Monday, April 27, 2009

Life has finally reached a point of relatvive stability. At least stable enough to allow me to gather my thought and begin writing again.

I am going to create a new blog (seperate from this one) that will allow me to focus on my professional writing. It's going to be game focused. However I'm still trying to decide the exact direction I want to take it. The problem is that game's writing is filled with people. There are five million gaming blogs out there. I really don't want write anything that's similar to anything else that's out there. The field is crowded enough already. I'd like to focus on long forgotten genre's and games. I have a soft spot for terrible 90's FMV games and consoles. However, I'm probably going to be writing a guest collumn on a well known site concerning that.

So my question to you guys is this: What kind of game's writing would you like to see? What kind of content to you not see readily or at all? I know not all of my friends who read this blog are gamers, but the majority probably are. If your not a gamer, what kind of commentary do you like to see when reading about Books, Movies, Music or your other hobbies?

Now that that's out of the way...

Life here at the moment is pretty rad. March and the first part of April were filled with changes; New job, new apartment, new city, new roommate, new everything basically. I'm currently in Yokohama teaching at a middle school. It's a big shock moving from elite high school to normal middle school. Not exactly an ideal change but it certainly provides me with motivation to figure out what the hell I actually want to do. The new blog mentioned above is part of figuring out process.

Still no Fencing! I've been rendered poor by my move. Japanese moving costs usually total up to at least four months worth of rent. So until Uncle Sam gives me my tax return I don't even have a working foil.

That's it for now. Please tell me what you think about the questions above in the comments! A friend of mine in the industry asked me last week why I wasn't working in games already. I really didn't have a good answer for him. I had some reasons but they all sounded like lame excuses. So help me out and tell me what you think.

Oh, and whoever linked to this blog with my full name can you remove the link. The of this blog was to have a place to blow off steam. I'd like to not have it show up in the first page of results when editors google my name.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of the more compelling gaming writing I've seen recently is mixed media-- the two that come to mind are Zero Punctuation and, in the slightly less cult-of-personality genre, ByteJacker. Both offer much more than the writing-only things I've been reading, and they're both quite enjoyable. And each has a unique perspective that doesn't seem to get heard much-- well, maybe ZP does (very angry), but ByteJacker is much more in the "I'm poor, what cool things should I play that don't cost much?" which fits well in with its other mission of indie games. Indies, especially, can always use more publicity, so I doubt that the world is so filled with that sort of work.

Regarding linking to your blog with your full name-- I did that; if you didn't want me to do that, ideally you would *TELL* me that. Silly Niki. Anyway, I'll pull the link, and maybe the Google gods will take pity and pull out the search juice (though I'm not positive that I have enough PageRank to make it the *first* link for your name by myself).

pennemu said...

It's cool. When I get my game blog up you can link to that.

Matthew Murray said...

I'd kind of like to see bits about indie games that will not make it stateside. I always love laughing at terrible games that I would never ever want to buy and would love to know about games that I should look for when I'm finally chilling in the land of the rising sun with you guys.

Jake said...

It might be ambitious but actual critiques as apposed to reviews or simple editorial commentary would be something new. It kind of leaves you with a really narrow roster of games to talk about though... It's pretty clear that reviews are not the way to get noticed in that field of writing. It would be cool to learn more about the people who actually make the games. Not just the producers. How about the grunts who do all the real work?