I stand on the precipice of a very busy period of time, friends. In just two days I leave the UK to return to the states, stopping by friends in New York City for a couple days before I head West to San Francisco for GDC.

Some things I’ve written lately:

Learn about one of my favorite games about ambition and overwhelm, A Dark Room. There’s some stuff for developers in there too, to do with bringing the Candy Box-meets-Nethack gameplay to iOS.

Bryan Ma and Babycastles are doing a gallery show about China’s independent game scene. I didn’t know anything about China’s independent game scene, and now I know a bit.

I talked to Cliff Bleszinski about growing older and watching the traditional industry-consumer relationship as we know it come to an end, I wrote about the closing of Irrational, and I wrote about Netrunner, and how games rewrite us, giving us the chance to become better and to surprise ourselves.

I hear a lot of grumbling about how there are no surprises in the IGF nominees list every year and “everyone has already heard of” everything in the list. I think this is only true if your work involves, as a writer, developer or superfan, a devoted scrutiny to the space. I really like so many of the nominees and I am excited at the idea that my friends who kind of like games but aren’t obsessed with them are more likely to come upon them as a result of the nominations.

There are most probably some games in the nominees list you’ve never heard of or played either, and Gamasutra’s annual Road to the IGF series of interviews with nominees is here to help you learn a little more. I’ve been doing some here and there, most recently about SoundSelf, Drei and Towerfall Ascension.

I’ve been doing coverage of GDC for six, seven years now, so please keep an eye on Gamasutra and on this space for writeups of interesting design talks. For this year, I’m going to try something slightly new: to keep a daily travelogue of personal stories, snippets of the people I see and meet, the things I do and feel.

I’m field-testing some kinds of writing I can collate and sell for, like $1, here and there on storefronts like Gumroad. As you probably observed, the economics of games writing are tough and getting tougher. I have less work than I once had — for example, the next column of mine in Edge that you read will unfortunately be the last one, after three (maybe four?!) years of being a featured columnist.

The work I do have tends to pay just a little less than it used to. I don’t think you guys want me selling opportunistic listsicles to mainstream magazines, right? I want to keep creating journalism and criticism that aims to add to and elevate the conversation around interactive entertainment and the people who play and make it. I think that’s what my readers want, too. You know, stuff we can all be proud of.

You can expect that I will begin participating in games in other ways besides writing, so as to keep being able to make a living here. But I believe in my writing, and I want to keep doing it, so I’m hoping I can keep experimenting with new kinds of things — some things like let’s plays, streaming, video criticism, et cetera that are ways of staying up to date with the way you guys consume content, and some writing I can sell directly to people.

I don’t think I’m a candidate for patronage or crowdfunding or anything like that — I will probably always write in some way whether I make money at it or not — but if I wrote more small books, or collected writings in nice digital formats, would you buy them if you knew your purchases supported me directly?

If you were to make small content purchases from a games writer like me, what kinds of things would you consider worth paying for? Though as always I can’t respond to everyone individually, your input via Twitter, email, or Facebook message would be super helpful.