I left two comments on a blog post by Eric Swain the other day. In his post, he was trying to bring some transparency to the process of curating the This Week in Video Game Blogging list that is put out by Critical Distance — notably this post. After going through his struggles filling in for Kris Ligman on short notice, the problems trying to put something together in just a few days and having limited resource to do all those things, he felt he had to present his reasons and trials in putting together the post.

He mentioned that the editors “were debating what exactly TWIVGB and Critical Distance are for, or rather what their direction is.” Clarifying that thought, he said:

“The short of it was, none of us knew or were quite on the same page. Critical Distance had some vague ideals of archiving and pointing out good critical pieces because the community was scattered and disparate, not even knowing the other end of the sphere existed. All of this was way back in ’08. Now 4 years later we haven’t defined it much beyond that. Each element being trial and error.”

That was what caused me to leave the first comment. I’m suspicious of Critical Distance and TWIVGB. And, after saying as much, Eric replied saying, “I’d be more interested in hearing about your previous doubts and your doubts now. We are on the inside and are clueless to how this is all viewed. We can only guess.”

And so, as you can imagine, I left an even longer comment detailing, I hoped, why I was worried about the power that TWIVGB wields and what my own personal journey has been like within the video game blogging space.

The long and short of it is that I’ve been on the peripheral of the video game blogging community for many years now. I can remember, since I was following their blogs at the time, back when many people who are game designers now were just bloggers then. I can remember when other people, who are now getting paid to write, were just posting random articles and thoughts they had that day. I have been following some blogs for years now and, if you were to just look at my own archives, I have been posting things here since 2007 — yes, this blog is nearly five years old.

That's me in the middle. Yup, that is the same picture I now use as my avatar in many places too.

Back in May of 2010, I got two other friends together and we recorded our first pilot episode of what would eventually become the @Play (At Play) podcast. We decided, after that first session, to invest in microphones, a soundboard and arrange our schedules so that we could record every week. And, over the following months, we found hosting on a site and started to slowly build up an audience. We liked what we were doing and thought, perhaps naivety, that others would too.

During our run of a little over a year from May 2010 to August 2011, we recorded 50 episodes. We interviewed Shawn Andrich (Gamers with Jobs); Leigh Alexander (Sexy Videogameland); Chris Furniss and Jinny Koh (The Weekly Geek); Scott Juster and Jorge Albor (Experience Points) and Jenn Frank (Infinite Lives). We had a Twitter account. We had plans of doing cross-over episodes with other podcasts.

That podcast is dead. I could go into why it stopped, how much work it became to manage (mostly for me) and the fact that we were dropped from the site we were on for budget reasons. I could even go into what lessons I learned and how everyone we interviewed was pleasent both on- and off-air.

For right now, I want to make the point that I have interacted with and even spoken to many of the respected members of the video game blogging community in the past. I’ve even had e-mail conversations with many more people who, if I could get a chance to do it in the future, I would love to interview and pick their brains about things.

I’ve been around for a long time now. But, as I mentioned in that second comment and is definitely the case with this blog, I’m not known. It’s that last point that has become extremely frustrating to me. From my point of view, I have had to keep saying again and again what my credentials are and why anyone should care what I think and say. I have to keep proving myself over and over and over. I had to write for a year straight before I even showed up on TWIVGB!

That’s why I am suspicious of TWIVGB. It is, not unlike Metacritic, the ruler by which material is measured in this space. The editors there, for better or worse, are the judges of what articles and posts hundreds if not thousands of people will look at and discuss the next week. They are the gatekeepers for this space. To matter at all, you must be on the list. To have a voice, you must continue to appear over and over.

It’s that last point that is the most frustrating to me. My local friends don’t talk about video games much anymore. Even when we had the podcast, we only talked about what we had been playing, with me perpetually the “Jake Rodkin” (i.e. making games and not playing them) of our ‘cast too. I was a student then and I’m still one now. I can’t afford the latest games. I don’t talk about what is upcoming. I talk about what I have and, when I get new games, I talk about them then.

If I look at TWIVGB as capturing the current conversations, I won’t be among them. I’m not part of the zeitgeist. And, as it has been the last few months, I’m getting to everything late. I’m not known and, because of that, I can’t find a conversation or a place to fit into that model. I don’t have that local conversation anymore and I have tried — and often failed — to strike it up with many others using e-mail, Twitter and blog posts. I want to talk about video games with people and, outside Twitter, I can’t find a place to join or a community to be a part of.

I know this is less uplifting than I usually try to be. It’s also a great deal more information about my past than I usually give out too. But, I’m frustrated at where I am right now. Every time I think I have a chance to get step forward, I get pushed back. When I think I have finally settled into a role, I find out I was missing out on something. When I think I might finally be able to freely spend time analyzing and writing about games, I get pulled back down.

Are you talking about… ? Oh. No, I see. Yeah… days ago. That conversation has moved on, huh? And… ? Yes. Okay. You don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do you mind if I… ? Oh. Okay. No, I understand. It’s cool.