Sunday Thoughts: My Dream

I can remember being twelve years old, waiting for most of the day in a game rental store for another customer to return Flashback on the Mega Drive so that I could take it. I sat there with my friend, eating chocolate and drinking cans of Coke and we dreamed about working with video games when we grew up.

Neither of us wanted to make them, there was no complex coding in our futures. My friend wanted to own a small independent shop, similar to the one we sat in, selling video games. I wanted to write reviews of them in a magazine like MegaTech. This was a few years before we would even hear about the Internet. So, print was the only option for someone who wanted to talk about games without going on GamesMaster with Dominik Diamond to do it.

Eighteen years later, with a varied and largely unsuccessful employment history behind me, here I am. Writing about video games to a huge audience. I’ve arrived at my dream, right? How do I deal with that? Well, sometimes I feel like giving up. It’s a stark admission, and one which might seem alarming to a number of people but it’s the truth.

You’ve probably all seen many of us say how difficult it is to run a website, on many different occasions. You might think that this is due to the workload, the constant struggle and internal debate about tone and content or the years it takes to grind your way towards any possibility of payment for your craft. In part, that’s true but I do those things happily because that’s what I dreamt about while perched on the windowsill of a game rental store eighteen years ago. For me, the difficulty lies somewhere else entirely.

I don’t like people. It’s nothing personal, I don’t have a particular reason or excuse for being awkward with other humans, I just can’t really interact in person. It’s not a simple case of not being a “people person” either. The prospect of meeting new people makes me feel physically ill in my stomach, it makes my head spin. I have anxiety attacks rather than phone someone I don’t know. Once, I pulled out of a decent new job the day before I was supposed to start and spent three days shaking and crying and not talking to anyone. I had myself a little breakdown and I’m still recovering from it years later.

So, for me, the hardest part of working on this website is the interaction I have with other people. It’s odd that the thing I love doing – the writing – is now vastly overshadowed, in terms of how much time I can give it, by the thing that I’m almost physically incapable of doing – managing people. I receive and respond to dozens of emails every day and my inbox backlog is still growing. I constantly talk to new contributors and potential news gatherers and I do my best to keep up with the Community Team and fulfil all of our competition commitments.

Much of my time working on the website is now spent doing things that the majority of readers won’t notice. I tidy up articles and features in between Lee, Dan and Kris’ valuable efforts. I make images and gather screenshots. I change formatting on features and organise review coverage. I talk to PR representatives and arrange for competitions, previews, assets and review code. I try to watch over as much of the community interaction as I can. I balance speed with quality and I try to insulate conflicting personalities so that things run smoothly.

I miss writing more than I can find words to explain. But if I didn’t do all of these things then who would? So I do it, sometimes having to force myself to face my own craziness and sometimes finding another route to the result.

I’m incredibly lucky to be surrounded by some of the most hardworking and talented people in this industry. Lee is driven and has a keen eye for detail. Dan is dependable, fast and talented. Kris is engaging and approachable. The News Team are unbelievably hard working and our list of contributors all have an individuality, a spirit that is hard to find. Of course, Alex is a personal inspiration, the only reason I still work at TSA. I’ve never known anyone as knowledgeable or hard working as him and even though he has dialled back his involvement to some PR duties and the site design and coding, he still puts in far too much time doing those things better than anyone else around.

You see, running a website is a team game. Without a strong team of core staff, support staff and contributors, it would be impossible to deliver the quantity of free content that we do. It just happens that at this time, I’m needed to do the support work rather than the stuff I love to do. That’s something I have to contend with, in spite of my own insecurities, because it’s what this team needs right now.

Recently, I was explaining to a distant relative what it was that I do. I said that I write news and opinion about video games for a website. They asked if that was like a magazine and after a moment’s thought I told them it was kind of like making a monthly magazine but putting it out three times a week and having a conversation with the readers while you did it.

When you stop to think about it, there really is an immense amount of content going up on TheSixthAxis. Every word of it is worked hard over but ultimately, I think, it’s worth the stress, the worry and the anxiety. It’s worth the difficulties because, as I often need to remind myself, this was my dream.

Note: I realise that this blog has been quite self indulgent so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who works with me, either presently or in the past. I am a very small part of this site and I respect all the other staff members more than I could successfully impart. I also recognise that it’s the active community that make it feel worthwhile so I’d like to thank you guys too.