I've started updating my Japanese gaming site MoeGamer again. I'd taken something of a break from it for a while, partly due to a general sense of disillusionment with the whole "writing about games" thing — the whole "getting unceremoniously ditched by the publication I'd loyally written for since its inception because I wasn't American" thing didn't help (and yes, that really was the reason I was given for my redundancy), and neither did my well-documented distaste for the way the mainstream games press at large tends to treat Japanese games — and partly simply due to the fact that I didn't feel I had a lot of time any more.
Having a "normal" job kind of sucks like that, in that it's a lot harder to find the time to do the things you want to do or that you know you enjoy. I always manage to find time to write this blog each day, of course — though sometimes it's late in the evening when I publish something, and sometimes that something is a barely coherent mess — but keeping MoeGamer up to date was proving to be somewhat more difficult, at least partly because of the expectation I'd set for myself that everything I put on there would be erring on the slightly more long-form side of things rather than quick, snappy posts. (I'm firmly of the belief that there are plenty of people on the Internet who are capable or reading more than 250 words at a time, and it saddens me to see so many sites dumbing themselves down to cater to people with some sort of attention-deficit disorder.)
That dumbass IGN JRPG article from the other day (which I think I've already linked to more than enough; check out my response on MoeGamer to find out more) spurred me into action, though; I wasn't going to let such an ill-informed piece slide, so I guess I should be thankful to Colin Moriarty for that if nothing else.
From writing that piece, though — which was actually, I must confess, adapted from something I'd written a few months back but never gotten around to publishing — I felt the old bug biting again. I enjoy writing about games; not necessarily for profit, pageviews or comments, but purely for the enjoyment of expressing myself about things that I love. I have no particular desire to be a professional games critic or journalist any more — not now I've experienced firsthand how shittily many of us get treated, and certainly not now that the whole GamerGate situation has put the games press as a whole under more intense scrutiny than ever before — but I do still like writing about games, and I enjoy it when people stumble across my sites for whatever reason, like what I've written and decide to say hi. A number of people have dropped by either here or MoeGamer recently and said that they miss my work on USgamer; I'm happy to hear that, because it means that what I was trying to do with my JPgamer column paid off in at least a small way: it gave an often-ignored, often-ostracised subsection of the gaming community something that they could feel like was written for them. And I can say that with some confidence, because I count myself among that subsection of the gaming community, and I wrote those pieces — and indeed everything on MoeGamer — for me.
Going forward, then, I hope to be able to post at least one or two things on MoeGamer a week. I'm not going to attempt to stick to any sort of schedule nor beat myself up if I don't manage to post something — I'm not trying to make it into a business or even make a bit of pocket money from it — but I am going to use it as a place to post my thoughts about games I've enjoyed or am currently enjoying. And I hope other people will continue to enjoy it in that respect, too.