This is probably going to sound like a terribly “inside baseball” post, but I feel the need to vent a little, so apologies in advance.

I am absolutely sick of the lack of respect given to my profession — games critic, games journalist, person who writes about games, whatever you want to call it — and I am likewise sick of the daily drama that accompanies it, particularly on the UK/European side of things. It’s getting extremely tiresome to put up with the daily snark, outrage and condemnation of this, that or the other, and I really can’t help feeling that ultimately all it does is distract from the reasons most of us got into this business in the first place: loving games.

Whether it’s someone using the infuriating scare quotes around the job title “journalist” (as in “so-called games ‘journalists'”), the regular (and, to my knowledge, usually unjustified) accusations of bribery, corruption and otherwise unethical behaviour or the current favourite of the social justice crowd, complaining whenever a white man writes something, you sometimes have to wonder why people put up with this shit. And indeed some don’t. And I can’t say I blame them.

I’ve been quite fortunate throughout my career in that there’s only been one real occasion where I became a little uncomfortable as a result of the behaviour of a reader or community member. That was back on GamePro, when the GamePro Facebook page was frequented by a rather strange individual who didn’t believe in debit cards and had some peculiar political ideas. He was harmless for the most part, until I posted a piece about an interesting-sounding game developed by a university that promised to explore matters of sexuality and gender. He exploded in a fit of rage; forced to confront things that clearly didn’t fit in with his rather narrow-minded view of the world, he became extremely aggressive and unpleasant, and for the first time I felt a little afraid of the Internet. (The second time I was afraid of the Internet has been well-documented on these pages, but that was nothing to do with work.)

The latest incident in Games Industry Drama involved a recent press event for Ubisoft’s upcoming game Watch Dogs in which attendees were reportedly given a free Nexus 7 — a decent Android tablet. Predictably, this quickly descended into people condemning the people who had accepted them and people arguing about “ethics”, while at the same time NeoGAF was doing its usual thing of whingeing about how game journalists are all paid off and how no-one writes “objective” reviews. (Hahaha.)

It is exhausting to have to process all this sort of thing on a daily basis. I write about games for one reason and one reason only. (Well, two if you count the paycheque.) I write about games because I love writing about games. No other reason. I’m not trying to change the world. I’m not trying to make people rise up and fight against oppressive powers. I’m not trying to make people confront things they’re uncomfortable with. And perhaps I should be doing those things. But I’m not. The reason I write about games is because I love writing about games, and because I love games.

When I come across a brilliant game I love that few people are talking about, the first thing I think about is how I might be able to write about it in a way that gets my passion and enthusiasm across. These are experiences I want to share with people; experiences I want other people to be able to have. And if just one person reads something I’ve written and thinks “hmm, that sounds interesting; maybe I’ll check it out!” then I’m happy.

But if just one person rolls up and calls me a sellout or calls my integrity into question, that sucks. Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with that particular issue in my career, but seeing it constantly going on all around me on a seemingly daily basis is just exhausting. Sometimes I wish everyone would just shut the fuck up and just enjoy themselves for once.

And I realise that by writing this I’m simply contributing to the noise. But it needed to get out of my brain and on to the page. And now I’m done. I’m off to go and play either Final Fantasy XIV or Demon Gaze and not look at social media for the rest of the day.