I often joke that I spend just as much time reading and writing about video games as I do actually playing them. As exaggerations go, it hasn't always been that far off the mark. From the moment I first plopped down with my first console, I wanted to do more than enjoy games at face value. I wanted to understand them. Why did they click with me so naturally - in ways my childhood diet of cartoons and Legos couldn't replicate? As a lanky kid, I rummaged through stacks of backlog Game Informer issues at the public library looking for answers. Call it leveling up my real-life intelligence stats.
Game Informer has been a supplement to my regular gaming diet for many years. Other sources of gaming news and knowledge have come and gone. My subscriptions to Game Pro and Nintendo Power lapsed shortly before those magazines suffered permadeath. But through the years I've kept coming back to Game Informer. Not only to keep up with the game industry's inner workings, but to compose my own thoughts in tidy blog posts (albeit rather infrequently). It's all come from a desire to participate in gaming conversations. That desire led me here. To this internship, and the chance to entertain and inform others too. Pretty neat, right?
It's been an odd journey. Blogging off and on, I've written everything from a list of my favorite Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic mods to a review of Unrest, a text-heavy indie fantasy RPG set in ancient India. While writing for Zelda Dungeon, the foremost source of Zelda news and walkthroughs, I argued for a playable Tingle in Super Smash Bros and reminisced about when Nintendo made grown gamers cry with a Twilight Princess trailer at E3 2004. Outside of video game writing, I dabbled in classroom magazines, newspapers and college radio. Once I even adapted the ballsy action flick Die Hard into a two-part radio play, pulling overnight shifts to trawl YouTube for public domain gunshot recordings. Not many people can claim that on their resumes, I imagine.
No matter what path I take, video games somehow remain a constant part of my life. Voyaging across The Wind Waker's cel-shaded Great Sea and braving the polluted surface of Tallon IV in Metroid Prime are among my fondest memories. Games like these invited me to explore and make a mark on fictional worlds, and helped leverage my creativity. It didn't take long before I was fiddling with their nuts and bolts. I can't count how many hours I spent scouring the web for mods to install to make my favorite titles that much better.
Being able to customize electronic adventures to my liking is a powerful feeling. It led me to join The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind modding projects Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel. During the years spent with them, I've seen cities rise out of nothingness at the hands of talented hobbyists experimenting with level design. I like to think I've gleaned a little wisdom about game development as a result. Tons of planning goes on behind the scenes, along with negotiations between different visions. It all comes back to interacting with games beyond simply tapping A, X, B, and Y on a controller.
Much like any other hobby, I learn more about video games the more I play them. From each boss that falls to my trusty halberd in Dark Souls, to each obstacle I navigate in Ori and the Blind Forest, I see another way for games to deliver magical moments. Going forward, I hope to continue sharing my thoughts on these subjects. Whether that's in the pages of Game Informer or somewhere else entirely, I'll still be finding ways to participate in this wondrous pastime of pixels and polygons.
Like the next blockbuster game release on the horizon, I look forward to working alongside the Game Informer crew and my fellow interns this fall. So far, sitting down with legends like Andrew Reiner and Tim Turi to watch Star Wars Rebels during lunch breaks has been a surreal blast, to say the least. Most of all though, I'm excited to interact with the amazing community built around my favorite magazine. Feel free to follow me on Twitter at @ParkerLemke and we'll see if we can kick start some interactions. With any luck, I'll actually tweet enough during these next three months to make it worth your while.