Starting Fresh.

Hi there.

It's been just over six months since my last post, which if I'm being honest was nothing more than a low-effort attempt to keep my few regular readers from thinking I was giving up - a pretence which I soon abandoned entirely. I stopped wanting to write, stopped wanting to research and put time into a finished product that I didn't believe was ever going reach the quality I expected.

Let me be clear: I never thought that building a career out of a free web-based blogging platform would be easy and I never expected to see tangible results within a few months of starting, but what I did expect to see was an increase in my own confidence in myself and in my writing. I expected to start enjoying what I was doing more instead of less, and I didn’t.

When I began this whole thing I had a lot of uncertainties, but one thing I knew beyond a doubt was that the internet is so completely saturated with content creators that "video game blog" didn't have a chance in hell of succeeding if that was all I had to offer. At a guess there are probably more gaming blogs on the web than there are people living in my country (Canada, population 37 million if anyone's curious). Without some gimmick my chances of gaining traction and followers were roughly zero, or so I thought. Which is why I settled into the theme of "learning about games by teaching about games." It seemed like a great idea at the time. Maybe it still is and I just lacked the conviction to execute it properly. Maybe one day I'll go back to it, maybe not. But right now it doesn't work for me.

I'm not a games journalist, and knowing about games doesn’t make me one. I don't have a journalism degree or any formal training. I've come to recognize significant flaws in the single article I wrote for games website Beyond Gaming, but if a lack of polish was all that I thought was holding me back I wouldn't be giving up so easily. The truth is I don't think I enjoy writing about games, and if I don't enjoy it then what's the point? It would be no different than the job I have now, except that the bad attitude I would inevitably develop would risk alienating people I might actually like.

So where does this leave me? Is this a goodbye post? Well, no. Starting now Shock and Pause is going to be one of those uncountable gaming blogs with no gimmick, no special features or tricks. No more promises about weekly posts to guilt myself into keeping them. When I have something to say, I'll say it. I'll talk about games I've played, games I'm looking forward to and just games in general. The posts will be less formal than before. I'm doing this for me now, because I love games and I still have a lot to say about them. I still want to work in the industry but I don't think that journalism is the right path. There are other places that will be better for me and where I can do more good if I make the right calls. Maybe we'll see each other there?


As always, thanks for reading.