Likely to be a long one today, and I'm not entirely sure exactly what I want to say, nor exactly how to say it, but I ask you to indulge me, whether you're a regular reader, someone who stumbled across this page, or someone I specifically pointed in the direction of this post.

I'm just going to start typing and see where things go from there.

This is something I've been meaning to write for some time, but have never really known exactly how to write it. It's probably going to be difficult to write, it's probably going to be difficult contemplating the possible reactions to it, and I honestly don't know if it's a good idea to even write it at all in the first place. But having had… Feelings festering inside me for probably the best part of a decade and some change at this point, I think it's time I got at least some of them down on paper.

I was inspired to write this by Chris "Papapishu" Person's excellent post over on Aftermath, I'm Only Here Because I Was A Forum Poster, in which he contemplates how, in the mid 2000s, he found a community of like-minded folks on the forums for 1up.com, and that, via a somewhat roundabout route, resulted in him being a professional games journalist, initially for Kotaku and subsequently for Aftermath.

Pishu isn't the only person for whom this is true. I can probably attribute my current position indirectly to those days back on the 1up.com forums, and Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti of Giant Bomb, both specifically namechecked in Pishu's piece, almost certainly have their own similar stories. Those heady pre-social media days on 1up.com were, it's fair to say, a real high point for online socialisation for me and for many others, and I feel like things have only gotten worse since the collapse of that site and its consequences: the community scattering to the four winds, never really settling down and calling one place "home" ever again.

I first came to 1up.com because of the family connection. My brother, John Davison, helped to launch the site, and was also working on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine at the time. 1up.com was a bold new experiment in online video game-related media: its social features were, at the time, pretty revolutionary, allowing any of its users to start a blog, create a club with its own private message board, and post on the forums. The site still had professional staff, of course, and for many folks the various 1up.com podcasts by that staff were a real highlight of the site. But for me, the thing that made me happier more than anything was the sense of community it had at its peak.

As someone who is what I now understand to be autistic, finding a community of like-minded nerds online was an absolute lifeline. Finally, I had a place where I could well and truly be myself, among "my people". And it didn't take long for me to find a niche within a niche: nerds who enjoyed video games, and who enjoyed talking about them at great length, in great detail, and with a mind to proper in-depth critical analysis rather than just flame wars or quickly writing things off because they didn't score over 80% in a review.

If you look back over the past entries of this blog, you'll see frequent references to "The Squadron of Shame". This was a loose conglomerate of 1up.com members who came together after a discussion on the 1up Yours podcast about "The Pile of Shame": what today tends to be referred to as "the backlog". The pile of games that you've bought, but haven't gotten around to. The games you always meant to play, but haven't. The games that don't get the time of day in reviews, but which you always thought looked interesting.

Fun fact: the first video I ever posted on YouTube was a hacked-together "trailer" for the games we'd covered up until that point.

1up Yours was initially intending to pick a game from the hosts' respective Piles of Shame, play it as a group, then discuss it the following episode, book club style. They didn't really manage to do that — and this isn't a criticism or admonishment of them, as they were all busy people — but a group of us on the forums thought that it was a really good idea… so we did it instead, beginning with the game the 1up Yours crew intended to cover: Psychonauts.

Squad "Missions", as they were known, took the form of a forum thread, in which the person proposing the "mission" would outline the reasons they thought the game in question was noteworthy and why they thought it could do with some in-depth discussion. These initial posts were often long and in-depth in their own right, and they set a good tone for the subsequent discussion: Squad threads became notorious as being wordy, but no-one gave us grief for it, and we often got a shout-out on 1up Yours for successfully picking up and running with the otherwise aborted concept.

One day, something terrible happened on those forums, and I'm not entirely sure why. Where there once had been a selection of subforums specific to particular types of discussion — including individual platforms, plus a special forum for the "1up Radio" podcasts, which is where the Squad threads resided — there were now just two forums: "Games" and "Not Games". Presumably this was done in an attempt to make moderation easier, but it was the beginning of the end for 1up.com's community.

The first Squad thread we posted under this new layout (in "Games") was immediately trolled by someone, clearly unfamiliar with how we had done things on the 1up Radio boards, complaining about a "massive fucking wall of text", and things derailed quickly from there. It was abundantly clear, both from this forum upheaval and various other behind-the-scenes happenings at 1up.com, that the writing was on the wall for this community, and so we started looking into alternative approaches. (1up.com actually hobbled along until 2013, but most of the community and staff left long before that.)

Many of us settled on the fledgling Twitter as a means of interacting with one another, but one of the most important things we did was organise a podcast. This would take the place of our megathreads on the 1up.com boards, and allow a rotating group of us — with several regulars — to discuss the games in-depth, in person, for as long as we wanted. Although severely lacking in confidence to speak up when surrounded by people I always felt were probably a lot more clever and articulate than I was, I quickly developed a reputation among the group as The Guy Who Was Good At Editing The Podcast, so my seat in pretty much every episode was all but assured, and I made a (now-defunct, and apparently non-archived) website that left a written record of all the podcast episodes and the things we discussed. (The episodes themselves, thankfully, survived — you can find them all on my Soundcloud.)

For a while, things went well, and friendships solidified. I even made the trip across the pond to visit various other members of the Squad (who were mostly North America-based) on multiple occasions, and we played host to some Squaddies on at least one occasion that I recall.

We changed the format in which we discussed things several times over the podcast's complete run, shifting from the "book club" format to focusing on a particular topic and bringing our own examples to the table. Things were good, for a while. Then we stumbled across Katawa Shoujo, a visual novel about a boy with a heart condition and how he came to love a group of girls with disabilities that he came into contact with when they all attended the same special school.

Katawa Shoujo was — is — a thoroughly interesting cultural artifact, if you're unfamiliar. It stems from the work of an independent Japanese artist named RAITA (if I remember correctly), who sketched some girls who had various forms of physical disabilities. Various members of the notorious imageboard 4chan found these images somewhat striking, and so, seven years after the original images' publication, they took the unusual step of forming a development collective of individuals from all across the world in order to bring these characters to life. The result was an absolutely fascinating visual novel that handled the subject matter infinitely more sensitively than anyone would have ever expected, given the origins of the development team being a website commonly referred to by many (not without cause) as a "cesspit".

In keeping with the visual novels that tended to come west at the time of its release, Katawa Shoujo was a sexually explicit game, featuring erotic scenes between the protagonist and each of the various heroines. Unsurprisingly, this made some people uncomfortable, particularly given the high school setting of the game and the way it (like many other localised Japanese works) left the cast members' ages somewhat ambiguous. And, although we had a great podcast discussion about the game itself — during which several of us opened up emotionally more than we'd ever done in public before — some damage had been done to our group. I don't blame the folks who splintered off or their reasons for it, but I am still sad that it happened, because it marked the beginning of the end.

We managed a few more episodes post-Katawa Shoujo, but eventually things petered out. We'd had plans for a Squadron of Shame website with its own forum to host discussions just like in the Good Old Days, but it took a long time for those to come to fruition, and it never quite built up the same momentum as in the 1up.com era. Eventually, it fizzled out completely, and after many years of reflection I probably can't say with any confidence that I was completely blameless in this.

Around the time of our Katawa Shoujo discussions, I'd started getting to know one of our members known as "Shingro" a bit better, and he was particularly interested in anime, manga and Japanese games. He, along with a couple of other people I knew in other places online (including Google+, remember that?) had given me some recommendations for some localised Japanese games to try — games that never got much attention from the press, weren't received particularly positively when they did, but which were likely to appeal to anyone who "got" what Katawa Shoujo was going for. Among those games were the early entries in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, the Atelier Arland series and the Ar Tonelico series.

I played and absolutely adored all of those games, and, along with Katawa Shoujo, found that I was experiencing something unusual and interesting: I was enjoying games that felt like they had been tailor-made to suit me and the way what I would later come to recognise as my neurodivergent brain worked. I recognised that they likely wouldn't appeal to everyone for a wide variety of reasons — and not just the sexually provocative element. They were unabashedly cheerful, they were colourful, they were often gleefully experimental (and not always successfully so) with their game mechanics, and their voice acting had a lot of screeching and shouting, particularly if you played in Japanese.

But I liked them for that; they knew their audience, and they unashamedly catered to that audience and no-one else with a laser-like focus. I started to discover hidden depths in these games; even the most silly-seeming ecchi titles, like Senran Kagura Burst, had something interesting to say, and they often had a lot less shame about it than many mainstream titles, many of which were still in their "dark and edgy equals mature" phase. In stark contrast to my growing disillusionment with triple-A games — Gears of War was my absolute last straw in this regard, as I hated that game and pretty much swore off "big games" after that — I felt like I was discovering gaming afresh for the first time.

And, naturally, I wanted to share the way these games made me feel. So I did. And for a while, things were okay, until I saw a few messages that made me feel a bit uncomfortable. Messages that, while it almost certainly wasn't the intent, given the sources, made me feel like I was being judged for the type of entertainment I was enjoying — entertainment that, let's not forget, I had recently come to feel was "speaking" to me like pretty much never before in my gaming career. Words like "creepy" and "perverted" were bandied about a bit too readily, and I… did not like that.

For a bit of context, I was struggling in my personal life around this time. (So what else is new?) Shortly after I took one of the aforementioned trips across the pond to meet some Squad members at PAX East in Boston, I split up with my first wife. And I… did not handle it very well. I felt betrayed, broken, utterly destroyed, and the things that I could cling onto for some degree of comfort in those trying times were of increasing importance to me. By the time Katawa Shoujo and the aforementioned other games came along, I was several years deep into A Difficult Time and, although I had met Andie, the wonderful person who is now my wife, I was still struggling and in great need of comfort.

I started to get frustrated when I saw the things I enjoyed come under what I perceived to be "attack". In the early to mid 2010s, this really started to come to a head, as the modern progressive movement started to really raise its head online — and was being more than a little abrasive about it, with public shaming often being the weapon of choice. In retrospect, I recognise how effective this can be — and how flaccid groups like the USA's Democratic party appear when they're not willing to step up and confidently declare their opponents to be Bad People — but at the time, I did not like it, particularly as I saw people I knew and cared about caught in the crossfire on multiple occasions.

At this point I should clarify that I have always had beliefs that are broadly in line with what one would call "progressiveness". I believe that straight white men have indeed been in a position of power and privilege for many years, and that marginalised groups, including women, have had an uphill struggle to stand on the same level — and that it is the responsibility of those who are in positions of power and privilege to help others up, so we can all benefit. I believe trans rights are human rights, I believe everyone has the right to love whoever they want to love, regardless of gender, and I believe racism is something we should have left behind long ago, and that it doesn't go challenged nearly often enough these days.

At the same time, part of my frustration stemmed from those mid-2010s feeling like I was being demonised for my gender and my sexuality in particular. I am sure at least part of this was down to my vulnerability at the time, but when I saw articles literally branding people who liked certain games as "creepy", "paedophiles" and "sex pests", I didn't like it. At all. Striving for equality, I felt, shouldn't mean dragging people down — particularly when there's a lot more nuance to the situation than just "white straight man = privileged". As someone having difficulty with my own personal situation — and what I later learned was neurodivergence — I certainly didn't feel like I was in the same position as the hypothetical straight white bogeyman, sitting in his suit with his perfect white teeth, counting his money and posting slurs on the Internet.

So I lashed out. There are numerous posts on both this blog and on MoeGamer where I did just that: I attempted to express how I was feeling about this. I attempted to express how these things that were important to me made me feel — and how it made me feel when I was called all manner of horrible names simply for what I liked, including by former colleagues. When I left USgamer, I was subject to some absolutely horrible abuse from an individual who joined the organisation as I was on the way out, and I received absolutely no support from anyone when that happened.

All this, as you might expect, eventually attracted the attention of the Gamergate crowd, who also counted among their number people who liked sexually provocative (or explicit) games, just like I did, and seemed to be forming a community of like-minded folks. I recognised even in the early days that Gamergate — and particularly its subreddit, KotakuInAction — was a scarlet letter, so I always took care not to publicly associate myself with the movement or even express support for it, particularly as things escalated and it became clear that no, for some of those people, it really wasn't about ethics in games journalism.

I maintain to this day, however, that among the early Gamergate crowd were some genuinely good people who wanted change for the better — and in a few cases actually achieved meaningful change that didn't involve any sort of bigotry — but with the inherently disorganised nature of the whole thing, it was, in retrospect, very easy for it to become an alt-right pipeline, and for bad actors to take control of things. And, as silly as it may sound for a dispute supposedly over video games to have such power, I firmly believe that at least part of the reason the world (particularly the online world) is in such a mess today is down to Gamergate.

Although I continued not to associate myself with Gamergate or its supposed beliefs, I found supporters from among its members for what little overlap we had. And I won't lie, it was nice to feel like there was someone who supported the way I felt, regardless of where they'd chosen to plant their flag. I found people who seemed to understand me, many of whom were on the periphery of the whole "culture war" by choice, much like I was, but who often got dragged into things whether they wanted to or not.

I continued to feel frustrated and vulnerable, though, like I was being pushed aside by people I had once called friends and a community I had once felt part of, all for the things I enjoyed. I continued to lash out, including towards people who had once been good to me, close friends, all because I felt like they had "sided" with people who didn't value my opinion, who wanted to brand me some of the worst names you can call people. And all because I liked anime-style games that occasionally crossed a line into sexual provocativeness or explicit scenes.

I said some things that I regret on multiple occasions, and I am deeply sorry about that. I recognise today that, in retrospect, I was standing at the very mouth of the alt-right pipeline and, if I had made some very different choices, I would be in a far worse situation than I am in today. Thankfully, I eventually recognised the danger I was in, and successfully changed my ways in such a way that I could continue to enjoy the things I loved without putting myself at risk of becoming one of those "everything I don't like is WOKE" idiots who infest online discourse today. And one of many positive results from that was a very enjoyable period in charge of Rice Digital, which subsequently led to my current position with Evercade — a job that, were it not for the necessity to check in on social media every day when I have otherwise mostly abandoned it for my personal life, would be 100% a dream assignment.

That doesn't change the regrets I have, though, and I wish I had come to the above realisation sooner than I did. There was still a period where I was in a bad place, and doing bad things, whether or not I really intended to. I deeply regret lashing out and pushing people away, and I wish I could make up for what I did, regardless of my reasons for it.

The reasons don't even matter any more; all that remains is the result, that being that I am growing older, I am mostly alone (except, thankfully, for the blessings that are my wife, cats and family) and in complete and utter despair at the mess I've made of my interpersonal relationships over the course of the last decade and a half.

I have many regrets. I am sorry to those I hurt. And I want to make things right. I just don't know how.

So this post is, hopefully, a start.

If you're reading this and you used to know me before… all this, I would like to know you again. I'm sure both our lives are very different to how they once were, hopefully for the better. On the whole, my life is much better than it was 10-15 years ago.

But I wish I hadn't lost those 10-15 years, and all the people I lost with them.

I am sorry to those of you I pushed away, either consciously or unconsciously. I am sorry to those of you I hurt. It doesn't matter if it was deliberate or not; if I hurt you, I hurt you, and I am sorry.

I just want things to go back to how they were during that one brief time in my life when I can say I was happy, when I felt I was accepted, when I felt I was among "my people". I know it can never be exactly the same as it once was. But I'm willing to put in the work needed to rebuild, reconnect and rekindle lost friendships.

Whatever it takes.

Thanks for reading.

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Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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