SweetieGames

It’s been a busy few weeks, to the point where my queued content on this blog has run dry for the first time in months. I haven’t had time to devote to writing here, as my schedule has been stacked with appointments and my social battery and overall energy has been completely flat. I’m not sure if it’s completely recovered yet to be honest, as I still hold myself to neurotypical standards, but my lack of ideas and writing has brought in vicious self doubt. I keep questioning if I’m doing the right thing, if writing here is worth it. So today, as a change of pace, I want to talk about what made me want to start this blog in the first place. What gave me the initial drive to write and create.

I was a university student during the height of the COVID pandemic, starting my degree in Journalism and Creative Writing in 2019 and graduating in 2022. Once my assignments were finished, I wasn’t having a typical university experience; no socialising, no societies, no house parties or meetups at the coffee shop or studying at the library with my friends. We couldn’t go anywhere, so I spent my time playing the Nintendo Switch that I had bought with my student loan. We had a refund on the halls that we weren’t living in, so what better way to spend that money than on a new console, and the brand new Animal Crossing game to go with it?

I have previously mentioned on this blog that Animal Crossing: Wild World is one of my favourite games on the Nintendo DS, and I hadn’t returned to the franchise since. Once I booted up New Horizons for the first time, I spent hours and hours designing my island, finding the perfect villagers, designing clothes, decorating my house, catching bugs, fishing, you name it. I also branched out into other games on the Switch, as I was now able to access a plethora of otome games exclusive to the console. This was around the same time that I started playing Persona 5 Royal until the early hours of the morning, so my days and my nights were filled to the brim with a wide variety of games.

The following year, my final year at university, we had a module where we were to design a WordPress blog. My lecturers were all older and didn’t appear to have much knowledge of the WordPress platform themselves, but I had a little bit of experience as I had set up a crappy blog in the past. We had to come up with a unique angle for our websites, write articles to populate it, and create content to promote it. I immediately knew I wanted to make a gaming blog; I had loved video games ever since 2006 when I was gifted a PS2 to share with my brother, and I had spent the last year playing video games incessantly during lockdowns. I could write all kinds of articles about the games I had been playing, current gaming trends and the gaming community. My USP? Targeting the content at girl gamers, people who are renowned for being belittled and excluded in gaming spaces. I had experience in this myself. My lecturer loved the idea, and I came up with the name SweetieGames to further push my content away from typical gaming audiences.

The earliest articles written on this blog were written for this assignment, existing purely to populate the empty space. I was proud of this work, I still am, and I was most excited for this module as I was finally using the journalism skills I had learned to write about topics I actually cared about. I wrote about how female characters were depicted in modern games, about my love for morally grey characters, and even conducted a couple of interviews with streamers and developers which I thoroughly enjoyed. My boomer lecturers didn’t really understand how difficult it was to have content pop off on social media on a brand new account, so I did have to beg some of my friends to leave comments on my articles (sorry guys!) but other than that, I really enjoyed bringing SweetieGames to life. I wanted to continue it after university and really create a space where girls and others who didn’t feel represented by typical gaming media could come together and discuss games that they were interested in, learn something new and feel heard. I submitted the blog and write up about it with hope and excitement in my heart, knowing I had created something I was proud of.

A month later, the dreaded notification of a graded assignment turned up in my inbox. There was always a lingering anxiety when I received these, but I tried to squash these; my pitch for this blog had received high marks, and my lecturer had been telling me that he thought I had a great idea with this blog. He even told me I was worrying too much about what other people might think. Once the app loaded, my stomach dropped. The grade was far lower than I was expecting. It had been graded by a completely different lecturer, which was unusual at this university, and he clearly hadn’t read my pitch. He was confused by my blog’s content, he didn’t understand why I had created a gaming blog for girls and had “alienated” men from my site, and he pulled apart every design choice and content choice I had made. I was devastated. My worries had come to life. All those hours of work interviewing, designing and writing had fallen apart because it was graded by an older man who still thought gaming was for antisocial men who live in basements.

I still believe this grade was unfair, and my biggest regret is that I didn’t push back on it. I was swamped with other assignments from my joint honours, including a creative writing dissertation, alongside trying to get myself added to a two-year wait list for an autism assessment. I didn’t have the energy to do anything about my grade. I pushed it aside, abandoning my plans to continue it after university and I didn’t want to look at it ever again. Despite the low grade, I managed to graduate university with First Class Honours, got a job and put SweetieGames behind me.

… But I couldn’t put it behind me. While at work, I couldn’t stop thinking about my goal to write about video games. I was still playing games a lot, engaging in the gaming community and desperate to provide input on the unfair treatment of women in gaming spaces. The grade I had received for SweetieGames further proved that we needed a space for girl gamers more than ever; they’re so overlooked that people can’t even fathom that they exist in the first place. I was struggling in full time work; masking as an autistic person takes a heavy physical and mental toll, and doing it for 5 days straight every week was pushing me closer and closer to a mental collapse. I had to do something.

With agreement from my manager, I went down to part time hours and became determined to write about video games using the time I had gained. I wanted to write about topics I was passionate about, to reignite my love for video game journalism and continue to push for the end of the rampant misogyny seen in the gaming community. It is, of course, difficult to come in as a new freelancer, so I made up my mind to build a portfolio and go from there. Re-enter SweetieGames!

This is where I’m at now. SweetieGames is the home of my gaming journalism, the start of my dream to write about video games. Whether I use this as a portfolio of work to become a freelancer or make this blog successful in its own right is yet to be seen. You never know what’s around the corner!

I sometimes think to myself: “what is the point of doing this?” But I only have to remind myself of this story, see the encouragement I got from so many people on the TikTok I made telling this story, to give myself the answer to this question. I’m doing this because I want to make my passion my career. This is the first step in doing that!

Thank you for being here at this stage of my journey. ❤