2013: Some Writing

2013 is almost over. It's been a pretty intense year! My December is going to be full of travel and events and I'm going to have precious little time to spend on my usual, self-gratifying retrospective end-of-year posts. So this is going to be a bit rushed, but here is a list of some of the writing I did this year that I am still pretty happy with.

1. My interview with Spec Ops: The Line writer Walt Williams. I mostly wanted to talk to Walt about what it is like to read criticism about your own game, but our conversation went much further than that. I didn't want to dissect it into pull quotes, so instead I published the entire transcript on Unwinnable. Related, that there is a site like Unwinnable where I know I can always publish an article makes me very happy.

2. My feature on the Queer Games Scene for Polygon. I struggle to feel proud about this piece because I know it isn't perfect. I know that, despite my best efforts, it still homogenises a diverse range of creators under that 'queer' label. I know that, as a straight white dude, I wrote the article from a position of extreme privilege over my interviewees. But I also wrote the article with the sincerest intentions. The creators I speak to in this feature remain, I am convinced, the most important and exciting people making and writing about videogames today. I wrote this piece because I want other people to be excited about these people. Not in a weird, exotic animal kind of way, but in a "these are the people that are going to convince others your beloved medium is art" kind of way. I don't know. Writing it was exhausting. Seeing a select few people criticise it on Twitter even as so many others applauded it was exhausting. Knowing I could only ever do an imperfect job of this article was exhausting. Still, I know various people who have said to me they had no idea this side of games existed before reading this article, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. So I should be proud of that I guess.

3. My feature on game jams for Edge. This was a piece I was asked to write, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. I like how I try to complicate game jams and look at how they've seeped into the Triple-A space, and that blurry line between jamming and crunching.

4. My profile of Douglas Wilson for Edge. Essentially, I just wanted an excuse to meet Douglas Wilson and talk about his amazing games and research. Still pretty happy with how this turned out.

5. My article on Grand Theft Auto V for Overland. One of my goals for this year was to write for one of Australia's literary journals, to write 'criticism about games' rather than 'games criticism', if that makes sense. I guess the website of a literary journal is close enough (the actual literary journal is happening next year!). This was technically meant to be a review of Grand Theft Auto V but it turned into a longer discussion of how despite talking loudly, Grand Theft Auto V fails to say anything of substance at all.

6. My essay on Tearaway and Sontag and Immersion. Okay, this piece only got published today but I'm still pretty happy with it.

7. My Notes series of blog posts. I really enjoyed writing my Notes posts. It started as an experiment. Okay, it started after reading Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp" and not being able to repress my desire to imitate every great author I read's style. But it turned out pretty well. The Notes format gave me the breathing room to just touch on ideas and move on to the next with no concerns for how the paragraphs flow, without having to make a singular 'point' about a game. Others have also done this this year, most notable Cameron Kunzelman's excellent post on The Last of Us. I would have liked to publish more Notes posts than I did (I still have drafts for Metal Gear Solid 3, Problem Attic, and Towerfall, but I'm also really happy with the ones I did post.

A Sum of Writing

Here is another writing update to keep this blog kicking.

This past month I started a new column at Gameranx called "A Sum of Parts" where I am spending an entire month and four articles dissecting and examining a single game. The point of it is not necessarily to say something more profound about the game as a whole, but to draw more attention to the 'bits' that make that whole work. To get things rolling this month I started with Driver: San Francisco. There is so much I wanted (and still want) to say about this fabulous game that it was a privilege to have the chance to get those thoughts down somewhere.

To start with, I flipped my old Unwinnable piece to say that not only are videogame worlds dreamlike, but dreamworlds are gamelike, and I discussed how Tanner always constructs goals for himself that he can only achieve through less efficient means. Second, I looked at one of Driver SF's more interesting and bizarre missions: the second-person challenge where you are following the car you are controlling, and looked at what that says about the player-character relationship. Third, I looked at the reoccurring motif in the game of the media influencing Tanner's thoughts and the design of the game, most noticeably through the phrase "Eyes on the city". And, finally, I looked at what Janet H Murray called "actively creating belief". I think it is a really powerful concept for understand how videogames are interpreted more broadly, and I tried to explore it through the ways both Tanner and the player convince themselves that Tanner's dreamworld is 'real'.

So that's it for Driver SF writing from me for a while. If you have been reading that series, I'd love to hear your feedback, be it positive or negative. Anything you would like to see me do differently with future games?

In other writing, a couple of pieces I have floating around the quaint old world of print media have found their way online. There's this review of Lone Survivor from PC Powerplay, and this studio profile of Supergiant Games (of Bastion fame) from Edge that I wrote after visiting the studio during GDC.

In addition to that, my regular Unwinnable writing (including this article about playing with TVs) is still happening, as is my "You Know What I Love?" column at Games On Net (this month I wrote about diegetic HUDS and songs).

Finally, if you follow me on Twitter, you may be aware that I have been enamoured by a certain Spec Ops: The Line game, and you might be wondering why I haven't written anything about it yet. The Line is one of those games that speaks so well for itself, as a critic I am not too sure what else there is to say about it. Sure, I could write an article about what it means to be able to see Walker's face reflected on a targeting computer, but you already know what it means. It's not because the game is blunt with its message; it is because the game is so good at saying exactly what it is trying to say, so what do you need me for? So, that is why I am yet to write any articles about it. The most interesting articles about The Line have, in fact, been the pieces that are highly negative of the game, because they are saying something the game isn't saying (even if I disagree with the vast majority of them). So writing positive criticism of the game and its themes has been a challenge for me. There is just so much to say but nothing that the game didn't say for itself.

So instead of writing an article or two exploring The Line's already well explored themes, I am experimenting with writing a much longer... thing. I am doing what I am tentatively calling "a critical reading" of The Line where I am writing my way through the game, chapter by chapter, scene by scene (I even more tentatively thought about calling it "embedded New Games Journalism but yeah, no). It isn't simply a walkthrough and it isn't simply lip-service fan-fiction (Christ, I hope it isn't, at least). Instead, it is starting with the themes that the game is exploring, and going through the game with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass to look at how everything in the game contributes to that theme. I'm not writing about what The Line means (though that is certainly a part of it) so much as how it means.

It's going to be long; I'm currently averaging about 2000 words a chapter. Too long for an article, or even a series of articles. Instead, I am planning on putting it together as an e-book and perhaps selling it online for a few dollars a piece. Maybe through MagNation or something similar. I don't know the first thing about doing this, but we'll see how it goes. And, if it is successful, critical readings of games (or whatever I decide to call this) might be something I do more often in the future. We'll see! But yes, that is where all my The Line writing is going, and hopefully you can expect to see that surface towards the end of this month. Hopefully. In the meantime, I will still be around the internet, doing what I do.

The Haps

Well, it's been a while since I have posted anything here at Critical Damage so I feel like I should post a quick update as to what I have been up to around the internet and beyond.

Firstly, I imagine you saw my somewhat emotional blog post from about a month ago about videogame culture's (videogame cultures' is perhaps more accurate, I guess) rape culture and sexism. It... got a little bit of attention. I started this blog in 2009. About half of the 80,000 page views I've had since then are on that post. For those playing at home, that means that post has had nearly 40,000 views. So yeah. A little bit of attention.

I've been meaning to post a follow-up to it. Mostly I want to write about how utterly naive I was when I posted it, thinking that it wouldn't cause such a commotion. I want to write about how so many female writers had already made the exact points I made in that post and have been making it for years (and have made them far more succinctly) yet it took a straight white guy to say something to really cause a shitstorm. I want to write about how the privileged misogynerds that disagreed with me went to lengths to prove the faults in my post, whereas when a woman writes something the same commenters go to lengths to prove the faults with them as people. No one sent me death or rape threats. No one designed a game where players can bash me up. I want to write about how the response to my piece and the relative decency of it just goes to show the inequality in videogame culture and the privilege I have as a male to talk about such things. A privilege that many others among us, those most affected by this shit, don't have.

Hopefully there will be a chance to write that article in the near future, but the first post was so utterly draining (physically and mentally) that I just haven't been able to yet. Still, it's been really good to see the discussions of inequality and rape culture and the such in videogames persist since the Hitman: Absolution trailer. Which is not to try to claim I started it. Many others wrote things before me, alongside me, and after me. But it definitely feels like we are reaching some kind of critical mass in this discussion. Some kind of tipping point. At least, I really hope so.

Beyond that, I've been really busy with writing elsewhere on the internet. I have three regular writing commitments now. At Games On Net, my "You Know What I Love?" column continues fortnightly. Which, uh, I would be linking to here but the most recent Games On Net redesign seems to have destroyed all my URLS. Hrmm. Well, you'll have to believe me they are there. Meanwhile, over at Unwinnable (which is fast becoming my favourite website for consistently strong videogame criticism) I am writing weekly pieces. Often these are iOS review-things under the column heading "Pocket Treasures", but sometimes they are other musings. And, starting this week, I have another weekly column over at Gameranx called "A Sum Of Parts". Here I am spending each month looking very specifically at several themes/elements of a specific game. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to spend an extended period of time (and word space) on elements of a single game, rather than doing a quick, general overview of the game. I'm starting the column off this month with Driver: San Francisco which, having just finished my second playthrough, is fast becoming one of my favourite games of all time. You really need to play it.

With these three regular pieces, I feel like I've made some kind of transition of late from videogame 'journalist' to 'critic'. It's a pretty blurred like and the two terms overlap pretty dramatically, but I feel like I have finally found a balance where I can primarily just write meaningful things about games without focusing on whats relevant to 'news', and that makes me happy. I still do write some pieces that would perhaps fit better under the category of 'journalism' than 'criticism' (such as a profile and interview I have with Jonathan Blow in the August issue of Hyper magazine), and some pieces that really straddle the two (like this piece for Edge magazine about Journey, Proteus, and Dear Esther), but by and large I feel like my focus is now squarely on producing videogame criticism. Whatever that is.

Which is largely probably because of the PhD I started at the beginning of this year, but have yet to really speak about here. I won't go into too much detail here, but ultimately I am concerned with forwarding a videogame phenomenology (or ontology, or aesthetics, or whatever term I decide I like next month) that can help construct a more robust academic videogame criticism. As literature has literature studies and film has film studies, I want videogames to have videogame studies. A field focused on the study of videogame texts and their meanings. I want videogame criticism to be a thing, more of a thing than it already is, and I guess my non-academic work is reflecting that.

And finally, you should go and grab a copy of issue 7 of the zine Ctrl+Alt+Defeat. I have an article in there about Just Cause 2 as my 'comfort game', but the reason you should pick it up is to read Kris Ligman's superb article about Skyrim and hoarding. It is a magnificent piece of New Games Journalism with an immaculate blend of personal story and game description. So much New Games Journalism gets this balance wrong and ends up saying nothing at all; Kris manages to get it perfect and says something meaningful and special about both the game and her personal experience. I really can't recommend it enough. You can look at the issue in your browser here, but I strongly recommend going here, registering, and just grabbing a free PDF (or paying some money for a print copy if you really feel like it).

So that is where I am at with things presently. I don't always update this blog when I publish articles elsewhere, but that is something I should get back into the habit of doing. Though I do have this poorly formatted page of all my writing that I try to keep up to date. I also always link to my work on Twitter, if that is something you use. So yes. Those are the haps.

How To Not Suck At Writing About Mechanics

Patrick Miller has this superb article at Insert Credit called "How To Not Suck At Ziggurat". It was published back in February, but I only just read it this week. I absolutely love it--not least of all because it is exemplary of a style of writing I utterly suck at.

I can easily write about how a game 'feels' in an emotive, affective way. I could write about how Ziggurat gives this great sense of stress and tension as you are slowly and inevitably swamped by The Aliens That Killed Everyone Else. I could talk for ages about the weird, unpleasurable-yet-awesome, discordant sensation of trying to hit a yellow alien with a charged up shot only to aim a pixel too low and have it bounce off the ziggurat into space, utterly wasted. But I cannot for the life of me write about how a game 'feels' physically, tactually, hapticly.

I love twitchy, precision games like Ziggurat, Super Crate Box, or Geometry Wars. I love figuring out what they want of me, and I get a real satisfaction of figuring out what to do with my fingers to kind of master the game's mechanics. I develop a real appreciation for these games and what I am able to do with them through my fingers, yet I can never find the words to succinctly describe these pleasures.

Miller's article does just that. He doesn't just list off the rules or goals or mechanics of the game, but successfully details just what you are able to do in the game and how it feels to do it. I tried to write something similar about Geometry Wars once, and at about 15,000 words I was no closer to describing the pleasures of that beautiful, beautiful game than I was before I started.

So Miller's piece is perhaps one of my favourite pieces of games writing for the year thus far, if only because it does so superbly something I wish I could do.

How I Made It As A Videogame Journalist

This post is kind of a response to this post by Christian Higley, where he decided to throw in the towel on videogame journalism. I don't intend to discredit anything Higley said. His experiences are his own, and I'm sad things didn't work out for him. Yet, I can't help but note that his own experience is precisely the opposite of my own experience of writing about games. Exactly the opposite. So I thought maybe I would write up my own story as a kind of counterpoint. Again, not to discredit his own experience, but maybe to offer some of the advice or support he seems to think he never got. Though, if you want such advise and haven't read Scott Nichol's response yet, I would recommend that post many times over this one.

Actually, change that. This isn't even a counterpoint. Clearly Higley didn't get the support or advice he needed. Maybe (probably) I was lucky and got it somewhere else. So this isn't a counterpoint. It's an answer to what Higley said is lacking in videogame journalism, at least to the extent that I can provide it.

But first, some caveats on my title. I don't normally consider myself a videogame "journalist" and I don't believe I've "made it", either. I freelance. I don't support myself solely off the money I make from the writing I do, and I don't believe I ever will. Maybe I could one day, but it's not my primary ambition. So maybe I have no right to write this post. Still, on the other hand, I love doing this and I devote a lot of time and effort to trying to do it well. So maybe I have something to say that's worth reading.

So where did I start? Well, right here. On this very blog. But let's go back a bit further. Crucially, crucially, I came to this as a writer, not a gamer. I love gaming; of course I love gaming, but that's not why I ever attempted to do this. I do this because I love writing.

When I first left high school I started a dual Multimedia/IT degree in 2005 with the hope of one day making games. This was back in the day when university's thought they still had to call it "Interactive Entertainment" just to be fancy. I quit that after 18 months. Partially because I thought the course was terrible, but mostly because I was terrible. In fact, I later found out the course wasn't terrible at all when a classmate and good friend got a job at Ubisoft Montreal.

So in late 2006 I changed universities and courses, and started an Arts bachelor with majors in Japanese and Writing. I chose Japanese because I needed two majors. I chose Writing because I like writing. I had aspirations, firstly, of being a poet (ha!), then of being a novelist (ahaha!), then of being--I don't know, maybe a graduated Arts students?

All this time, I played videogames. So in 2009, having failed to make any money from poetry or novel writing, I started a blog to write about games. I had no real plans on how or why I would write about games; I just would. So I started this very blog, Critical Damage, with such excellent, biting games criticism as this, or this, or this. It was, raw, rough, inconsistent, terrible, and I had no idea what I was doing. The important part is that I was doing it. And that's my first formal tip in this story: at first, worry about writing a lot. Worry about writing well later.

Slowly, very slowly, I found a voice and a style. At my height, I was blogging about one essay a week. I installed a hit-counter to see if anyone was actually reading. Sometimes I'd get five hits in a day. Sometimes from real people! Sometimes I would get a link-back directing people to my blog. This was the most exciting thing. Ultimately, knowing that some people--not a lot, but some--read what I was writing. This gave me just enough confidence to keep writing that little bit more.

Around the same time, I started using Twitter. I had no idea how to use Twitter; I thought people just used it to tell the world when they brushed their teeth. I had this weird idea that I could record my every gaming action. Kind of like Raptr, but more annoying. I wasn't sure to what end, but I thought that might be fun. So if I caught a new Pokemon, beat a level, found a hidden item, I'd tweet it.

Then I stumbled, completely by accident, onto this community of tweeters and bloggers already writing about games across a number of blogs many times more impressive than my little thing. Quickly enough, I abandoned my Twitter experiment and started conversing with these other bloggers. Well, the twelve or so I knew at the time. This would have been about the middle of 2009.

So I would talk to people on Twitter, and when I wrote a new blog post, I'd link it on Twitter. Then, in early 2010, the small community I had joined was just enough to get a few of those early blog posts on the weekly Critical Distance "This Week In Videogame Blogging" post. My first post was about (what Critical Distance called "That old bugbear") the narratology/ludology debate (feel free to remind me I wrote that next time I complain about new writers restarting the same dumb debate on Twitter). "This Week In Videogame Blogging" gets reposted on Gamasutra and GameSetWatch ever week. This gave me dozens of hits. Dozens! People added my blog to their RSS feeds. They clicked the link on the side to my Twitter profile and followed me.

So things snowballed. I wrote more articles, and deliberately posted them with the hope they would get on Critical Distance. If I wrote something on a Friday or Saturday (probably too late to make the Sunday roundup), I would hold off posting it until the next Wednesday or Thursday when I assumed the list was being compiled. I spent years trying to become a writer and this was the closest I had ever gotten to being published. For months, getting featured every week on Critical Distance was my sole ambition as a writer.

This paid off. In June 2010, I got an email from an intern at Kotaku asking if they could republish a post I wrote defending cut scenes. People complain at the way some sites leech content off the blogs so they don't have to pay for freelancers, but at the time I was so incredibly psyched that somewhere like Kotaku would want to repost me that I didn't care. The post got 25,000 eyeballs on a stack of my words and a link to my blog.

A month after that, I attended the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in Melbourne, Australia. I have no idea why I decided to go to Freeplay, but I'm glad I did. Running high on my Kotaku exposure, I had a crazy idea: why not pitch coverage of the event to a website? The festival was small, down in Australia; if I was lucky, no one else (read: no 'real' game journalists) would've pitched coverage. Adam Saltsman and Brandon Boyer were both presenting speeches so maybe a website would want coverage.

So I went straight to the only gaming news website I knew: GameSetWatch. I sent the email from my hotmail address direct to the generic email on the 'About Us' page. I said:

To The Editors,

My name is Brendan Keogh. Please find below a proposal for GameSetWatch.

As your site has already reported, the Australian indie games event Freeplay is happening in Melbourne next month. I am looking forward to attending Freeplay myself and plan to write up a multi-part report outlining the various seminars and workshops, as well as looking at the games exhibited. If you are interested and do not have anyone else already covering the festival, I would be keen to write this report for GameSetWatch. 

Although I do not have experience of reporting on an event, I have recently had growing success with game writing and am eager to get more involved with the scene/industry. My gaming weblog, Critical Damage can be found on multiple entries of Critical Distance’s weekly blogroll, “This Week in Videogame Blogging” that is reposted on both GameSetWatch and Gamasutra. My article “In Defense of the Cut-scene” has also been republished at Kotaku. At present, I have an article in the upcoming third issue (No. 2, that is) of Kill Screen Magazine. I currently reside in Brisbane, Australia. I have a Bachelor of Arts with majors in Writing and Japanese and am currently studying a Film and Media studies Major in preparation for a Communication & Cultural Studies Honours looking at videogames next year.

 I would be happy to accommodate any specific angles you would desire me to approach the festival from and to attend any specific seminars that you think your readership would be most interested in. I greatly enjoy the various festival reports posted on GameSetWatch and would approach the chance to cover one myself with much enthusiasm.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to your reply.

Regards

Brendan Keogh

Yep. I called it a weblog. Anyway, Simon Carless himself replied and asked for coverage for Gamasutra and, much to my surprise, offered me money for it. I flipped out. I spent the weekend at Freeplay hyperventilating. I stayed up until 4am writing my reports on the keynotes (something I'd now have done ten minutes after a talk finishes). I truly, honestly did not believe Gamasutra was going to run the stories. Why would they? But they did!

Also at Freeplay, I networked. I made a lot of connections with a variety of developers and bloggers. Most importantly, perhaps, I met James O'Connor, a freelance journalist who writes for a variety of outlets including Hyper ("Holy shit you write for Hyper?!" is how I believe I introduced myself to him). After the event, he put me touch with Dylan Burns, who was at that time running the ship at Hyper. James put in a good word, I gave the ever-growing spiel (been on Kotaku, featured in Critical Distance, wrote for Gamasutra) and pitched an article about this new game thing called Minecraft. And that was that.

Also (the story is getting a bit frayed here, sorry) around the same time as Freeplay, I pitched the stupidest idea for an article ever to the relatively new Kill Screen magazine. The theme for the issue was "Back to School". I pitched an article called "Capture the School" about going to a school to play a real-life game of CTF in the middle of the night. It was the most literal interpretation of the theme ever. Yet, somehow, Chris Dahlen saw something in it, took a gamble on a random blogger, and accepted the pitch.

When I made my first pitches, I highlighted I was a blogger and had been republished on Kotaku. Then I could say I had been on Gamasutra. Then in Kill Screen. Then in Hyper. The hardest part of being a writer--any kind of writer--is it feels like in order to get published, you need to already be published. Finally, I was already in that closed-off loop. Before that, I just made myself a published writer through my blog.

Then I paid my way to GDC at the beginning of 2011 (well, with some financial support from my amazing girlfriend that I can never truly repay her for). I scored a press pass by offering to cover the event for free for IndustryGamer. They got content they couldn't afford to pay for; I got a pass to a conference I couldn't afford to pay for. Everybody won. There I made more contacts (including Edge Magazine's feature editor) and so the snowball continued. Sometimes it is okay to work for no money.

So, really, I was lucky. That's not to say I didn't make the right decisions or that I didn't earn this. But I was so lucky that the decisions I made, the way I acted, was the right way. This year I returned to GDC with "Edge Magazine" printed on my press pass, freaking out and feeling like a complete fraud even as I interviewed phenomenal developers and did "real journalism", whatever that is.

There is no tried-and-tested way to break into videogame journalism. There is no tried-and-tested way to break into any kind of writing. This is why you will find hardly any "this is how to be a games journalist" posts and plenty of "This is how I became a games journalist" posts. Truly, you fake it until you make it. While trying my hand at poetry and story writing, I hated all the "just keep writing until you make it! Don't give up!" crap pep talks. But I'm sorry to say, that is exactly how it works.

Still, based solely on my own personal story and experience, these are the tips I would give you:

1. Write a lot. Then, once you've got that down, focus on writing well. It is okay to write crap, especially if:
2. You are okay with people reading and critiquing your crap writing. Letting others edit your crap writing and being able to acknowledge when they are right is a crucial step to becoming a better writer. Know another writer with a blog also trying to make it? Get together and rip each other's writing to shreds. Constructive shreds.
3. Don't write for nothing; but that doesn't mean you have to write for money.
4. Network. For christ's sake, network!
5. Get on Twitter. Engage with Twitter. Don't just post links to your stories. Give people a reason to want to follow you so that when you do link to your articles, they will be watching and ready to click.
6. Be honest with how people work. Look at your Twitter profile page and ask yourself if someone who didn't know you would follow you from five seconds of looking at it. Your follower/following ratio does matter. How you've worded your Twitter profile matters. If it includes either the facts "I'm a gamer!" or "I hate the word gamer!", you are probably doing it wrong.
7. Have enough confidence to actually write terrible pitches and enough humility to never think you're good yet. Well, think you're good. Don't think you're great. The moment you think you're great you'll stop trying to get better.
8. Read a lot across a lot of websites. If you can't think of any other websites where your writing might fit, you don't know of enough websites.
10. Do it because you love writing first and because you love gaming second.
11. Write a lot.
12. Network
13. Wear sunscreen.

And one final point: Videogame journalism does have inclusion problems. There are not nearly enough of the amazing non-cis, non-white, non-male writers being given a voice beyond their own blogs. But that said, the community of writers I've stumbled into has been the friendliest, most inclusive, most welcoming and eager group of people I have ever had the honour of knowing. Maybe it isn't indicative of all of games journalism, but it is indicative of the only games journalists I've ever met. If you want to write about videogames well, talk to these people. Write response to their pieces on Twitter. Email them your own writing and ask them for advice. Maybe they won't respond. Maybe they will. If they don't, it will be because they are busy, not because they don't want to. There is indeed a club among game writers, and they are pretty excited for anyone else who wants to write (and write well) about games to join them. I know this because I never intended to join any such group, yet here I am. The door was open for me to stumble into.

So I'm sorry Higley didn't have a good experience, and I wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. And maybe he had some good points. The more I think about it as I write this post, the more I realise that I actually learned most of this in my undergrad Writing major and very little of it from anyone in games journalism. But at the same time, there was always another freelancer or editor I could email when I had no idea how to write an invoice or how much I should get paid or who the editor was of a certain outlet.

At the end of the day, only one thing is true: to make it as a videogame journalist, you need to write a post about how to become a videogame journalist on your personal blog. So there you go. I made it. And you can too!