My Relationship with the Games Industry
I have been playing games every since I could coordinate my hands and eyes. growing up having played a lot of games, I naturally started gravitating towards more towards the games industry and the community surrounding it. My only knowledge of a world outside of the Indian “TV Game” scene was through expensive magazines that I would get to glance at bookstores or maybe get as a gift for my birthday. In 1999 we first got internet at our home and that changed everything. I was now able to go online and read all the latest info, look at these consoles that used CDs to play games, so on and so-forth. I usually gravitate towards Platformers and Point & Click adventure games but I have owned and played almost every time of game that exists, from a complex Strategy Game to a Walking Simulator.
Internet opened the gates to all things games and I started becoming active in forums that no longer exist, and forums at sites like Gamestop which have been purged multiple times by now. However, my longest lasting community was the Gamespot community where I spent the greater part of 1999-2009 interacting with lots of people around the world, making groups for under-represented gamers (AAAG 2004, IGG in 2006) and having discourse on all kinds of games. I also started writing my blog series back in 2003 which chronicled my gaming life. It was a memoir of sorts, recollecting all my experiences from my early childhood till current date. The series was often featured on GameSpot.com’s Home Page among the community features.
In my years as part of Online Game communities, I contributed to a lot of community-run fan magazines. I did both the magazine art-design work (using my Photoshop skills) and did a lot of review features. Soon I became the Video Games editor for a Local print magazine too, Bhel Puri, a startup run and managed completely my Students. I also started diversifying my writing efforts and soon started writing Critical Analysis of games, these were not reviews that helped in making a Buy/Don’t-Buy decision, but a break-down of the inner-meaning, game design, or any other side of the game that piqued my interest. I have always found pontificating on the meaning of games, a very satisfying exercise.
I run my own site WEastFellows.com (2008) where I put up all my games based writing. I also write pieces on other forms of media that I enjoy, Manga, Anime, and Movies, also cover topics on them there.
Whenever I am not contributing to the Games Community, I am often busy spending my free time reading articles on games, and the games industry. I have been following many publications and personalities for over a decade now and have kept myself up to date with the constant changes in the games industry. The development, publishing, marketing, and even the streaming side of things, are what I keep myself abreast of on a daily basis. Every day I commute I also listen to Gaming podcasts, and with over a decade of listening to some, I can happily say running them at 2x the speed is almost like 1x for me now, haha.
And of course, in my other free time, I play games.
Portfolio of Games Contributions
