Four Years and Still Scratching - Features

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Four Years and Still Scratching

My road to the Armchair Empire took me on a globe-spanning cyber trip. Back around the time that Aaron and Jeff were thinking of starting their radio show that then turned into a website, I was a writer that simply wasn’t writing. I graduated nearly 10 years earlier with a journalism degree possessing dreams of becoming a sports writer, but to that point, had only had some part-time sports writing gigs to my credit, and at the time working a semi-journalism-related job. Married with four kids and feeling unfulfilled career-wise, I had started to feel more and more a burning itch to write. And write seriously.

My two passions in my life had always been sports and video games. The epiphany hit me when I got the Dreamcast for Christmas that year. While I was playing and playing my Dreamcast and the bevy of games my wife bought for me, I saw an ad for what was an early blog community: www.themestream.com. Basically, you could write about anything you wanted, anything at all, and could actually earn money based on how many people read your work.

Seemed like a chance to get my writing juices flowing freely again. But what to write about? With my renewed gaming passion brought about by my Dreamcast ownership, I started a Dreamcast column. And people actually read it, although nowhere near what would be considered worth it financially. Still, I enjoyed writing about games. It just seemed so natural for me. Soon after, Themestream ceased and folded (I “earned” about $5 in the three months I wrote for Themestream).

On a great gaming website that still is around today, www.gamejobs.com, I found a new outlet for my game writing: www.bdgames.net. The site was run by a young Bangladeshi with impressive Web designing skills, but a lack of industry connections. I basically was reviewing my own purchased games and writing a column about Sega and the Dreamcast. I wanted a more influential forum to express my writing, a forum that had North American-based resources, including solid connections to the gaming industry.

I was off scanning the gamejobs.com classifieds again. It was then I found the AE. I sent some of my writing to date to Jeff, and have been there ever since. Now, almost four years later, I’m one of the senior members of the AE (in terms of longevity at the site and in actual years; I’m not going to tell you how old I am, but here’s a clue: I was born in the 1960s).

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Some bizarre little quirks about me and the AE I’d like to share: Aaron and Jeff are both based in Vancouver up in the lovely land of Canada. I’m 3,000 miles away, in a small suburb outside of Philadelphia. To this date, I’ve never actually met anybody from the AE. I’ve had only a 30-second phone conversation with Aaron (he needed my Xbox serial number so he could get me in, last-minute, to the Xbox Live beta testing). I’ve never been associated with someone so closely

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in my life without having met or really talked to them. But that’s the wacky world of the World Wide Web that’s so prevalent as an everyday part of life today; you can literally work for somebody or establish a relationship spanning thousands of miles without any communication besides email. That lack of face-to-face contact may change next year at E3 2006, however.

I credit The Armchair Empire with helping me develop into a solid gaming writer. Aaron and Jeff would be proud to know that, partially because of my writing at the AE, I actually got my current full-time job as a proofreader and copywriter at the advertising agency in New Jersey that handles the Electronic Boutique monthly catalogs and newspaper inserts. I’m back also writing sports again (part-time, but I get published on a weekly basis in a 100,000 circulation daily newspaper). I also recently was interviewed for a gaming-related writing position (which I didn’t get).

Yes, I enjoy getting my games for free from the AE. But that’s not why I write for the AE. It’s more than that to me. I take my writing responsibilities seriously: the AE is a job to me (the most fun job I could imagine); I want to be a considered a serious gaming journalist. I think these last four years have gotten me close to being there. The future with the help of the AE will get me there, and I’d like to say thanks to Aaron, Jeff and The Armchair Empire to getting me where I am today as a video game journalist. My itch has definitely been soothed, but I’m still scratching.

- Lee Cieniawa

lcieniawa@armchairempire.com

(September 5, 2005)