Starting my substack
Why am I here? What will I be doing? What do I want to achieve?
I have been part of several different types of communities over my nearly 40 years and most recently I re-discovered video games when I got a steam deck in March 2024 and wanted to find my types of gamers. The initial problem I had was that I just thought there was a “First person shooter”-gamer and an everything else gamer. Oh how wrong was I!? What type of gamer am I?
A bit of everything. It is probably easier to list what I don’t play. In general I don’t play:
first person shooters
racing games (apart from Mario Kart)
visual novels
JRPGs - maybe I haven’t met the right one but I tried a handful of the final fantasy ones and I didn't get into any of them *shocked face*
Genres I have thoroughly enjoyed so far this year:
platformers
dungeon crawlers
farming sims
metroidvanias
RPGs
soulslike (This was a huge surprise to everyone who knows me, but Elden ring changed me)
roguelike
Who am I?
I am a woman in my late 30s, a tech professional and mother to 4 ferrets. We live in the Southeast of England, and did start my career in video games over 15 years ago.
I grew up playing on the original Nintendo GameBoy and Sega Megadrive. This has given me a love for pixel art and 2D side scroller games. Those type of games are definitely my comfy games and 3D games used to scare me. In real life I have a terrible sense of direction and turns out this translates to video games also. Haha!
Other consoles I have gamed on regularly are the Playstation 3, 4 and 5 as well as the Nintendo GameBoy Colour, Advanced, 3Ds, Wii and Switch.
English is my second language, and I love to travel and drink coffee.
Gaming journey journal
On this platform, I want to share my journey through the industry as a gamer but also as someone who started their career in video games and being on the outside looking in a bit (I have also recently been interviewing for roles but we all know that the industry is struggling).
Where I live, there are a few small studios and many creative people and I have an ambition to organise events to bring people together, which is something I used to do for other professionals.
In terms of the type of content I’ll be posting think adhoc reviews, monthly lists of games I tried and completed, and sharing video gaming content I enjoyed, as well as information about events I have attended. I want to connect with people, share and learn. This means I may not stick to a schedule for now, but be more organic.
I was inspired to try substack because I found it hard to find other older, casual and relaxed gamers on the, to me, usual social media places.
What have I tried:
Twitter / X - the platform has changed so much since I used it for my professional networking over 15 years ago - I now no longer use it
Instagram - a lot of set up influencers, cozy looks, and I found it hard to chat to people - notes on here has already been more enjoyable
Threads - people are hyping up the Gamer Threads tag and how nice and welcoming it is. My feed is definitely less toxic than Twitter / X but engagement is really low (I don’t mean with my posts but even just replying to people)
Wordpress - I briefly started to write a blog but found it overwhelming (This might not end up any different)
Youtube - I am finding it difficult to find content created by anyone else but a man - this is also the algorithm working against me I am sure
Twitch - I gave this a go as a viewer and I think I am too old
TikTok - definitely too old - my brain does not work in short format videos
So next I thought I’d give substack a go because I do like writing. English is my second language, and I am not literary genius, but I enjoy putting my thoughts to paper to process them and connect with people through the written word. I look forward to reading all the gaming related posts here and I hope you like my style in the future too.
Welcome to GameStack!! There's lots of us here!
As a fellow gamer of a younger age, I look forward to following and seeing your substack journey!