The State of Play (pun intended)

Well, shit, here we are again! The old blog, haven’t touched this thing in over a year now; but brush away about six feet of dust and you might even find some scrappy, poorly written articles about gaming on here. On one hand, I chose to do this post here because, well, it’s a blog that I already have. Making a new one would be effort, right? But on the other hand, it’s actually a pretty relevant spot for what I want to say. This blog marks the beginning of my time doing stuff with purpose on this ol’ internet (which by now I’ve figured is probably gonna be sticking around for a while), albeit a list of articles that were never read, and rightly so. They’re garbage, and I won’t sell them as anything more, but when I look back at some of the earliest, I’m able to read in them nuances of the pretty big changes that were going on in my life – even if they’re not so apparent to the untrained eye.

But let’s lighten the mood first. I’ve been doing cartoon versions of some of my Tweeps lately, but I’ve never done a self-portrait, so here’s one. Enjoy.

… and now that I’ve deceptively lowered your expectations, let us continue the tale. Allow me to cast your minds back just two years in Simpsons fashion to the beginning of 2010 – Haiti is suffering one of the worst quakes in history, the Sun has given anther vain attempt at hiding behind the moon if only for ten minutes, and those crazy Arabs have just opened that massive pointless building in Dubai – but not much of this really seems to matter to one stupid, opinionated 16-year old boy in Berkhamsted Collegiate School. And that might seem like an incredibly unflattering presentation of myself, and I want it to be. I hate what I was then, and I’m proud to: it’s not depressing to me, in fact I can only love how different I feel to what I was. The year was, awesome games aside, the worst year of my life, as my downward spiral in education (which to this day I can’t explain, I just started to suck) was really hitting rock bottom and in brutally heavy subjects like Philosophy, History and (believe it or not) Photography I was truly out of my depth.

It’s true that pretty much everyone complains about their childhood, and I’ll admit here I’m no different. Hell, I wouldn’t blame you if you find it hard to believe someone in a privileged private school is ‘having it tough’, but the school I had attended since my infancy was an odd social environment. There are those who loved it, and I understand that, but it seemed that if you weren’t loving it, you were god damn hating it. I’ve managed to glean a small circle of my closest friends from the school, and for that I’m forever grateful, but honestly, those I’ve not talked to since I likely wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.

It’s probably this environment that led to my twisted, illogical and constantly fluctuating political and social views that shaped the way in which I acted on a day to day basis. I’d flicker inconsistently from Conservative Christian to brutally left-wing to Greenpeace to blindly misogynistic almost on a weekly basis. I’d hear a rich person acting snobbishly, I’d be a Communist. I’d get annoyed at my mother and hate women. It could be said that without the experience in these mindlessly extreme views I wouldn’t have ever settled on the liberal views I hold now (both politically and to general people I meet) so to that I’m thankful, but I’m sorry to any and all who had the displeasure of hearing me talk about it at the time.

As I’m sure is obvious, the exams for that year didn’t go well, as expected, and being under the minimum grade boundary I was told to either fuck off or repeat the year. That was an easy choice, and a couple months later I was joining my lifelong partner in crime, Ryan, at Amersham college. My liberalisation which was just beginning to kick in pretty much was hammered in shut within a few months. Being exposed to people who didn’t get lifts to school in BMWs and get given PS3s for Easter was refreshing, as was the college not having the attitude of ‘you’d better be at least a lawyer or a doctor, or you’re nothing’ which I had been so used to. At last, the prospect of doing something I even gave a shit about was at least worth considering, and being someone who’d always had a bit of a knack for the written word, and in recent years had developed a passion for gaming, games journalism was the new goal. By this time, I’d already had this blog, and my reviews blog, but I certainly hadn’t thought anything of them. They were Blogspots, after all, not job applications. A way of churning out all the things I wanted to say about stuff, even if most of it was about games. But combined with me having just made a Twitter account under the advice of Vicky (@Vix_Russell), I had finally found a way where this wasn’t the case, where people might even read all those wordy words.

Oddly, my increasing use of Twitter was actually simultaneous with me becoming a more confident and social person. I won’t deny it, before going to college I had found it not easy at all to talk to girls (not because of any sexual matter, but simply because in my single-sex school I had barely seen nor heard of one) and I was, despite my closest friends, a pretty lonely person. Cliques didn’t cross-mingle with other cliques where I came from, so you hung out with who you hung out with, and that was that. Suddenly, I was faced with people who’d invite you out for a drink after knowing them for two weeks. It was humanity-faith-in-restoringly good, and despite the common view that internet life has a negative correlation with real social life, this helped me enormously when it came to randomly talking to new people on Twitter. For example, a few months later a certain @CapnRaccoon got retweeted by GAME, and I thought ‘shit, let’s have a chat to this fellow long-haired lovely looking wanker.’ I couldn’t tell you due to sheer terrible memory where people like @GetUpKidAK came from but the effect was the same. I’ve no doubt to them at the time this was just another someone-or-other floating around the Twitterverse, but to me this was massive.

I guess at this point it would only be fair to mention a very good friend I met at this time, who went by the name of Mary Jane. We met on a cold wintery night in my friend’s bedroom, and we’ve been the closest of friends since. And I know due to the ridiculous view our societies have built up around this kind old girl that this might seem dumb, or immature to some, and I won’t argue. I could, sure. I’m armed to the teeth when it comes to defending Mother Nature’s favourite plant, but that’s not what this post is about. I will, however dispel two myths that might come to mind. Firstly, was it the cause of my educational failings? No, if you’re smart you’ll realise this came after my grades failed, and they’ve actually gone up since. Secondly, has it made me lazy? Instead of bringing out all the scientific evidence that proves it doesn’t cause general laziness, I may as well just admit I am and always have been a tad on the lazy side. Nonetheless, I’ve actually found she has, like with a million musicians before me, only helped bring out my creative and appreciative side, and if she only had a functioning brain and ears I’d thank her a million times over. The times with my friends that she has accentuated into classic evenings of long discussions of religion and politics, ridiculous laughs and tasty food beyond belief are innumerable. Also, to my ents out there, especially our introducer G-Slice, my eternal love is with all of you. Summer of 2011 Forever <3

The final subject being, of course, writing itself. By early 2011, it was definitely the goal, but the means to its end were devious. I wrote with foolish dedication for a ‘growing’ site that went by the uncreative name of ps3xboxreviews.com for much longer than I should have, which took 1000+ word reviews in return for next to no views, and my Dead Space 2 review turned out to be my last. I was then tweeted at by a mysterious account which had been following me for some time, asking what ‘cool games’ had come out recently. It turned out said account was for a nice-looking new site called Flush the Fashion. I appreciated the Alice Cooper reference, so we talked for a spell (that was a Bastion reference) and before I knew it, I had done a review for them too. Being put on the front page of a site that seemed to actually be attracting an audience was a feeling I’ll never forget, and here I still am, writing for the site which is nearing 6,000 followers, scoring me review copies, getting me to press events, and getting me known with PRs. Pete, you too have my eternal gratitude. Go follow @tweetthefashion.

But if you know me, you know Flush the Fashion isn’t the only place I write for, and I think it was in the latter stages of 2011’s summer that I first heard of Pixels or Death. ‘I’ve just started writing for Pixels or Death’, I believe Chris’ words were. ‘INTERESTING’, I thought (I sometimes think in full caps). However, I didn’t think much of it until I, purely for research purposes, listened to the first PODcast which included Chris himself – is there no one else absolutely HAS to be able to put a voice to a face? – and even though at this point I didn’t know my Patrick from my Rush, I did know that these fine gentleman knew what they were talking about… even the Northerner.

Honestly, I can’t really remember the details of how I joined POD, but somehow in the early months of winter I moved up in the world from podcast question-asker to question-askee. And while I love everything that the site encourages, from terms of lengthy discussion of topics to supporting to supporting small-time developers, what I’ve come to love especially in the last month or so is the awesome community around the site. I’m surrounding by some of the most talented writers I’ve ever known of (I have a shrine to Adam and Ben’s work that I sacrifice goats to every night) but the people I have come to know on Twitter, most of whom are literally friends of friends of friends, are an absolute blast to chat to on a daily basis. If I’ve talked to you more than, say, twice on Twitter and it was an amicable exchange, I want you to know that my cyber-heart totally goes out to you. Also worthy of mention: Trin’s caps lock key. That thing is a character of its own.

So, if you managed to trawl through that short novel above, that’s roughly where I stand now. Writing, tweeting, toking and loving every minute of it. With the sense of renewed perspective it’s given me, I’d give my biggest thanks to the internet itself, were it not an inanimate and somewhat abstract being. Hell, where else could THIS happen?