[As I travel to the Game Developers Conference in the week ahead, I’ll be keeping a daily travelogue of sorts about my life as a games journalist, the experience of the industry event, and the colleagues, developers and friends I meet there. I’ll gather, edit and digitally self-publish the full diary for $3 when it’s all finished, but for now, select portions will be available for free from this website. Please come with me as I experiment with new (to me) types of writing and new ways of monetizing my work! I hope you enjoy it!]

The morning I left London to go back to America it was cold and dark. Just what you’d imagine if you read a fairy tale of London: hanging wreaths of mist, foggy bus window, just a series of lamplights whipping by, strung like a necklace. I wanted to cry, but you don’t cry in public in England. I didn’t want to go out breaking the rules.

When I crossed the heath to the bus station, I noticed there was a remarkable chorus of noisome birds. None of their calls were familiar to me. Where I stay in Blackheath, there are wild green parakeets that live among the branches of the rear gardens and in the massive Greenwich Park just down the road. They have bright red crowns on their beaks, and vivid blue and yellow piping underneath their wings and tails. I read in a bird book that they are the northern-most parrots in the world.

It seems there are three flavors of weather in London: Light gray, dark gray, and raining. Every time I spot the wild parakeets in our neighborhood, it seems they shouldn’t be there. I shouldn’t be there either.

When I get to passport control they’ll ask me what I was doing in the country for three months. Doing journalism, I’ll say, for American games magazines, which isn’t really untrue. I participated in the jury process for the British Academy of Film and Television’s games category, I’ll say. I went to Paris with a British friend. You don’t tell them ‘boyfriend,’ because they’ll think you’re some kind of swooping bog witch, hunting for a marriage visa.

I sound pretty legit, I think, when I talk to border guards about my work, but then it always seems to come apart a little bit. “You work in video games?” Asks the agent at Newark Airport when I land. “Do you actually have to play them?”

I’m a game journalist for a living. I write about video games. Sometimes I try to make this an easier or more elegant thing to talk about by saying I write about “interactive entertainment and social media.” In a pinch, just “tech.”

Talking to the border guard, I hear my own voice coming back to me, its childlike rehearsal of trying to convey enthusiasm without sounding completely batshit. It does not sound like I’m talking about a real job, I admit. They always ask me what my favorite game is — they’re watching for authenticity in my response, reading me to see if I really do what I say I do.

In that respect, the border control officer baffled by games is not actually all that different from a lot of people in the industry, or from “gamers” who read my work. To some extent the authenticity test is part of the participation ritual for anyone in this space, but women get it worse.

In 2008 or 2009 I was an employee of Kotaku. I think the most trafficked article I did as a staff writer there was an interview with a Playboy Playmate, who was pitched to me as “Cyber Girl of the Year,” a sort of True Gamer Girl Fantasy who was also a nude model. I’m pretty sure that I endeavored, if immaturely, to treat her with some dignity and without the alternate slavering and skepticism one would expect her to court.

But in the interview, when she told me she was obsessed with Final Fantasy XII I asked her, as cool-detective as I could muster, if she knew how to get the Zodiac Spear. She did, and described it to me, this infuriatingly intricate sequence of chests you could just mess up without ever realizing you’d messed it up. And I thought, “hmm, approved.”

The stamp came down and I was allowed to re-enter the United States.

These days I get a lot of emails asking me about how to become a game journalist. I used to feel more confident about answering them than I do now, even though I think probably objectively I’m better at my job than I used to be, when I was always kind of anxiously performing someplace in the space between the laser eye of the Authenticity Police and the baffled scrutiny of the normals with real jobs, the sanity police.

In those earlier years, my voice as a writer careened uneasily, as if following a mad compass needle. I have terrible map-reading skills, in games and outside of them. Even just being asked to track due north can sometimes lead me ambling circuitously in rings, as if somehow I’d mixed up the kind of compass you follow directions with with the kind of little caliper you draw circles with.

I am a displaced wild parrot, I have gigantic hair which never takes color consistently, I am a patchwork creature who finds herself clumsily changing her coat and shoes in the baggage claim area, as a drug dog makes several disinterested rounds of my sprawl.

On the plane, I asked the flight attendant plaintively for a can of Diet Coke as if talking to a babysitter I wanted to impress. I watched half of an awful movie about cougars sleeping with one another’s sons and realized it would be totally possible for me to have a ten year-old child of my own, if I’d gotten pregnant after college like fictional characters of the past seemed to do.

Shit, when my mother was my age she was putting me on a school bus for the first grade.

I brought my PlayStation Vita with me on the plane so that I could continue a uniquely arduous replay of Phantasy Star II. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that Phantasy Star II, a grandiloquent showpiece for the Sega Genesis’ ability to deliver uniquely immersive RPGs, was plush with all-important “firsts”: it is among the first RPGs I know of whose conclusion is that “humankind is the real enemy”; its raw, naturalistic sci-fi setting that married raw, out-of-control nature with the logic of computers, of spaceports and control towers and key tubes. Most importantly, it was the very first RPG permadeath, before anyone had ever heard of any Final Fantasy VII Aeris memes.

I first played it when I was eight years old. It seemed wondrous, mythical, and for me at the time, literally unconquerable. I’d page ahead in the strategy guide to mine the stuff of my imagination: Portraits of characters I would never meet, names of enemies I’d never encounter, crammed into the character limit (IMAGIOMG, MXDRAGON, TRCRBASE, ORANGOO). I’d dream about reaching the dungeons in the later pages of the tiny booklet that came with the cartridge on the assumption that the Japanese game was too hardcore for American audiences.

I’m at the end game now, and even though it’s been a couple decades, and even though this isn’t the first time I’ve revisited it, the sense of finally having scratched an old itch, of having resolved an old, old grudge is evident and deeply felt.

You feel so fragile in the beginning of the game; it takes a unique and specific intuition to know your limits in the early days of a stat grind, when you always desperately need the next weapon, when you’re constantly afraid of death. And aeons later the only equipment stronger than the things you’ve bought has to be plumbed from the most elaborate lace-doily futuristic dungeons. You rack up money from every powerful battle, and then none of it matters because there is nothing left on the planet for you to buy.

Life can let you get soft like that. You hate the hunger, but there’s a nobility in it. The more your statistics increase and the more you attain, the easier it is to forget how hard it used to be. Only games can capture, simultaneously, the paradox between what you’ve achieved and what you still want. The bar just keeps getting higher.

A couple days before I left London our housemates had friends over for a Sunday lunch. They had a child with them, Finlay or Finnegan or something like that. A couple with a child, coming to our flat for a properly-cooked Sunday lunch. I was sleeping in, worn out after a weekend of necking wine and yelling at the Seine with my boyfriend in Paris, when I heard the sound of a family.

I have hunger. At the first taste of comfort I just want more. I do the work of a fledgling hero who has just enough equipment, who could not tolerate the addition of a LV 1 Thief to my party. I am traveling the world — I want to make it easier to access other towns, I am on a plane with twenty American dollars in my pocket and a deep anxiety about how there is never enough gold for a new suite of equipment. I’m a modern game journalist deeply immersed in a game that is twenty years old.

The plane wheels shudder into contact with Newark Airport. I’m going to stay with my closest friend. She’s just moved from the Neverland of Brooklyn to the sci-fi city of Manhattan and she doesn’t have enough room anymore for a couch I can sleep on.

Mostly we’re going to share the bed, but I can sleep on the kitchen floor, I offer.

I think about my bank balance. I think about the work ahead, the writing ahead, the towns and the cities and the equipment. I think about how I told my boyfriend, “I hope we get married someday.” I think about how he told me just a night or two before I left, “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying.”

I don’t remember what he said after that. I was exhausted.