Ok. The point of having this blog is to be upfront and honest with people (I think), so here's the situation: I've been in an absolute funk for the past few months since 1UP has shut down. Part of it is that I was very emotionally invested into the site. Even though I came a little late to the party after its supposed heyday, I jumped ship from GameSpot to 1UP because of things they did well: engaging staff, smart writing, and the podcasts and shows. I knew that, even though I wasn't as involved with the community as I probably could have been, that was the place for me, and it was always among the first sites I would visit every morning. But it was more than that for me. 1UP represented an end point, a dream job. I've writing about games for a years now, and even a few years before I got hip to Retronauts, the Oddcast, and the 1UP Show. That was the place I wanted to work, and I wanted to do it with those people creatively starting that kind of content. It was one of the few times in a person's life when they knew exactly what they wanted and where they knew they could get it.
But 1UP was fraught with internal strife, mostly from the management side, and that caused multiple shake-ups, layoffs, restructures, etc. That didn't make it easy, or even practical, to try to move to San Francisco and hope that I score an internship or even start to work freelance for them. After I got sick in 2010, it made it that much harder to pack up and go anywhere. I still wanted to be a games writer, but I had to do it in Cleveland for the time being.
But, man, this week. Pointed criticism of the way the "traditional" model of games journalism is busted is starting to make even the layman and sometimes-contributor take better notice of what's really going on, even though I could clearly see that changes had to happen a couple of years ago. Both Ben Kuchera and Patrick Miller seem to agree that solid, investigative journalism is crumbling under the pressure of the absolute necessity of page clicks, and that the holy trinity of current games writing (news, previews, and reviews) is not a sustainable model for either good writing or even ethical practices when it's all just restructured PR.
For a long time, these were things that I was striving to do well, keeping my head in the sand that even though there are hundreds or even thousands of places on the internet that do the exact same thing, I could find work at one of the larger sites based on skill, experience, and a Bruce Wayne- like force of will. Over the past year or so, I've learned that I need to break free from that and do other kinds of work, but the perfect storm of listening to the final 1UP podcast, reading those articles, and losing out on PAX Prime tickets (which was going to be part fun, part schmoozing for contacts) --along with losing my original goal of working at 1UP in February-- has definitely given me some sobering perspective. I'm 33, married, and my wife and I have both gone through some serious issues with our health even though we're two of the most healthy people you might ever meet. I'll write about games forever, and I have immediate plans to do so, but this hasn't been the best week for Achieving Your Dreams.
I want to contribute to something that I love so much, and the mounting evidence that places on the internet to do so for a living will bottom out sooner than later is depressing. That's one of the reasons I wrote about a renewed perspective a few weeks ago on this blog, because it's time to learn new things and reform my outlook. There is great work on the internet about games, the culture of games, and the creation of games. Previewing them and reviewing them might not go away (and my gut says that I don't want them to), and the odds of so many sites doing it in the next five years still existing is almost ludicrous. But I have to shake out of this funk, even though I know not so deep down that this is a hobby and nothing more.
If anything, I can keep trying to grab freelance work, and I still have the book to write, but it's hard to give up on that down-the-road mentality, that sometime-in-the-future perspective. After Dorritogate a few months ago, I (maybe stubbornly) decided to pull myself up from the bootstraps and try harder, but it's just been one hit after the next lately. Is it time to regroup again, or is it time to get my priorities straight? If great writers like Frank Cifaldi and Bob Mackey have to do the same thing now that they were unceremoniously let go from their jobs, it's going to be ridiculous for me to be on the same boat.
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