When it comes to making a living writing about games - writing about anything - I try to manage my expectations very carefully. I know how hard it is, how naive I am, how privileged my generation is and how sour my sense of entitlement tastes to those older and wiser than me. How anything I have to say on the matter will be self-indulgent until I've succeeded: or at the very least, until I've accepted failure.
I have a day job. Of course I do - the question has only ever been whether I was going to talk about it on this blog, though in the circumstances I'm willing to take the hit to my credibility as a disaffected graduate. My day job is fine. It pays for the things I need, and it gets me out of bed at the morning. It has also made me thoroughly, harmfully unhappy. It's stable, white-collar, and I'm lucky to have it - and sometimes I feel like I'm in one of those dreams where I'm running downhill and can't stop and I'm heading towards a main road and there's a bus coming and the sign on the bus says "you fucked it up".
Writing about burly men firing burly guns keeps the wolves away, and when someone pushes a couple of quid my way for doing it I get to feel like maybe it's not totally unreasonable to expect a little more from my future. Someone who knows me better than I do once told me that politics doesn't suit me, and they were right: but the belief that we are all entitled to a little more than safety is essential if a life worth living is going to survive Austerity Britain. 'They' forgot this about us; that if you're going to close our libraries and our mental health charities, it's time to start building bridges and laying railway tracks.
Games journalism is important to me because it is a craft, a skill, and a service rendered; because it is base, irrational, and because it's not going to last. It's something I want, not something I need: but as time goes on I'm starting to suspect that those are not very different things. Michael Walbridge may well be right: this path might lead to nothing but disappointment and failure. I'd argue, then, that it's on me to take ownership of my disappointment: that if I'm going to fuck up, I might as well choose the direction I'm going to fuck up in.
Right. Enough of this. Stuff to do.
I disagree with Michael Walbridge's article because it is explicitly stating that it is pointless to even /try/ and succeed in your chosen field.
ReplyDeleteI went to a Buddhist monastery once to write a big article for coursework. I'll be honest, I found the monks slightly barmy. But their Abbot did say one bafflingly wise thing:
"We are responsible for our actions and will receive the consequences that flow from them. Sometimes there are conflicting needs and it is hard to see what is right.
"But to do nothing out of fear of making a mistake is the saddest mistake."
I never really understood a lot of their practices, but that tenet stuck with me.
I think it provoked the response it did in me because he would deny people the experience of failing, even though he admits that he enjoyed himself for a time. That, for me, is unfair, and as convincing as the words "I'll never drink again."
ReplyDeleteThis isn't a "not because it is easy" moment. We're not going to the bloody moon. I just like writing about the video games.