I love making comics. I enjoy obsessively playing video
games. I like writing so much, I often have a stupid grin on my face while I'm typing
at my computer. And I relish any opportunity to discuss video games.
So why did the prospect of writing another in-depth review
of a video game derail my motivation so much that I had to take a lengthy
hiatus from my creative endeavors?
Perhaps it's my straight-forward approach to the subject
matter. I set out to avoid the snarky writing that's a staple of the internet
era. As a result, I wrote reviews that were devoid of much excitement. I don't
regret taking my reviews seriously, but maybe it was too much against my
nature.
I always struggled with the level of information I included
when drafting a simple game analysis. I know it's not my job to explain every
feature in a game, but was I giving enough info to justify why I love or hate
it so much? Do I need to spell out every aspect of a funky new multiplayer mode
if I'm just going to dismiss the addition with a written shrug? I'm naturally
long-winded in my writing; brevity is something I've awkwardly attempted to
juggle for years, usually failing spectacularly. These reviews brought out the
worst case of rambling I've contracted in a long while. For every sentence of
information I added, I felt I needed two more to be consistently thorough in my
reporting. This caused a seemingly endless loop of revisions to rearrange
earlier paragraphs now that I had decided to expand on concepts I had already
touched upon.
This process dragged out the writing process so much that it
became the main source of delays in my comics. I could play a video game, be
inspired for a comic idea, draw the full comic and then... it would sit there.
The process of arranging my thoughts into a complete and somewhat-concise
review sometimes took longer than all the other steps combined. Often the
looming dread of having to organize my thoughts would be enough to stutter my
creative impulses, to make me not even want to play games. It just had to stop.
I had to stop.
So that's where I stopped. But I miss the comics. I started
drawing Those Games We Play as a way to fuse my passions of playing games and
making comics. And I'm going to return to making the comics, and they'll
remain focused on games like they always
have been. But the full length reviews are out. I'm sticking with the 3-4
sentence blurb reviews that accompany the comic strip, but none of the
over-long blog types. That's definitely not to say I'm out of the rambling-blog
business, far from it! I have a lot of video game related topics to passionately
babble on about. Especially with the Next Generation of consoles arriving next
week. I want to reflect back upon the last few years of gaming, about lessons
learned, about changes to my gaming habits, and about my hopes for a bright,
glimmering future. From time to time I may even write something that
essentially an in-depth review, but only when I'm emotionally invested in the
subject and not just because it's my routine.
