An Alternate Life

We’re trying something different: we fielded questions from Remap subscribers for this week’s letter series! Maybe we’ll try this out every once and a while? Feel free to drop your suggestions to questions@remapradio.com with the title “Letter Series.”

Maybe we’ll pick you!

Onto this week’s topic, courtesy of John from Kentucky…

“Good morning Remappers,

Even if you love your life, as you begin to enter middle age you start to reflect back on where your decisions have taken you. You think about what other paths you could've travelled down. Rob the artisanal baker? Chia the hobby shop owner? Patrick the Bears beat writer? What paths do you think you might have driven down if the gaming journalism worlds had not opened up like they have?

As a side note, how much differently do you think your gaming hobby would have played out over the last 15 years if playing games wasn't also your job?”

Patrick: It’s funny, I’ve thought about a version of this question a few times in the context of “okay, Patrick, you’ve managed to survive sustaining this career for a few decades, and while it’s clearly you’re not necessarily a fraud, eventually you’ll have to do something else, right?” But what that suggests is something still within or around video games, like pivoting to marketing or community management or whatever. It feels like fewer and fewer games writers are headed in that direction these days, but whatever, for the purposes of the thought exercise, it works. But I’m lucky that Remap and Crossplay are still successful, so for now, the charade continues on.

I have been writing about video games as long as I’ve been able to, really. My first E3 was at 14 years old. I was publishing online in the years before that. It’s basically impossible to separate my life from the career I’ve strung together, but it’s not hard to squint and wonder “well, if you didn’t end up writing about games but still discovered you were good at writing, then what?”

When Waypoint exploded, I remember looking at a sign advertising part-time work at our daycare and thinking that wouldn’t be such a bad job. I’ve wanted to be a dad for as long as I can remember, and I still get such a goddamn kick out of playing with little kids. Elementary school kids, specifically. Something about that age—still playful, no cynicism—that tickles me. 

So for me, education immediately comes to mind. Being a teacher. Perhaps an English teacher—or a journalism teacher? But something where my ability to string together words would have collided with another career, and I think I’d have enjoyed going down that path.

There was also a hot minute when Kotaku exploded—dang, I’ve been around too many explosions—where I wondered if maybe being a stay-at-home dad wouldn’t be so bad. I could still freelance and make some money, but then I’d be able to fully indulge being in dad mode. 

It's hard to complain about how things turned out, but I do day dream about that version…

What about you, Rob? Where might you have ended up? Or like me, except a history teacher?

Rob: I remember during the first of many near-death experiences at Waypoint, I met with a consultant who wanted to look at some placement options for me and the issue that immediately came up was that I appeared to be temperamentally and intellectually a fit for anything. He was like, "Well, usually in these interviews I come away with a good direction about the stuff you'd be a fit for and what you're most keen to do, but uh… being interested in everything is kind of hard to narrow down." Which was not news to me. That same dynamic is why I ended up double-majoring and came within a few credits of a triple. I find so many things interesting that I struggle to focus on any of them as a single goal, which is why I ended up making freelancing a career almost by accident while MK was progressing through academia.