It feels like ages since I’ve sat down and written anything publicly about games – partly because an internet mob rose up a few years ago and started trying to destroy the lives of anyone who wrote things about games they didn’t agree with, partly because of some Real Life Stuff that left me too tired to think for about a year and a half, and partly because I’ve spent most of this time playing just three or four different games. Thanks to the industry’s current focus on metrics, I can deep-dive into my gameplay stats and put some KPIs on this last point – in the last three years, I’ve spent about 200 hours playing GTA Online, 400 hours playing Destiny, and 600 hours playing various iterations of Monster Hunter.
I had a lot of doubts about starting a new blog when I’ve had so little to say lately, but instead of wallowing in my poor track record I’ve decided to view this as a springboard for changing my habits. I made a resolution at the start of the year to spend less time playing endless grind-fests and more time dipping into short, finite games, and – hopefully – knocking a few old things off my list of shame. So far? Mixed results. I finished Bayonetta 2 and got the super-secret reverse vampire ending of The Witness, but I did also spent two solid months grinding PvP achievements in Destiny in order to earn the right to buy a (not particularly appealing) t-shirt.
The main thing is that over this summer, between the Midnight Resistance Phantasy Star Online marathon in June and the release of Destiny 2 next month, I challenged myself to spend less time playing games and more time doing things in real life – visiting friends, exercising regularly, reading books, and so on. It’s been awful. Still, I do feel like I’ve shaken off a few cobwebs and got some of my mojo back, so here we are.
Stunlock’s goal is to serve up mature writing about videogames, without wasting your time.
One thing that’s become clear to me as I slide into my thirties is that I absolutely do not have time to keep up with everything going on in the world, even just within the sphere of videogames – there’s an unfathomable number of games coming out each week, I am slowly being buried beneath a pile of unread books on game design, there are lifetimes worth of podcasts out there I don’t have time to listen to, and I could name a dozen different eSport titles I wish I could afford to care about. As a starting point I’d like to try and chew through some of this stuff and present it in a format that can fit into your life – essentially the same kind of stuff I’ve been writing for years, but with a bit more focus on brevity.
We have a Patreon. Our running costs are negligible, but if people want to throw some money our way, it means we’ll have a budget with which to pay contributors, fund any funny ideas we have, and perhaps even pay for the odd game. I went back and forth over the idea of taking people’s money during the Midnight Resistance years, but what settled it for me when I realised we had a lot of great people offering to write articles for us, and we had almost nothing to offer them in return. At the time of writing there are no plans for any secret backer incentives or anything like that – the whole site will be available free for anyone who wants to read it, and the only extra feature you’ll get from supporting us is a vague sense of guilt for enabling my ongoing breakdown.
We have a Twitter account, which we’ll mostly be using to tweet out information about new articles and stuff. We’re on Twitch, but don’t expect much streaming until the local council sort out a fibre connection to my town (still many months away, I gather). I’m hoping to get a podcast going, but I also have a lot of fussy demands about what it should be like which makes that whole process difficult. Oh, and I’d like to set up some kind of mailing list through which I can send out monthly round-ups of everything new on the site (and perhaps any interesting stuff that caught our eye on other sites), but it didn’t seem worth setting that up until there was something to put in it.
That’s it. That’s everything. You can stop reading now.
