A Quiet Life

Hello dear Patrons,

I quit Twitter last night. Not for the first time, and I don't want to say for sure whether it will be the last… but for my own good, yeah, I quit. I wanted to take a moment to explain why, because I know a number of you good people follow the MoeGamer account there and may find yourself wondering why, from today, it's going back to an account purely to share links to my articles and YouTube videos.

Those of you who know me personally will know that I deal with a delightful cocktail of mental health issues including depression, anxiety and Asperger syndrome, the combination of which makes it quite hard to deal with certain situations, most notably intense, relentless negativity. (The Asperger's does, however, help with having an obsessive interest in things and desire to talk about them, mind you, so I don't resent that side of things too much.)

Twitter has, over the last few years, stopped being fun. I originally joined (under a different account name) as a means of staying in touch with people I used to regularly chat about games with on the 1up.com forums. Over time, as my interests shifted, so too did my friendship groups and the things I liked to talk about, though gaming remained a constant presence in one form or another. My priority was always to find like-minded people with whom I could enthuse about the things I was enthusiastic about, nothing more; I wasn't interested in putting down things that I wasn't into, I most certainly wasn't interested in the growing trend for politicising gaming, and I didn't want to get embroiled in negativity.

I don't want to get too bogged down in the politics side of things, but in some ways it's unavoidable, since my outlook in this regard is what led to me starting MoeGamer in the first place. For now, suffice it to say that I am primarily interested in writing about games themselves: their mechanics, their narratives, their aesthetics and their historical contexts.

That latter aspect certainly sometimes involves sociopolitical aspects when they were developed partly as a response to a particular event — you can't talk about Hyperdimension Neptunia U without talking about "Gamergate", for example, at least in terms of its localisation — but the key difference between what I'm interested in writing about and what I find so utterly fatiguing on Twitter (and in the mainstream commercial press) is that I'm not passing any sort of judgement on the developers and publishers of these games, nor the people who enjoy them; I'm just interested in looking at their "meaning", and talking about why they're fascinating, inspiring or products of their time.

I'd been growing weary of Twitter for some time, particularly since the election of Trump, which had led to a sharp rise in the amount of people trying their hardest to demonstrate that they had what they perceived to be the "correct" political views. It's not fair to blame this purely on the US election, though; this trend had been on the rise for a while, and had led to numerous incidents of "public shaming", in some cases of people I had worked with or considered friends, simply for them saying what some considered to be "the wrong thing". (In some cases, "the wrong thing" was simply stating the facts of a situation rather than passing judgement on it.)

I've mostly escaped public censure for the things I'm into (at least to my knowledge), though I did find myself doxxed by a troll group on one occasion for nothing more than expressing an appreciation for Lauren Faust's excellent My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (which any fan of JRPGs should watch, like, for realsies), an incident which led to me 1) abandoning my first Twitter account and 2) discovering that the UK police did not, at the time, take so-called "cyber-crime" particularly seriously, even when it concerned people finding not only my personal information but that of my friends and family, then contacting them to spread horrible, horrible lies about me.

Last night, the main catalyst for me deciding to finally cut the cord was someone reaching out to me and accusing me of being a bad person for not addressing what they perceived to be the games industry's biggest "problems".

I was furious and upset at their accusations, because they stemmed from a position of exactly the sort of ignorance that led me to start MoeGamer in the first place. The matter of what this person described as the "rampant sexism" of the industry, for example, is repeatedly addressed in the wide variety of articles I write about the fascinating female characters in Japanese gaming; you only have to look at the many thousands of words I wrote on the cast of visual novel series Grisaia for just one example of many.

What I don't do on MoeGamer is write sociopolitical articles that are only tangentially related to gaming — and I have little patience for them when they crop up elsewhere, which is, I suspect, where this person's accusations came from. But that is not what MoeGamer is about, it's not what I want it to be about — and it's not, I suspect, what my readers want it to be about, either. Any time someone has reached out to express their gratitude for my work — or even, as in your cases, to actually pledge their support in a more tangible manner — it has been for my honesty, my willingness to engage with games on their own terms and to look deeply into why people are so passionate about them, rather than some sort of attempt to figure out a way in which [game X] is somehow bad for the world and everyone in it.

To put it another way, my desire for MoeGamer in the long term is for it to be able to function as a "reference" of sorts; loosely inspired by Hardcore Gaming 101, I want people to be able to dip into my All Games list and read up on games that they find interesting, and I want them to be able to do so without being confronted with politicised articles that are only relevant to a particular time. (There are exceptions to this when I feel it is important, of course, such as my response to Destructoid's vile review of Valkyrie Drive, but I try to keep these to a minimum, and to make these articles about ongoing considerations as much as possible rather than specific concerns from a particular time.)

So basically, this person accusing me of being a bad guy for doing what I do is what tipped me over the edge. They're not the only reason I've stepped away from Twitter, they were just the proverbial straw that broke the chocobo's back. I don't have the patience or the inclination for this any more; I don't have anything meaningful to add to these endless non-debates online, particularly to people who make their minds up beforehand and, in this person's words, "aren't interested in discussion". I am here for one reason only: to celebrate games. And getting mired in negativity on Twitter takes time and mental energy away from that mission, so it gets the chop.

Twitter is, unfortunately, something of a necessity for anyone hoping to get their work seen, which is why I'm keeping the MoeGamer account open, but purely as a place for articles and YouTube videos to get automatically shared rather than anything else. The account will not be monitored, so don't try and respond to anything — I won't see it! (I will see comments on the site, however, so if you have something to say please feel free to leave a comment!)

I would, however, greatly appreciate any likes, quote tweets and retweets you can offer for anything I post that you particularly enjoy, as that helps me to grow my audience, and perhaps also helps more people to discover games that they might not be aware of, which is ultimately all I'm trying to do!

I appreciate that some of you enjoyed chatting with me on Twitter, though, so I'd like to offer you some alternative means of getting in touch if you'd like to continue talking. You can, of course, always comment on these Patron-Only posts or on MoeGamer itself, but here are some other ways to reach me:

• Discord: Pete [MoeGamer.net]#2465
  – Email/Google Hangouts: Contact me via MoeGamer's Contact page and I'll respond via email

You can also reach me on the following gaming networks:

• Steam: steamcommunity.com/id/angryjedi
  – PSN: Angry_Jedi (please leave a message with your friend request so I can distinguish you from randos/bots!)
  – Xbox Live: sonicfunkstars (though I'm not active much on there!)

Once again, thanks for your support, and I hope you understand my decision. I'm doing this primarily for my own mental health, but it will also enable me to focus more on what MoeGamer should be about. It's a project that is deeply important to me, and it means the world to me that there are people out there willing to support my work in a tangible way.

So thank you. Sincerely. I love you a bit.

Pete x