eat. sleep. game.

I’ve been gone a while.

This is obvious, if you look at the recent posts. Chuf has made a valiant effort to preserve some sense of regularity in the posting during the end of the year lull, for which I thank him immensely, and a special thank you as well to Jayslacks.

My absence has been the result of some fairly distracting personal life issues. These issues were amplified and focused by their proximity to Christmas and the holidays in general, although my life shows a strange predilection towards entering a tailspin around the holidays. I’m not making excuses. I’m just sharing, I suppose.

Over my absence, I’ve done a lot of hard thinking about who I am, where I’m at in my life, and what I want from it, and from this website. It’s been a crazy year, honestly, and this site had a lot to do with it. I can honestly say that it was the impetus and catalyst behind my relocation to the Bay Area, behind really getting reasonably serious about web design (insofar as I’ve gotten serious about web design), and has been a regular exercise in writing in the public eye.

I’ve gotten invited to speak to developers on anticipated and less-than games, and have even experienced my first disappointment in a game being cancelled that I got a chance to see in production. I used this site as my thesis more or less for my undergraduate degree. And over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been pondering whether to continue here at all. The idea of quitting has reared its head, and I’ve looked it straight in the eye, and I am not blinking.

I’ll continue with this site as long as I am able, for a few reasons. For one, this site, unlike many other sites on the tubes, has been a labor of devotion and love since day one, and it continues to be a source of pride. And also, it’s because no matter what personal issues materialize in my life, gaming has always been a constant. Hear me out.

In my life, I have moved hundreds of miles away from everything and one I knew, have experienced death and heartbreak and divorce and substance abuse (not my own), and have experienced all the other issues of a male growing up during the 80s, 90s, and the current decade. My life has had little real stability, save for three things. Art, writing, and video games.
Gaming has been a stable staple of my experience as a human being, and honestly, I feel like I’m a better person for it. I’m proud to be a person who has been a gamer for 21 years, and it’s one of the most rewarding things in my life. Throughout my childhood, and the divorce of my parents, and the awkward, hellish, intense period of high school, to the malaise of my life between graduation and college, I have always had games to fall back on and use as a way to ground myself and escape or take a break from things, and in the interim have developed a love for the medium and an appreciation for it. And it’s with this in mind that I will continue to write about gaming. What’s more, I’ll be writing more regularly as well.

To the people who have read this site (and given that we had approximately 50,000 hits last year for a tiny site with two main writers, there might be a fair number of you), thank you. I greatly appreciate that you spent time here, and hope that you’ll return. And on that note, welcome to 2008. Where’s my fucking Ninja Gaiden II?

-Aegies

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Site minutae. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.