark Souls II and Watch_Dogs.
This seemed like a desperate measure, and I became skeptical as to the long-term future of USgamer. With the guides I was tasked with rewriting, I had little time for other news coverage, reviews and previews, though I made a point to make time to write JPgamer each and every Wednesday, because it was something that had become important to both me and my readers. The magic was starting to wane, but I was hopeful the site would pull through this rough spell and we’d come out of the side happy, and perhaps even able to go back to our old editorial style.
Then came the unexpected email. I no longer had a job at USgamer — or, more accurately, I had about a month to continue working for the site and figure out what I was going to do. In the meantime, aforementioned industry veteran — whom it had become extremely apparent knew about this well in advance — recruited two of his most sycophantic cronies from back in the day, on the grounds that “the site wanted an all-American staff”. This obviously spurious reason was clearly intended to make me feel better, particularly as it was combined with soulless platitudes about how it “wasn’t anything to do with my work, which was consistently very good”. It did not. During my last month with USgamer, I felt like the career I had been dreaming about since I was a kid — after seeing what a success my brother had made of himself in the business — was being snapped, broken, beaten with a hammer, stamped on and then shat on. I felt like my desire to be a unique voice in a business notoriously hostile towards Japanese games — particularly in recent years — had been thrown back in my face. And, not for the first time in my life, I felt utterly betrayed.
I spent some time without work, thankfully able to just about support myself until I found something new, and eventually managed to score an interview with the local offices of energy supply company SSE. This wasn’t the kind of job I particularly wanted, but at least the position as Web Content Editor sounded reasonably relevant to my interests, so I went for it, and, after two separate occasions when I showed up for interview at a company who apparently had no idea I was coming — in retrospect, this should have probably sounded alarm bells, but I was more thinking “I need a job, any job” at this point — I eventually secured the position.
SSE seemed like a nice enough place populated with nice enough people initially, but it wasn’t long before its incredibly obnoxious corporate culture revealed itself. SSE, being a utilities supplier, is extremely concerned with health and safety, to such a degree that you will literally get reprimanded for not holding a handrail as you ascend a set of stairs, or if you don’t wear a bump cap when going under your desk to pick up a pen, or if you spill a tiny bit of water on the carpeted floor and don’t immediately report it as a “hazard”.
We’re talking about a company that starts each and every meeting it holds — and it holds a lot of meetings — with a “Safety Moment”, usually an opportunity for some apple-for-the-teacher type to chime in with some simply dreadful thing they’d seen someone driving to work do that morning. We’re talking about a company that took most of its employees to a residential weekend at a very expensive-looking (but actually rather shit) hotel where, I kid you not, the bulk of our time was spent designing safety posters and colouring things in. We’re talking about a company that thought it would be a good idea to divide people into groups to produce special safety-themed presentations for everyone else, like primary school children.
Despite this obnoxiousness — which I found easy enough to ignore and pay lip-service to when necessary — I didn’t mind the job too much, though it was abundantly clear that the company had hired eight people to do the job of four, at best. Where things started to fall down a bit was towards the end of my probation period, when I suddenly seemed to be being picked up on a whole lot more for things that I had always been doing — most notably having a look at my phone on my desk during a quiet moment between content updating jobs which, due to the aforementioned overstaffing issue, certainly didn’t fill every moment of every day.
I suffered a couple of health problems during my time at SSE, too. On one occasion, I had a week-long bout of diarrhoea that prevented me from going anywhere, and on another occasion I did something unpleasant to my back that likewise prevented me from going anywhere. The official SSE policy was that you are “allowed” to be sick up to three times in a year before you start getting reviews and meetings and all sorts of unnecessary red-tape thrown in your way, and you’ll notice that this was just two separate occasions. I was rebuked for being ill, and rebuked again for not seeing the doctor during this period, even though I pointed out (accurately) that with my local surgery, it is literally impossible to get an appointment for anything closer than a week — sometimes two — from the current date.
I felt my depression rising up again. I gained a lot of weight, to such a degree that I ached and felt constant fatigue — this was my impetus to finally start Slimming World — and, as you might expect, got rebuked for displaying signs of fatigue. I was honest about how I was feeling and received little in the way of understanding from my bosses, ultimately leading them to bring me into an utterly humiliating meeting where I was supposed to have an opportunity to explain myself and convince them not to fire me, but which the conclusion of had clearly been determined well in advance.
It may not sound like a big deal, but I still have “flashbacks” to that meeting every few nights, and it gives me enormous anxiety: partly because it was a horrible experience, and partly because there are all manner of things I wish I’d said and done rather than the simple bellowed “FUCK YOU” I gave the assembled panel before I left the building for the last time.
Since that time, I worked as a seasonal temp at Game in Southampton, reminding me that I actually enjoy working retail, and that not every place of work is filled with insufferable, power-tripping wankers who want nothing more than to wave their cock (literal or metaphorical) around and make everyone else miserable. Sometimes they’re filled with a group of people who enjoy what they do and do their best, even though they know it’s only a temporary job for not-particularly-good pay. Sometimes they’re filled with people who treat each other like human beings — having a laugh and a joke when appropriate; pulling together when necessary — and sometimes they’re filled with a positive, jovial atmosphere that makes coming into work in the morning a genuine pleasure.
Of course, my temporary contract for that job ended this week, so I am faced with the unenviable prospect of having to look for work once again. Can you perhaps understand, after all that, why I’m not relishing this task, and why I find it a little difficult to trust people?
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