Press (Re)Start

Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe it’s the constant state of crisis that’s been underlying everything. Maybe I’ve changed — my standards, my needs, my perspective. Whatever the reason, it’s been hard for me to write much of anything for a while now.

I think I’ve grown a lot in the past couple years, and I try to remind myself of that when I can. Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve gotten my mental health largely under control, started exercising regularly, took my first real steps into the games industry, made a lot of new friends (many of them writers and designers in video games, who have been delightful), and moved into my own place in a (sort of) new city. Much of it has to do with circumstances beyond my control, so I can’t take all the credit, but regardless— I feel stronger and more confident than I think I ever have. Yet with growing confidence comes an ever greater creeping doubt.

Making the transition from being an “aspiring” something on the outside of an industry or culture, to an actual something on the inside, can be thrilling and magical. Your dreams feel more real and attainable than they ever have, and suddenly you’re surrounded by people who understand the value of things you long felt only you understood. It’s an amazing gift, to find your community. But that transition comes with its own challenges. Rarely are you ever the most knowledgeable person in the room, or the most practiced and skilled. Impostor syndrome hits hard. There’s no doubt in my mind that privilege was a major factor for me to end up where I have, but then I wonder — was that all it was? Do I actually deserve to be here? What if one day everyone wakes up and thinks, “wait, what’s he doing here?”

I think about all the incredible people I’ve met in the last two years: the ones with extraordinary talent, the ones with a razor-sharp image of where they want to be or what they want to create, the ones with decades of experience already under their belts, and all of them thoughtful and generous. I feel incredibly lucky to find myself among them, and honestly honored that I’ve been trusted to help guide and teach them, even in a small way. And yet these fortunate circumstances have made me even more scared to make things and put my work out there. I have over 70 unfinished blog posts in my drafts, multiple games I started making and abandoned, and plenty of other ideas and ambitions soured by my fear that they simply won’t be good enough, or that I won’t be good enough to execute on them. You’d assume that someone hired to help run a class on game writing would be good at game writing, right? I feel like I need to live up to people’s faith in me, or at least their perceptions of me, as someone bestowed with a modicum of authority. I feel like anything I make has to be impressive. It all feeds my unfortunate perfectionist tendencies, and makes me scared to show people what I am—a kid who just likes video games and doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

But even if that’s all true, and people’s expectations of me are crushingly high, I have to remind myself: I’m still new here. I did have to work hard to get here. And the quality of my work has been good enough that I’ve been deemed worth keeping around —it’s why I’ve been entrusted with this community and this class, something wonderful and worth cultivating. My being here was not, at least entirely, a fluke.

So here I am: forcing myself to start writing again. In all likelihood I’ll end up creating some real garbage. But if I’m ever going to get better, I have to try, and accept that making stuff that sucks is part of the process of making things that don’t.

In case you’ve somehow made it here without knowing who I am: Hi! I’m Jack. By night I’m a writer and aspiring narrative designer, and since mid-2020 my day job has been helping to build and run a series of online classes teaching people how to write stories for video games. This blog/newsletter is where I put all my personal non-fiction writing, most of which is about video games but sometimes branches out into reflections on mental health or whatever weird thing is occupying my brain space that week. My current plan is to try and publish one post a week, starting with my (long-overdue) reflections on all the games I played in 2021. If for some reason that sounds interesting to you, come along!