Two Years of Big Nerd Gaming

Two years ago today, I wrote my first blog post for Big Nerd Gaming. In that post, I talked about why I was starting this blog.

While I didn’t want to go into massive detail at the time, there’s always been a bit of a hole in my heart when I’m not writing or “producing content” in some sort of way. When I was six years old, my favorite show was SportsCenter, and I liked to pretend to be an anchor on the show with my parents. When I was ten years old, I was making newsletters about classroom events and distributing them to my class. I also was one of a few people responsible for reading school announcements to the entire school each morning in elementary school. When I started posting on GameFAQs when I was 13, I almost immediately started posting (bad) reviews for games that I played to the website. When I was 15, I was the youngest person on my high school newspaper. I also tried starting a gaming blog during college (it was called “Shiny Buttons” and pretty short lived), and I actually hosted a podcast in college that was centered around a GameFAQs message board I was on at the time.

When you look at that, I’m sure you can imagine that my entire goal in life was to be a journalist/media person of some sort. Literally from childhood, I had teachers telling my parents that I could be a journalist, and writing/speaking to a camera was genuinely fun and fulfilling for me. There’s something about writing in particular that just tickles me. I view each post that I write kind of like an open ended puzzle. Finding a way to put all of the pieces together is a challenge that I relish every time. And being able to put it out into the world and seeing people react to it is always gratifying.

Breaking News: Old Professors Might Not Always Be With The Times

However, we aren’t all destined to do what we love the most. After a few years in journalism school in college, I realized that I may not be cut out to actually work in the field. First off, journalism is a lot more than just writing. There’s a lot of reporting involved too. This isn’t a big deal in a high school newspaper, when the stakes tend to be low, but once you get to the real stuff, it’s not so easy. A lot of journalism involves holding the powerful to account. There’s a lot of chasing people down who may not want to be talked to and asking them questions that they don’t want to answer. This wasn’t always easy for me, as I’m not someone eager for that kind of confrontation. I also always had a hard time with interviews, because back in the mid-2000s, I was mostly expected to handwrite the answers that various interview subjects were giving me. I really didn’t want to misquote someone, and it’s hard to write someone’s answer down, be accurate, have clean handwriting, and maintain an actual conversation. It made a lot of interviews very awkward and stressful for me. Unfortunately, I also had some tech-phobic professors who thought recorders were unwise to use, as they could potentially break and then you’d lose everything.

While I was dealing with some professors who were perhaps a bit too old school, the entire media landscape was also changing as more and more people were relying on the internet. I had a hard time even finding an unpaid internship when I was in college because there was so much competition for so few slots. It wasn’t long after I started journalism school that newspapers began to bleed jobs. The industry has lost 26% of its workforce since I went to college, and many of those jobs have gotten harder with less pay. It was becoming obvious to me, even in school, that finding a job in journalism would not be an easy task.

I had spent my entire life chasing one goal and one dream, and I had slowly come to realize that I wouldn’t be able to get there. I had no backup plan. I had never even envisioned another life path for myself. It was a depressing time in my life. Being so sure of something your entire life and then watching it slip away is difficult to cope with. It took me years after I abandoned my journalism dream to feel like myself again.

Eventually, my life finally came together. I found a good career, met the woman of my dreams, and got married. About six years ago, after almost a decade of not doing any sort of real “content creation,” I started a soccer podcast with some friends that actually did pretty well. Sadly, it faded out after I moved away from the area where I started it. The few years where I did that podcast re-ignited a spark in me that had been a bit dormant. I had a blast doing the show, and people told me that I was good at it, much like I heard a lot when I was younger and did other projects.

Seriously, I Wish The Blog Was Here When Chained Echoes Dropped. I Would Not Have Shut Up About It

When that podcast died out, I felt a bit of that same hole in me that I recalled from the past, when I originally stopped writing and podcasting. But I really couldn’t dwell on that anymore. I had a baby on the way, and sure enough, I felt a bit too busy and overwhelmed to even contemplate doing any of those things as a hobby while trying to get through each day of caring for my little one.

Each day when I get home from work, I’m almost immediately doing something in regards to my kids, be it getting them ready for bed, cleaning the house, or playing with them. On my days off, it’s usually an early rise and figuring out what the heck I’m going to do to keep them from losing their minds with boredom. It’s easy to get trapped in a cycle of repetition and survival as a parent.

As I’ve been on this wonderful and at times challenging journey of parenthood, I’ve slowly come to an important realization. While I am a father, and it is now a large factor in my identity, it will not always be quite as large of a part of my identity as it is today. One day, my kids will be older and much more independent. They will do many more things on their own. One day, they will move out. As important as being a parent is, I think it’s equally important not to completely lose sight of who you are outside of that, because eventually, you will need to rediscover life without kids all over again. Not to mention, I think finding fulfilling hobbies outside of parenthood can enhance being a parent in a variety of ways, especially when you can share those things that you love with your child.

Eventually, I became internet friends (and now I’d say real life friends) with a guy named Paul. We happened upon each other on Twitter, and he was a fellow Metro Detroit dad who loved video games. But Paul took it one step further: he was actually writing about games for various publications and his own blog, while still being a working father of three kids.

Seeing Paul do this lit a fire inside of me once again. If Paul could do what he does while being a busy lawyer and having three kids, why couldn’t I do it with (at the time) one child? At that point, parenthood was getting a bit easier, from both adjusting to it and my child getting a bit older.

That fire burned even hotter at the end of 2023 when I played a game called Astral Ascent. I thought the game was incredible. I thought it was the best roguelike that I had played since Hades. And yet, not one gaming podcast or publication that I followed was talking about it at all. I had dealt with similar frustrations the year prior when a game called Chained Echoes had blown my mind. I would occasionally tweet my gaming thoughts, and I’d post my top 10 list at the end of each year on my personal Facebook page, but I’d be lucky to get much more than a dozen pity likes on those lists. Any time I talked about gaming on the internet, I was mostly talking to a digital wall.

Finally, I took the plunge. I started the blog and wrote that initial “about me” post. I set a schedule that required consistent writing but that I didn’t think would overtax me (I’m lucky to be a pretty fast writer), and while I of course check my numbers, I made a vow that I couldn’t do this if it ever bugged me that no one read my stuff. I could not do this if every dip in readership would bother me. These were both very important promises and goals for myself, and they are why I’m still doing this two years later.

The funny thing about this blog is that while in some ways it’s harder for me to maintain than it ever would have been in the past because I’m so much busier than ever before, I actually don’t know if I had the skill set to do it the way I do until now. Being a parent really forces you to level up your “discipline” stat, and I’m much more efficient and just able to power through way more than I ever was in the past. You genuinely have no idea how much free time you used to have until you become a parent, and now I am beyond determined not to waste one minute of that time.

Thank You For 2 Years And Nearly 12K Views In One Month

I think that discipline has paid off and then some. Last month, the blog broke 10K views in one month for the first time ever. Considering I’m just one person writing two times a week, I think that is pretty freaking cool. I’ve also been able to start a monthly podcast, which is averaging about 200 listeners an episode between YouTube and Spotify. This is also way more than I ever could have imagined two years ago. However, I will never let myself get down if those views drop significantly, because I know now more than ever that when I’m not doing this, something is missing. I do this because I think this is good for me first and foremost, and I think that has to be any content creator’s main reason for jumping into this. I have no delusions of doing this for a living or of ever getting particularly important in the gaming space. There are thousands of people more talented and with bigger followings than me. Even if I were struggling to get 10 readers a post, I’d still do this. Once again, I think if you are going to do something like this, that has to be your mentality.

But man, the fact that so many of you have followed along on this journey sure makes it a lot more fun. I love posting articles, ranks, and reviews and seeing people react. It means the world to me every time. So as much as I made this longwinded post a lore dump, I also want to use it to genuinely thank anyone reading this for any click, comment, or any support at all that they’ve given me over the past two years. I would love my life as it is either way, but this blog gives me something extra to get excited about two times a week, and as a parent, that’s the kind of shit you need to help get through each week.

I can’t wait to continue this ride with all of you. Thank you for following along and being here. Here’s to many more years to come!