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Blogging’s kind of like a long, long video game for me. And you know when you get to a new area and you put the game down and for some reason you don’t get back to it for a while

For a while I had comments turned off on the blog. This was mainly because they only ever caused me stress. The internet’s a funny thing, offering literally everyone the ability to react immediately and be heard. In some cases, that’s a good principle; it’s done wonders for media and creative thought.

In other cases, it’s obnoxious and destructive. If you’re one of those people who’s addicted to Twitter, you might get an inkling of that — you end up hooked on a drip of irrelevant information, a sea of thought and opinion noise that you can’t really explain why you’re reading but can’t seem to stop.

That’s how it is for me and comments some of the time. Yes, I write so that I can hear what people have to say back on a given subject — for me my work is a form of large-scale conversation — and yet paradoxically in order to do it I need to do it in a vacuum, in a way that’s for me, that could exist whether people are listening or not.

Writing for the commenters is a bad policy. This is because so few of them are ever actually useful to the writer; commenting is something that in general benefits readers more than it does writers. I turned comments back on because I feel like that’s something you guys need, want and deserve, but I very carefully cultivate a state of remove from the obligation to read them all.

I wrote my latest Thought Catalog piece, “The Different Types of Commenters There Are“, mainly as satire, but there’s a grain of truth in all humor, right?

Coincidentally, someone asked me last night on Formspring what kinds of questions annoy or tax me, and I began the response thinking “oh, very few,” and concluded it while realizing, “actually, that’s kind of a lot.”

People ask me a lot how I manage to “put up with” the internet. It’s not particularly easy. And yet I am such an active Twitter user, such a high-volume Facebook user (sorry, friends!) and there is nothing in the world that says I need to maintain a Formspring and make myself so available, but I do.

I think because being engaged in dialog with people in general, my readers in particular, is important to me. Even when it’s hyperstimulating or exhausting, it helps me feel realistic, if that descriptor makes sense. But general word of advice to anyone who’s of a similar need and mind: Careful you don’t let people feel entitled to you. Do it on your own terms. Be aware of how people are responding to what you put out there — yet remember, you are not some object in need of being constantly shaped by ‘constructive criticism’ from the outside. You’re you and at the end of the day people can listen or not, and you can detach.

I think I let myself be so available that some people became more interested in me — and not even me-as-a-person, but me as some kind of visible entity that could be commanded to react and share herself on command from strangers — than in my writing, even when my writing’s what made me initially visible to them.

Sometimes you guys write me and say I’ve grown some teeth, or gotten an “edge”, or that I seem angrier than when I was a friendly community blogger puttering around SVGL mostly undisturbed. I think that’s because I don’t always know how to deal with that feeling — that everyone feels entitled to be heard by me or answered by me, no matter what they want to say. I mean, that people observe changes in my public personality and can talk to me about them is sometimes surreal enough.

One exciting thing about me being freelance now and having a little more free time and emotional space is I can really concentrate on shifting my focus back, away from “being a video game writer for you” and back onto “writing about video games for you,” if that makes sense. Excited about that.

[Today’s Good Song: Papercuts, ‘Do You Really Want To Know‘]

Sometimes people are ugly when they’re being honest, but let me be honest.

When I decided I was going to try to enter games journalism I also decided I was going to reach the top of my field, you know, be “the best” at the kind of writing I intended to do. I think if people told me how hard it was to break in I wouldn’t have started. But once I broke in, and I wanted to keep succeeding, when everyone said to me, “well, it’s hard”, I’d silently append maybe for you.

And people would say stuff like all games journalism sucks and it’ll never be a serious profession and you’ll never make your career this way and things like that, and I’d nod sincerely, but privately I felt that I had the capacity to change those rules, even if those who were warning me had become cynical. I suppose I’d set a goal not just to succeed, but to succeed in areas where others had failed. I had a special pride.

So with that in mind — whenever a publication shut its doors, or a prominent voice left journalism for development, or someone migrated into another field or fell out of the public conversation because they couldn’t keep sustainable work, I confess, I felt a little satisfied. You don’t feel there’s anything more to be done here; I do.

Like they’d failed for a good reason. Or if they left for a better opportunity, it’s because they missed the chance to make better opportunities in game writing, which meant there were more for me to discover. Even when it was people I liked very much and whose work I would miss. Even when it was good people losing jobs and I felt for them — it’s not like I’m glad to see people out of work — there was always that subtle satisfaction in the fact that no matter what the reason, I was hanging in where others weren’t.

And for every writer that retired, was fired, gave up, was promoted out of editorial, I felt I automatically advanced, like when someone stepped out of the line, I could step forward. Some of the time, I even felt like a reduction in the noise everyone was producing was a good thing for game journalism, like pruning branches from a tree so that it doesn’t choke itself.

Mostly I’m happy with my career. There are only a few people who could make me second-guess that, who make me think that if they don’t feel there’s anything more to do here, maybe there isn’t. And, I mean, could is theoretical. Since I started, no one has left that has made me feel loss instead of that self-serving sense of opportunity until today.

Writers of my particular breed have the opportunities we do because of people like Kieron — really, him and a handful of others — being the really-really-first. I remember after a few weeks of Aberrant Gamer columns, largely the first pieces of writing with which I distinguished myself in any way, I saw that he had posted some kind of neutral comment, I don’t even remember what it said. And I remember becoming really overwhelmed and excited and thinking that if Kieron was noticing my work, well, then, I was pretty much going to be okay.

Since we began talking a few years ago he was one of those few people that I held up, on various fronts, to say I want to be like you. That he was “here” in this space and had done it forever for so long and in his way always made me feel like I had more growing to do, like there was more room here for that. It wasn’t just his writing, it was his attitude about writing, about audiences, about games, everything, that made me feel like this is an arena for sophisticated people and I wasn’t wasting my time.

I knew about his plans but I got choked up today nonetheless because I’m a big sap and he’ll probably be embarrassed but I’m always a little embarrassing like that when I actually admire someone instead of paying lip service to the concept of admiration, the latter being something Kieron would probably never do.

Not like I’m going anywhere right now. And it’s not like he’s dead or something, geez, Leigh! But the transition of Kieron Gillen makes me consider for the first time that a battle won in a war of attrition isn’t much of a victory. I suppose I still have to keep getting better and more useful to this space, then.

So. Thanks for everything, man.

Starting this fall, the game industry’s about to become a shootout — literally. All year we’ve followed the movements of Infinity Ward, Bungie’s new Activision deal, EA’s Medal of Honor reboot, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Killzone 3 in 3D. Ashes fall on Crysis 2‘s ravaged New York City and on Gears 3‘s alien landscape. Halo: Reach aims to outdo its predecessors.

My cat Zelda is kind of a hard-ass. She can be adorable as you please, but she’s also pretty fickle and pugnatious. She plays rough.

It’s been kept under wraps long enough. So without further ado:

All I hear anybody talk about is that volcano. I told you, ashes are so trendy right now.