1679: Countdown

Tomorrow is a bank holiday here in the UK — a public holiday to you Americans; I'm not entirely sure why we place so much emphasis on the "bank" part, aside from the fact that it means the banks are usually shut — and also my last day of "freedom" before I become a cog in the corporate machine.

I've mentioned before that I'm actually quite looking forward to starting my new job. It's a daunting prospect, of course — it's a new place of work, new people to work alongside, a new role and a whole new industry to be a part of — but it's something that I'm eagerly anticipating, rather than dreading. Why? Well, partly because it's something new to do, and something that will help me feel like I'm leading a more "normal" existence — as pleasant as the freedom of working from home can be, it's a lonely existence that can become surprisingly stressful and trying after a while, particularly when you have no-one around you to bounce ideas off or just vent a bit of stress — and actually building a career rather than just constantly treading water.

The other reason is something that's become readily apparent since I stepped back from the games industry. In fact, it was already becoming apparent when I was still involved with it. And that "something" is the confrontation that seems to be at the heart of the various parts of the industry's interactions with one another on a daily basis.

Frankly I don't want to get into a discussion of what's been going on recently because it's all been done to death elsewhere, and it tends to lead to frayed tempers on all sides. If you're that curious, I'll point out that it started here, passed through here and will hopefully end here and leave you to make your own mind up, perhaps with some of your own research filling in the blanks. If you're shocked at what you read — if indeed you can be bothered to read all of it, since there's a whole lot there — then good, you should be; there are plenty of things under discussion that need examining without one side complaining about "social justice warriors" and the other complaining about "neckbeards". But unfortunately that's never going to happen because the games industry has a collective mental age of about 14 — and yes, I count all sides of the debacle in this group in this instance — and is thus unable to discuss anything reasonably or rationally without immediately jumping to the most extreme viewpoints possible.

I'm happy to be out of it, frankly. My new job may be in a somewhat more stereotypically "boring" sector — utilities — but I can pretty much guarantee that said "boringness" (and I use that term relative to the dynamism of the games industry) will bring with it a lovely atmosphere of calm in which people don't feel the need to aggressively state and restate their views on a daily basis; in which Internet hate mobs aren't dispatched to harass and belittle other people; in which I can just get on with my work, come home in the evening, switch off and just enjoy some video games.

Two more days to go then. Hopefully my posts towards the end of this week will continue with a positive outlook!

1676: Cleaning Up

Following yesterday's post, I've been having a social media cleanup. This started with the unfollowing of about a hundred people last night — some of which I felt a bit guilty about, as I'd previously considered them friends; in other cases, they were former colleagues that I'd thought I might stay in touch with. That already helped a great deal, but there was still some unwanted noise on my feed, largely through retweets and Twitter's irritating new habit of adding other people's favourites and random tweets from other people's followers to your timeline. Those people were swiftly blocked so hopefully I will never have to encounter them ever again.

All this may seem somewhat harsh, particularly for a platform as open and public as Twitter is. But some reflection has revealed to me that it's really the only way to handle it and stay sane. And it's not, in fact, all that harsh at all, really, when you compare it to real life: after all, we carefully cultivate our real-life friendship groups and, over time, tend to whittle them down to groups of people that we particularly like, enjoy spending time with and have something in common with. We — well, I — don't try to be friends with people just because I feel that I "should" be friends with this person. That's high school stuff, trying to get "in" with the gang of cool kids; that way lies only madness, or at the very least a life where you're unwilling to be able to just be yourself with confidence.

And so Twitter is the same for me, now, particularly now I don't "need" it for industry networking and the like. My Following list has been whittled down to the people I actually enjoy interacting with — a healthy mix of game enthusiasts, game developers whom I have some sort of personal connection with (even if that's just having met them and enjoyed a chat with them), anime fans, and a few people I know in "real life". I'm no longer following people I feel "obliged" to follow — people who are often held up on a pedestal as being "important" to some cause or another — and I'm not following any celebrities. Insufferable arseholes who get retweeted into my feed are quickly blocked without mercy — no sense feeling guilty about it, since I probably wouldn't want to follow them anyway — and those who do nothing but indulge in lame hashtag games for hours on end are also swiftly removed from my following list, at least temporarily; permanently if I haven't actually spoken to them for a while.

It's kind of sad that we've got to the stage where this level of "friendship curation" is necessary, but it's a side-effect of the social media age and the fact that the Internet has brought us in touch with far more people than we'd ever be able to have met in reality. I'm pretty sure there's an "optimum" number of friends or acquaintances for a person to have, and over and above that level everything just starts contributing to an overall, growing amount of white noise — noise that occasionally becomes intolerable. I'm gradually — hopefully, anyway — finding a good balance that hopefully won't drive me mental, and which hopefully won't necessitate me abandoning the genuine friends I have managed to make via Twitter.

In the meantime, I'm trying my best to migrate a lot of gaming discussion over to the Squadron of Shame forums, which you can find here. While the Squadron of Shame was originally a group of people who came together on the 1up forums, I know I for one would be very happy to see some new blood over there, too — particularly if you are, like me, the sort of person who'd rather have a lengthy, wordy discussion about a favourite, underappreciated game than think that "lol" or "cool story bro" is in any way a valid contribution to a debate.

Hopefully I won't have to write about this sort of thing again for a while.

1675: Two Negatives Make Even More Negatives

Today has been one of those days where I've been considering jacking Twitter in altogether. What was once a friendly, fun, enjoyable place to hang out — and a place where I've been able to make a lot of friends I otherwise would never have come into contact with — is rapidly becoming an echo chamber filled with people that I don't particularly want to associate with. It's becoming somewhere where I don't feel particularly welcome.

I shan't get into details as the latest spate of Twitter outrage is plastered all over the Internet and really doesn't need any more publicity, but I will say that, as usual, both sides of the argument in question are acting like complete tools. There's the aggressive, unpleasant, filthy undercurrent of the Internet supposedly harassing people for their beliefs and supposed transgressions, and on the other side, the people defending themselves and their friends often stoop to personal insults, hypocrisy and outright ranting. Anyone left in the middle, wanting to take a rational viewpoint on the whole thing, is left branded as an awful person regardless of how much sense they're actually speaking — if you don't stand on the side of the group that has painted themselves as the "good guys" then you're worthless human garbage, no better than those that are supposedly sending "death threats". (And don't even get me started on the semantics of how that term is liberally misapplied.)

At the core of this never-ending parade of outrage, argument and public shaming is a group of people who claim to believe in "social justice". Who wouldn't want to stand up for social justice, right? The trouble is that the term "social justice warrior" has picked up severely negative connotations owing to the behaviour of some of these people supposedly fighting on the side of equality, freedom, all that good stuff. Which is daft, when you think about it — as previously noted, who would say they were against social justice?

And yet the criticisms of many of these "social justice warriors" and the way they go about their business are often valid. They use aggression, harassment, sweeping generalisations, public shaming — many (though, it must be said, not all) of the tactics they are quick to condemn the seedy underbelly of the Internet for — to get what they want. Disagree with the way they do things and you're "tone policing". Disagree with some of things they are saying and you are a misogynist, sexist, transphobic, terrible person who should be hounded until the end of time until you apologise, and then hounded further when you are forced into an apology because it somehow wasn't good enough. The people involved make this group huge, influential — and quite often in possession of a really quite unpleasant mob mentality.

I'm utterly sick of it. I don't care. It sets me on edge. It makes me anxious. I'm nervous about even posting this in case one of these armchair activists gets hold of it and decides to twist my words into something that doesn't even resemble what I originally said — as happened to YouTube personality "TotalBiscuit" earlier today.

This surely isn't what these people want. This surely isn't a good way to go about raising awareness of social issues. Certain quarters of Twitter now scare me and make me feel like I can't talk about certain things for fear of reprisals — from the side that paints themselves as the forces of Good. I've done my best to ignore, unfollow and even block the people who are most unpleasant about all this, but it's still not the friendly, welcoming place to hang out that it once was. And that really, really sucks.

I've culled my Following list by a hundred people this evening. If that doesn't filter out this never-ending, anxiety-inducing noise, I'm setting my account to private. If that doesn't work, then it's time to say goodbye to Twitter — for good this time. I wouldn't be the first from among my group of friends to do so — for these exact reasons — and I probably won't be the last.

1666: You're Never Finished

Occasionally, my mind gets into an almost comatose loop, and I find myself going round and round the same websites, over and over again. I hate the loop — and I'm growing to hate the websites and all that they stand for in 2014 — but still I do it compulsively, habitually, regularly.

First I'll check Twitter. Then I'll check Facebook. Then I'll check Google+. Occasionally I'll poke my head in the sites for my Final Fantasy XIV guild or the Squadron of Shame, but more often than not, it's just those three sites. And there's rarely anything interesting to see on any of them — but still I feel compelled to do it, particularly if there's a little red number at the top of the page.

The same is true on my phone. I'll check it every few minutes, looking for little icons across the status bar and hoping that something interesting might have happened. But it rarely does, and still I do it.

I'm talking about "notifications", one of my least favourite developments in modern technology. Turns out I have the sort of brain that gets extremely uncomfortable if something is left "unfinished"; if a little red number is there, suggesting that there's something that requires your attention.

Trouble is, most notifications these days aren't necessary. On Google+, since the Squadron of Shame moved its base of operations to its own site, the only notifications I get are from people who gave a comment I left on a YouTube video six months ago a "+1", saying that they "liked" what I said without actually having to interact directly with me. On Facebook, where I rarely post any more, my only notifications come from replies to a comment thread I long since lost interest in. And Twitter's 2014 incarnation sees fit to notify you not only when someone replies to you, but also when they "favourite" or retweet something you posted — or, in comedically ridiculous levels of Inception-style madness, when someone retweets something you retweeted.

The provocation of this sort of compulsive behaviour is entirely deliberate, of course; these sites' use of notifications — and mobile app developers' use of notifications, too, for that matter — is designed to get you doing exactly what I'm doing, which is visiting the sites or booting up the apps several times a day just to see if the notifications are anything useful. They inevitably aren't, but there's always the hope.

Provoking this sort of behaviour can't be healthy. It doubtless plays havoc with people who already have more obsessive compulsive tendencies than I do, but just from a user experience perspective it's frustrating to never feel like you're "free" — there's always something out there demanding your attention. Look at me, that little red number says. I'm important.

It's because of all this that I find myself considering daily whether or not I should nuke my social media presence altogether and simply interact with people through more private channels — email, blog comments, chat messages, the Squad forum. Every day it gets more and more tempting to do so, so one of these days soon I might just do it — and this time for good. This isn't what I signed up for at the dawn of the social media revolution.

1662: Moving Pictures

Call me a traditionalist, out of date, out of touch, whatever you like, but I'm really not a fan of the current obsession with video as the be-all and end-all of publishing things online.

I have numerous feelings about this, not least of which is the fact that as a former member of the gaming press, it smarts to see my particular skillset — writing compelling words about my specialist subjects — being sidelined in favour of video, but as a consumer of online content, it also frustrates me immensely, too.

Put simply, I like to read. I prefer to read. If I see an interesting-sounding link on social media, I'll read it if it's text, but if it's video I will, nine times out of ten, not watch it. And this is true whether I'm sitting at my computer or browsing on phone or tablet — though it's particularly true when I'm browsing on a mobile device, since due to patchy network reception and exorbitant data charges, watching video on the go is often, to say the least, a somewhat subpar experience. Text is much more desirable in these circumstances. (This is to say nothing of live broadcasts, which are even less desirable than video on demand to me.)

There are types of content where it's simply easier to refer to text, too. Take game guides or tutorials in general, for example; while video can show you the things the creator is trying to teach you in context, it's difficult to refer back to specific points or cross-reference things, whereas this is a snap to do with text. Again, if I'm using a mobile device to browse this information, I much prefer having the information open in front of me to keep referring back to, rather than watching a video and having to take as much in as possible, perhaps over the course of several viewings. It just doesn't seem like a very efficient means of delivering information — particularly when that information is complicated.

This isn't to say video can't work, of course. Video is a great means of delivering educational content that you passively absorb rather than actively refer to while working on something. Crash Course on YouTube, which my friends Mark and Lynette introduced me to recently, is a good example of this.

And video is great for comedy, when said comedy has been written to be performed in the form of video. Glove and Boots is my current favourite example of this:

I just get a bit annoyed when people make sweeping declarations about video being "the future" of online content, as if those of us who still like to read words on a page rather than watch and listen are somehow irrelevant. Like so many other things, there are plenty of different tastes out there, and lots of different ways of doing things. Rather than only pursuing one to the exclusion of all others, let's accept that fact: continue to provide relevant, interesting content to all people and all tastes, not just the fashionable, young market who, at this point, are obsessed with video. My individual opinion may not matter all that much, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person out there who will close a tab without checking out an "awesome" link if the link turns out to be just another video.

1646: Tongueface

I can't remember if I've blogged about this before or just pondered it on Twitter — and, writing this on my phone from bed, I can't easily check — but what the hell. Let's do this!

I do not know what the tongueface smiley — a colon followed by a P — means. Or rather, I have the odd feeling that a significant number of other people in the world think it means something different to what I think it means.

To me, tongueface smiley represents someone sticking their tongue out, and that in turn is something that I've always considered to be a mild rude gesture — a childish, non-offensive and somewhat light-hearted alternative to flipping someone off. You'd perhaps use it as a response to someone gently mocking you, or revealing a piece of information that, while not earth-shattering or mortifyingly embarrassing, you'd still prefer wasn't public knowledge.

Here's an example of how I expect it to be used:

Phillipe: You're putting a shelf up? Can you even do that? I thought Andie wore the pants when it came to DIY.

Pete: :p

Or possibly:

W'khebica: Hey, everyone, did you know Amarysse fell off Titan Extreme on the first Geocrush?

Amarysse: :p

You see? Both situations where, were the conversation happening face to face, you might want to actually stick your tongue out, assuming you are seven years old.

However, I've noticed an increasing use of tongueface smiley as a form of punctuation — a la the use of "lol", which thankfully seems to be dying down a bit — and I honestly can't get my head around it, much how I couldn't get my head around how people could possibly be laughing out loud at the most seemingly mundane and stupid things.

I'm not against the use of smileys per se — I use them myself quite a lot as a means of making things like flippant comments abundantly obvious — but I remain confused by the current and widespread (arguable) overuse of tongueface smiley.

Perhaps I'm just too old to understand. :p

1634: Pee Aitch Pee Bee Bee

Been digging around in the guts of PHPbb (or is it phpBB?) today to help get the Squadron of Shame's forum looking the way we want it to. And while there's still some work to do, things are coming together very nicely.

I haven't really explored a self-hosted forum solution before — I've set up forums for various people in the past, but have always made use of pre-made free services, since that was all we needed to fit our needs at the time. In the case of the Squadron of Shame, we're trying to make this place our permanent home on the Interwebs, since we've been flitting around from place to place every so often ever since the 1up forums imploded.

Mostly, I've been impressed with phpBB's (let's go with that spelling for the sake of argument) flexibility and customisability. There are a whole lot of options you can tweak, and in doing so you can make the forum function in plenty of different ways — you can adjust the way users can interact with it, assign various levels of permissions to users, allow or disallow various board features and extend the functionality with plugins and mods.

The only real downside to it all, so far as I can make out, is that installing the aforementioned plugins and mods looks like a bit of a pain in the arse, eschewing a handy-dandy automated install process a la off-the-peg CMS systems such as WordPress and instead in most cases demanding that you edit multiple HTML, CSS and script files, uploading new files to the server and generally doing a whole lot of things manually.

It's been relatively minor issue so far, though, since most of the things I've wanted to do with the board have so far been covered by phpBB's comprehensive administration panel — including uploading attachments such as images, which is something that appeared to be significantly more difficult to include in previous incarnations of phpBB (we're using version 3).

It's been interesting, though, since, as I said above, it's not something I've really poked around in before. I've been learning a lot about what phpBB is capable of, and how it provides a flexible solution for building an online community with relatively minimal fuss. Of course, I haven't been getting involved on the hardcore coding and styling side of things — I'm leaving that up to my friend Mark, fellow founding member of the Squad and someone who does this sort of thing for a living — but I have been doing things that I'm able to easily resolve through a bit of tinkering in the admin panel. (I'm less likely to break things that way, too; past experience with manually fiddling around with templates and CSS files has taught me that I'm good at breaking things.)

Plus there's always the possibility that this sort of knowledge might prove useful in future job hunts. You never know. And it's not as if I have anything better to do right now, is it?

1631: GO GAMERS

The Squadron of Shame forums are coming along nicely — they're pretty much ready for the public to show up and start posting in now, so if you're at all interested in computer and video games and find that places like NeoGAF and its ilk aren't quite fitting your needs — in other words, you like to use paragraphs and write posts that include more than ten words at a time — then do feel free to come on over, sign up and start mingling with the rest of the community, who are slowly trickling over.

Forums are the spiritual home of the Squad, since it's where we, as a group, first came together. But they're also one of the most long-standing parts of the Internet — one aspect of the ever-changing digital world that has actually managed to remain reasonably constant over the course of the last 15-20 years or so.

I recall my first experience with forums fairly vividly. Our first Internet service provider was CompuServe, one of several providers that, at least initially, didn't offer "true" Internet access, instead opting to provide its users with a gated set of online services exclusively for subscribers. (Full Internet access eventually came later, initially in the form of the ability to send email messages to Internet addresses instead of just CompuServe IDs, and later full-on Web access.) As part of this "gated community", CompuServe offered a swathe of forums on a whole host of specialist subjects. Unsurprisingly, I quickly found an online home in the GAMERS forum — you clicked the "GO" button and typed "GAMERS" to get there — and had my first experience of mingling with the online community.

The term "online community" these days has a certain number of negative connotations, due in part to the perpetuation of the narrative that the majority of people who post things online are somehow "toxic", and the fact that indeed, some people who post things online are somehow "toxic". But back in its early days, it was a different matter. "Flaming" and "trolling" were established terms, but they tended to be seen fairly rarely. There were extensive glossaries of the then-new emoticons and acronyms that started to creep into everyday usage, and new terms like "netiquette" were coined to describe how you should interact with other people online.

I honestly can't remember a whole lot about the sort of things I posted and discussed on the Gamers' Forum on CompuServe, but I do remember one thing vividly: I was into Wolfenstein 3-D at the time, and had been experimenting with a variety of mod tools for it, at least partly because I'd been helping a local shareware dealer write his catalogues that included a selection of Wolfenstein add-ons and editors.

Anyway, yes; I was into Wolfenstein 3-D and had spent quite some time working on a selection of new levels — ten of them, in fact. I uploaded them to the Gamers' Forum's download area for others to have a go at, but didn't think anything more of it and certainly wasn't expecting any feedback or anything.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was contacted by a gentleman named Carlton, who claimed to represent Apogee, the publisher of Wolfenstein, and also claimed to be interested in including my levels in an official expansion pack for the game. I'd be paid, he promised, and appropriately credited.

Frankly, I was at a loss as to what to do at this stage, but after some deliberation and discussion I took a chance and got in touch with Carlton, who took my contact details and promised to be in touch in short order.

Not a lot happened for a while, but then one day a package showed up. Inside it was a cheque for $200 and three floppy disks — one containing a full, registered version of Wolfenstein 3-D, and two containing the official expansion pack, the Super Upgrades pack. I installed the disks, browsed through the directory containing the game — and sure enough, there were my levels, credited to me. I was a professional game designer.

And all because of a forum. Pretty neat, huh?

1620: Community Matters

The Squadron of Shame, the "gaming book club" that was born on the 1up Radio message boards and has subsequently lived in several places across the Internet, has moved house again. We now have our own forum here — though if Squad co-founder "Beige" gets things sorted, we'll have either that forum or a variation thereof on our own domain before long, which will be nice.

Forums aren't all that fashionable these days, though they are still used somewhat, particularly for communities relating to specific software companies or even individual games. I can't say I've used one for a very long time indeed now, but having gotten back into the swing of posting on one thanks to the new Squadron of Shame boards, I can honestly say I've missed them.

The reason? They're completely different to the way modern social media works. While you may think that social media would be the ideal place to begin discussions and have in-depth conversations, in actuality modern social media is not at all well-suited for this task. Whereas many forums have long-life conversational threads that stick around for months or even years, the very nature of social media means that posts are transient — they're there one moment, gone the next, replaced by a cat picture, some vapid meme or One Of Those Clickbait Headlines That Makes Poor Use Of Headline Case And You Just Won't Believe. And while certain social media posts can attract a long string of comments and stick around for a while due to consistent interest — the reason why Facebook steadfastly refuses to organise posts in chronological order is because of this, if you were wondering — they'll still fall away far quicker than an equivalent topic on a forum.

This is fine for the sort of vapid nonsense that people post on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, but less ideal for more long-form discussion on more specific topics — such as the sort of thing we like to stroke our collective chins over at the Squadron of Shame. Now I know that many existing, well-established forums in 2014 — long-standing gaming forum NeoGAF is a good example — have proportions of the community that do not like seeing "walls of text" (even when they use paragraphs and punctuation and everything), but the fact is that forums are ideally suited to long-form discussion and thoughtful discourse. They're not instant messages, they're not time-sensitive, they're not places to post "fire and forget" comments that you never look at the responses to — they're places for asynchronous communication between people of similar interests, and an excellent means of having far more detailed discussions than is possible on social media in its current form.

Social media is crowded. Social media is noisy. Social media is like stumbling into the middle of a party, slightly drunk, and shouting whatever you feel like and hoping someone hears it. And, sometimes, that's fine, and can lead to beautiful interactions, friendships and even relationships. (I'm sitting in this house with the person I own it with because of Twitter.)

But a forum is like getting together a group of people with common interests — depending on the number of participants, it can be like a book club, a seminar or a large-scale gathering — and having a civilised, peaceful, thoughtful discussion on a particular topic. (Usually, anyway. This isn't to say forums are drama-free, but there's a lot less of the attention-seeking passive-aggression that's often seen on social media for the most part in my experience.)

As I said above, I'm not sure whether the Squadron of Shame will be staying on that free forum software for now or whether we'll be moving to our own site. But either way, the shift — or should I say shift back, since that's where the group was born — to a forum-based means of discussion has so far proven popular, and I think it will be good for the group in the long term.

If you're interested in joining us to talk about underappreciated and overlooked games, both new and old, drop by our new home and say hello.

1619: Reflections on Working in the Games Press

As I've noted a few times recently, my time with the games press is shortly coming to an end and, short of an amazing offer coming my way that I'd be a complete idiot to turn down, I'm not going to be pursuing further work in that enormously competitive industry. It's fairly unlikely I'll be pitching many freelance pieces, either, although I may find the time to do a few in between other things.

Since this is largely, then, the end of my career in the games press, I feel it's probably an appropriate time to reflect back on my time doing it and what, if anything, I've gained from it.

Let me preface this by saying that working in the games press was something of a lifelong dream for me, ever since I grew up with both my father and brother working for Atari magazines. My brother John, when he left home, began working on various magazines over the years and built a career for himself that eventually culminated in high-profile positions at 1up and Gamespot as well as the launch of his own site, the sadly defunct What They Play. His career was an inspiration to me that I hoped, one day, to be lucky enough to follow in the footsteps of. Because, frankly, there's a significant amount of luck involved in getting anywhere in the games biz… much as there's a significant amount of luck involved in not suddenly finding yourself without a place of work.

I contributed a number of pieces to various publications over the years as I proceeded through school and on to university. I wrote reviews and articles for the same Atari magazine my father and brother did; I wrote reviews and walkthroughs for UK games magazine PC Zone (may it rest in peace); I wrote tips books and guides for The Official UK Nintendo Magazine, in the years before… well, let's just say we don't see eye to eye. But I didn't seriously pursue a full-time career in the business — it didn't seem like something feasible, and in the meantime I was at university studying and trying to work out what I was going to do with my life. (I opted for teaching, which turned out to be a Bad Choice from a mental health perspective.)

Whizz forward a number of years and I'm in a bad place. My wife has left me and I'm staring down the oblivion of my life as I knew it. But there was a small glimmer of hope — I was writing for a small site named Kombo. Kombo didn't pay particularly well — certainly not enough to live on — but it was something. I was writing professionally, gaining some important and helpful experience and getting great feedback. It was a start.

Eventually, Kombo folded and, through various combinations of circumstances, I found myself working for GamePro, a site and magazine that my brother had been in charge of previously, but had since moved on to pastures new. My work for GamePro was initially sporadic and occasional, but over time it grew to a proper part-time gig and eventually a full-time position on a wage I could actually live on.

I had to make a choice partway through my time with GamePro, though. I had an interview with a software company in London, who actually offered me the job. At the same time, GamePro offered me the full-time position. The wages were similar, but the software company required me to move to London (expensive, plus not exactly friendly to my then-burgeoning relationship with Andie, with whom I now own a house) whereas the GamePro gig allowed me to work from home.

It seemed like a simple choice. I turned down the software company and told GamePro I'd continue working for them full-time. Eventually, I got to a position financially where it was practical for me to leave home again and start living with Andie.

All appeared to be going well for a while, until the collapse of GamePro one December. It was a quiet death; I came down to start work one morning, checked my email and discovered a message thread already in progress with everyone seemingly panicking about what was going on. The site was closing, it seemed, and so was the magazine. Everyone was being laid off. There was nothing we could do.

Thankfully, a former colleague at GamePro was working for a business-facing site that focused on mobile and social games, and she offered me regular work for a very generous pay package indeed. Mobile and social are two of the most objectionable parts of the video games industry for numerous reasons, but work was work and the pay was great for what I had to do, so I sucked it up and continued, happy that I had the opportunity to write and still leave myself time to pursue other interests.

But it didn't last.

I realised something was wrong with the site when all my colleagues suddenly announced their departure within a day or two of one another. The new management who had taken on the site were… not great, to say the least, and it was looking very likely that the generous pay packet I'd become accustomed to every month was soon to shrink to literally less than a tenth of its size.

I jumped ship. Fortunately, around the same time this was all happening, a former colleague from GamePro got in touch about USgamer and, well, you know the rest. Now, almost exactly a year after the site officially launched, I'm staring down unemployment, again through no fault of my own, but due to a shift in the way the site is doing business.

I've worked hard for every outlet I've had the privilege to work for professionally. I've graciously accepted feedback to improve my work — a particular shout-out to Mr Jason Wilson (formerly of GamePro, now of VentureBeat) here, whose copy-editing skills helped me refine my craft in a way no other editor had done in the past — and made an effort to improve and challenge myself as and when I can.

And yet even with a work ethic like that, there's no guarantee of a stable job. Each time a site folded or restructured and left me without a position, I've effectively had to start again from scratch, often with a big gap of unemployment leaving an unsightly hole on my CV in the meantime.

For me, this isn't an acceptable or desirable way to live. I cannot, in good conscience, look for another job in the games press knowing the inherent instability and volatility of the business, particularly now I'm a homeowner and having no money has even more severe consequences than in the past. My dream is crumbling into dust, but it's been crumbling that way for a while now; what I really wanted to do, it turns out, was to write for magazines, but that hasn't been an especially viable option for many years now, thanks to the Internet and the way in which we consume media these days.

More importantly, the way in which outlets make money — you know, with which to pay their staff — has changed. Readers on the Web expect their content for free — attempting to get people to pay money for text is a losing battle. As such, there just isn't the same amount of cashflow coming in as when a magazine is pulling in money from every sale from the newsstands. It also leads to "clickbait" articles, whether these are top 10 lists designed to encourage readers to read, agree and/or disagree, or provocative, inflammatory op-eds about whatever social justice issue is on the Tumblr sociologists' radar this week. Overall quality of content suffers as a result, and good quality writing about specific subjects goes all but ignored, leaving the games press a shadow of what it could be, and all outlets looking like slightly reskinned versions of each other.

And then there's the growth of video to consider, too, but that's probably a matter to discuss another day.

In other words, then, a career in the games press is simply not a viable option for me any more. Eternal respect and well-wishes to my peers out there who can make it work — whether on a salaried or freelance basis — but I simply can't do it any more with my current life situation. It's sad, but oddly I'm less cut up about the death of my dream than I thought I would be; it's become increasingly apparent over the course of the last four years that the games press I've been working in is not the same games press that I wanted so desperately to be a part of for so long. That games press is long-dead, replaced by something very different that I'm not entirely sure is sustainable in its current form.

But it's not my problem any more. I wash my hands of it all. I'll continue to write about games on my own time, for the love of it, and if I can make a bit of money off it, so much the better. But career-wise? I'm looking elsewhere. And I'm not looking back.