Dec 16

Dec 16 Elizabeth Henges Is Moving On and Moving Fast | Winter Spectacular 2021

2020 was a difficult year. Beyond difficult really. 2020 felt like it was all about survival–just get to the end of the year. And finding anything to get you through the days and that was it.

2021 was, unfortunately, not much of a better year. This past year was definitely a different brand of difficult, though. The pandemic is still raging, but 2021 is more about adapting to and accepting what will be our reality for the foreseeable future. It's about learning how to protect yourself as best as you can, while still trying to live some semblance of a life.

This last year for me has been strange, to say the least. I started the year with a job, lost it, and got a new one within a great company, full of great people. But, what might have really shaped my year the most were the three months where I was back in the freelancing game.

From March to June, I was finally able to write about games again, or so I told myself. I had thought I missed games journalism and now I could write about any game I wanted again, new or old. I started pitching, writing, doing what I could to cobble together an income. However, I didn’t rekindle an old passion, instead, I started burning out. Hard.

Writing about video games is pretty easy to view as a dream job and in some ways it is. But it's difficult to be a games journalist, in many other ways. You deal with low pay rates, unstable and sparse employment opportunities, blatantly obvious nepotism, obnoxiously pompous writers, companies that view you as a tool of PR, and vitriol spat at you from all sides. But I thought it was where I belonged, even with all the downsides. Writing about games is what I truly loved.

But, 2021 was a year of self-reflection. In the past, before the pandemic, I thrived in the chaos and grind of games journalism. I quit my job to take a chance on the new career path, and it ended up working out well for me. In 2019 and early 2020, I was happy with where I was and where things were going.

Cast “I hope this email finds you well”!
It only has a 12% chance of hitting but if it does you will finally get paid for that guide from four months ago.

But COVID changed a lot of things and none of them for the better. Getting work suddenly became harder, social media became nastier as lockdown grew longer. People seem to have fallen into an isolationist survival mode, no longer having the mental bandwidth to reach out to one another. Every person for themselves.

When I started freelancing again in 2021, I wrote one article that I am extremely proud of and will be proud of for a long time, but overall? I was miserable. Despite being able to find plenty of work to keep me busy and pay the bills, it all wore me down quickly.

There was always more discourse happening on Twitter that I needed to keep track of. More "bad apples" to watch out for in the industry. More obligations. More abrasive opinion articles to read. More wondering when that invoice will get paid. More sleepless nights writing guides.

I am sure they are just *real good friends…*

It wasn't long that I was applying to commerce writing jobs again before I landed one in June. At first, I approached this new position with the same mentality as before–that this was just something to keep me stable until the world was stable, then I could go back to freelancing about video games. You know, the dream job. But as it turns out, not needing to hustle every waking moment of the day gives you time with your thoughts, and my thoughts quickly made something clear… I was tired of games journalism.

Around the time I was freelancing, I joined the Final Fantasy V Career Day community. Career Day is a relatively new randomizer–a type of hack that remixes various aspects of a game so that it's random on every replay. FFV is by no means my favourite Final Fantasy title, but it is a comfort game for me and it's my favourite to replay. So of course I was excited for another way to play the game.

The community is small, but pretty passionate about the randomizer (and other randomizers in general). Career Day isn't the easiest randomizer to learn, due to all the classes and skills you need to keep in mind while playing, but those that invest their time into learning it all can find a rewarding experience.

So I started investing my time into Career Day. I was far from the best at it(and to this day I've yet to complete a standard seed), but I was having fun. Career Day, and by extension livestreaming it, gave me a chance to get away from the video game writing grind and just enjoy a video game myself.

You know video games are a fantasy because you can get any job you want. In mys school career guidance councilors just told everyone to either do medicine, business information systems or drop out…

One of the open secrets about games journalism, and about any hobby you turn into a career, is that it's so easy to suck the fun out of it all. It becomes hard to be excited for the latest releases when you need to blitz them in four days for a review embargo, or need to worry about pitching features and guides everywhere, all just to pay rent. There's still that rush when you can go "wow, I'm being paid to write about something I love", but that rush isn't enough to keep the fatigue at bay.

Within a few weeks of me getting my new job, I had decided something–I didn't really want to return to games journalism. Instead, I wanted to invest in the communities I truly cared about; the ones that didn't make me feel miserable most of the time. So I started moving on.

Untangling yourself from anything you've been invested in for a while is a challenge, though. I've had to take a step back from people and communities I like for my own mental health. I had to mute a lot of my acquaintances, whose articles I loved to read but with 80% of tweets being about the discourse of the day.

But by doing so, it allowed me to invest my time and energy into aspects of gaming I enjoy. I find streaming a lot of fun, and it's a good excuse to set aside time to play RPGs. In general, I can work when I am on the clock and just enjoy video games as they come, instead of needing to shotgun something for review or for time-sensitive pitches. I was even able to start speedrunning, something I didn't think I had the time or the skill for.

I do less Twitter doomscrolling and researching on the latest game industry nastiness and more looking to help out with community charities and marathons. I'm getting more comfortable talking and streaming on camera, and my mental health has improved. It's not like my depression is magically cured, but I'm less frustrated and angry at everything than I was a year ago today, even if the pandemic continues to thwart any long term plans I could even attempt to make.

The last two years have been difficult, so it's important to reflect and make sure you're happy. For me, unfortunately, games journalism didn't make me happy, at least not now, during a global crisis that has pushed many to the brink. I hope eventually that feeling will pass, though I also hope I have a decent future ahead of me at my current job. Writing about games is a bit of a bittersweet goodbye… but I can always make a blog if I really want to.