This is my fall back plan: 2013

Friday 8 November 2013

Recent writings

I'm not doing a very good job of sticking to my plan of updating this blog with occasional personal essays splattered amongst worklog posts. I'll get there eventually, I guess, but for now let's play some catch up.

Features

I've had four reported features published since the end of July. There was a big story on Polygon the people trying to make video games accessible to the blind, and the blind gamers who stand to benefit. Then I had a piece on the efforts to preserve Australia and New Zealand's video game heritage, with the wonderful State Library of Victoria and a cool project called Play It Again cited.

I had wanted to write for ages about a community of fans of the soccer/football management game Championship Manager 01/02 that still obsesses over it more than a decade later. In early October, I got my chance with my debut piece for Eurogamer.

And just this week I got my fourth Polygon story published — a lengthy profile of Melbournian Steve Fawkner, a 30-year game development veteran who had two big hits (Warlords and Puzzle Quest) 18 years apart.

Stepping Up

Eurogamer wasn't the only place I broke into contributing to over the past few months. I also got a story published on leading tech publication MIT Technology Review, writing about a cool project that lets blind people interact with a camera worn around their neck through hand gestures. It helps them understand their surroundings, identifying people, objects, colors, and distance.

Mac|Life

I'm contributing more regularly to Mac|Life now. There are a couple of things I've written for the magazine coming up in the next few months, plus loads of reviews and galleries (lists). Here's my output since the end of July:

AppStorm

I phased out my involvement with the Web and Mac sections of AppStorm (the last couple of Mac posts are mixed in below), but I'm still very much a contributor to the Android coverage. Big pieces from the past few months include a review/interview combo on the MOGA Pocket game controller, two mega roundups, and a review of the iRig audio gear for Android and iPad.

Archive.vg/MacScene

I haven't had much time for the hobby gigs (a far cry from when I was able to do lengthy features and off-beat news reporting), but I still managed to do my regular emulation news roundup on MacScene and to get a few experimental game reviews on Archive. Hoping to get a new game diary going soon. (Here's a link to the last one.) Below is all the Archive stuff.

Great Long-Form Writing About Video Games in July (I've cancelled this column because it was too much work for too little reward)
Up Up Down Down Left Write Shows You What it Takes to Be A Freelance Games Journalist
From the Archive: Payback
From The Archive: Where’s Waldo?

Saturday 21 September 2013

Blind games

It’s been a month and a half since this was published, but I wanted to talk a bit about my Polygon feature on games for the blind. Because the people involved in that community are incredible.

I came up with the basic idea in a brainstorming session. “Playing with blindness/playing blind,” I wrote in my notebook, right in the middle of the list. (None of the other items on there have turned into a pitch…yet.) It stuck with me. I ran it by my mum — usually a good metric for stories with broad appeal. She didn’t like it. But I kept thinking about it, because my instincts screamed there’s something in the idea.

Then I started digging, and boy was I impressed. I found Brandon Cole, a blind gamer who for years has run a website for other blind gamers interested in the big console releases that sighted people take for granted. I discovered the amazing world of audio games, which I had previously thought started and stopped with BlindSide. I read about Guitar Hero and Rock Band haptic modifications that were designed to open those games up to the visually impaired.

The more I looked, the more I was blown away by the passion of blind gamers and the community trying to service them. And nobody was telling their story — not at any scale, at least. So I picked out half a dozen narrative threads that I thought would serve as a compelling introduction to the field, came up with a hook to tie them all together ("Meet the people trying to make games accessible to the blind and partial-sighted, and the gamers who stand to benefit"), and wrote up a pitch for Russ Pitts, the Features Editor at Polygon. It was a longer pitch than I’d normally write on this kind of article — about 350 words — but I was angling for a big word count and I had a lot of threads to describe.

Russ said, quite simply, “I love this story.” And asked how I felt about 5,000 words with a particular deadline. Two-and-a-bit weeks later, I had 30,000 words worth of interview transcripts — nearly a third of which came from my interviews with the stars of the show, Brandon Cole and Liam Erven — and a completed draft. How I managed to compress all that stuff into a cohesive story is beyond me, but I did.

I was personally delighted with how I managed to get the human angle across, showing, with a lot of help from my subjects, that blind people are just people who can’t see — and they have lots of interests and multi-faceted personalities, just like sighted folks.

And the feedback has been tremendous. I’ve had emails and tweets to thank me for writing it. The comments were all lovely, and many expanded the story. One person told me it wouldn’t be out of place in a science journal, since it was so thorough and in-depth. I’m getting all sorts of random contacts. And, most importantly, developers are taking notice. I saw over a dozen tweets from game developers about the article. Some were thinking about designing an audio game; others had their minds opened to a disadvantaged portion of their audience. Here’s hoping this helps lead to change.

Please read it, if you haven’t already. And share it around.

For my part, I’ll be pushing to cover games and tech accessibility — not just for the visually impaired, but everyone —whenever and wherever I can. I’m shopping a few stories around at the moment, and I’m on the lookout for more. Editors: if you’re keen on an accessibility-related feature, hit me up. Other folks: If you have leads, or if you are doing something cool in the field, let me know. It doesn't have to be about games. I’ll do what I can.

Sunday 25 August 2013

The birth of Kenya's games industry and other July articles

I meant to write this a few weeks ago, but I’ve been busy moving house, keeping up on assignments, and getting my workload back to full time (which I'm now happy to say is becoming the norm — I only eased off because of the move).

I had a busy month in July, with PAX Australia, my first hardware review (I'll discuss that in my August roundup), and a big feature story all happening at once. I also got to see two very special articles published.

One was on a guy called Tom Koska, who I like to think of as Typewriter Tom (I’ve seen him described elsewhere as “Tom the typewriter man”, but mine has more pizzazz). Tom fixes typewriters for a living, or at least he used to. Now semi-retired, he lives above his shop and only opens it by request — repairing and servicing typewriters for people from all around Melbourne (and sometimes beyond).

I shared his story in a piece called Carriage Return for the excellent iPad publication The Magazine. I also explored the so-called typewriter resurgence, and wondered at my own attraction to the mechanical beasts.

The other was a rather lengthy report on the birth of Kenya’s games industry, starring Wesley Kirinya of Leti Games/Leti Arts and Nathan Masyuko of NexGen Ltd — with a few others, including the very nice gentlemen at University of Games, holding support roles. It’s a wonderful story of people driven by their passions to achieve the impossible, like how Kirinya made a crude African Tomb Raider rip-off and got it distributed online and in local stores, despite the absence of reliable (or speedy) Internet access in the country at the time.

It’s also a story that I lucked my way into. I got an email back at the end of January from Blaise Kinyua asking me to take a look at the pre-release version of his company’s first game. I thought Election Thief was an interesting idea (and I ended up reviewing it), but I was more taken by the fact that these guys were making a game in Kenya — where as far as I knew there was no games industry.

I pitched a story on them to Russ Pitts at Polygon, scribbling in a note at the last minute that I’d also be interested in doing a larger piece on Kenya’s emerging industry (my due process research indicated that there are other developers in the country) if he’d prefer. Then I waited. A few days later, Russ asked for more information on the latter idea. I did my research and fired back a new pitch. And I waited again. A couple of weeks later, after a quick follow-up reminder, Russ greenlit the story. We agreed on a March 18 deadline, and Russ looked into the possibility of including it in the Human Angle video series. That didn’t work out, and my story got bumped around in the schedule for a while.

But it finally saw the light of day on July 3rd, and boy was it worth the wait. I’m super happy with the final product. Judging by the reception I’ve seen in the comments, on Twitter, and around the web, so is everyone else. Wesley Kirinya told me that it’s particularly made waves in Africa, which I think is just awesome.

All in all, I had 17 articles published in July. The other highlights for me were the five PAX Australia stories I put together for Mac|Life — my first bit of convention coverage — and a gallery I wrote up that highlights 10 iOS apps for the blind and partially sighted (also on Mac|Life).

In no particular order, here are all the links:

I’ll be writing a separate post soon to talk about my big August-published feature, Blind Games: The next battleground in accessibility. Then I’ll roundup my August writings not long after.

Thursday 23 May 2013

Still Alive, Still Writing

So with Posterous gone, I’ve moved my personal blog here. I had to import each entry manually, which is tedious enough that a few of the posts didn’t make it over—basically everything from last year, and I think maybe also one thing from 2010. All of the personal essays are up, though.

I’m still writing; doing it for a living now. Well, trying. My income isn’t consistent enough to live off at the moment, but I’m getting closer. Actually, I’m branching out.

I had been writing only about games and apps, and the people who make them. But that was never my intention as a writer. I want to write about anything and everything that interests me, so I’m spreading my wings and expanding my horizons. I’m working on getting freelance gigs covering technology, history, science, culture, sport, film, travel, general lifestyle topics, and, of course, games.

I hope to focus on long-form journalism, with a smattering of shorter stuff and non-journalism gigs on the side. And I’d love to do some editing or subediting—technically, I already do, between Archive.vg and helping friends or people on the internet, but I mean for money.

For the past two months I have spent every spare second researching the market, trying to figure out what’s in demand that I can provide and where I can pitch long-form ideas for good pay. There’s still loads more research to do, but right now I'm easing my foot off the pedal to read the publications that weren’t on my list before until I feel confident I know their style and tone well enough to nail my first pitch.

Then I'll redouble my research efforts (probably at a slower rate because the work I get from that will make me busier), then focus on just reading to really master the tone and perspective, then rinse and repeat—over and again until I know every writing market that I feel I could succeed in.

Wish me luck.

I have a couple of cool features coming up—one gaming-related and one not. The gaming one is a biggie (5,000 words), covering a topic that should have broad appeal. The non-gaming one is shorter, but I’m excited about it because it’s something totally new to me—new outlet and new subject matter. I’ll post about both here and everywhere else when they’re published.

As for other stuff, I’m not dancing as often as I’d like; looking to rectify that sooner rather than later. I haven’t finished any routines—although I’ve started several—since the deeply-personal 2010 production effort (described in this essay). Trying to make more time for sketching and music, too. I was way too focused on one thing last year, and started to forget who I am as a result.

I’m a writer, a dancer, a musician, an artist, and a person interested in the world around him. Most of all, I’m me. And I will resume intermittent blogging of personal essays and things that don’t fit anywhere, starting now. This is still my fall back plan; I make it up as I go.