Welcome

Welcome to Starmap, my personal newsletter! This is a companion of sorts to my gaming channels on Twitch and YouTube, where I play and talk about games like Morrowind, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and whatever else appeals to my millennial-dad sensibilities.

I’ve been working in games professionally off and on since 2013; if you recognize my name, it’s probably from the oral history of Morrowind I published at Polygon, or from my time as a columnist at StarWars.com. After spending a number of years as a freelance journalist, a few more as a full-time commerce writer and editor, and dabbling in PR for clients like performance director Tom Keegan (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle), it certainly feels like I’m entering a new chapter. Getting laid off twice in the span of 17 months has a way of putting things in perspective, and I find that I really enjoy consulting work, mock reviews, streaming, and YouTube.

Writing has been my life’s great passion. I started selling short stories and essays professionally as a junior in college, and I still do creative writing and the occasional essay or reported feature occasionally, but it’s not as easy to scrape together a living as it was eight or nine years ago. Budgets are drying up, there are fewer and fewer outlets taking pitches, and legions of writers are vying for the same scant opportunities. So I’ve been trying out the proverbial pivot to video these past 10 months or so—and it’s been a great experience for me.

I never cared much for school, but I’m a lifelong student of art, fiction, game design, photography, and all kinds of other creative pursuits. It makes me happy to immerse myself in a technical craft, and digital filmmaking and live broadcasting offer a wealth of exciting things to learn (and headaches to solve). I like makin’ stuff, and YouTube presents a fun way to package some of my original reporting for an all-new audience hungry for behind-the-scenes stories about the ecstasies and agonies of game development. Streaming’s a good time, too.

People seemed to enjoy my WordPress blog back in college, and my brief attempt to get a Substack off the ground circa 2020, so this newsletter is my chance to bring all the various parts of myself—the Midwestern parent, the aging gamer with an anxiety disorder, the washed-up veteran journalist, the hobbyist game developer, the Star Wars nerd, the blogger—together in one destination. When I have something to say, I’ll try to say it here first.

Whether you’re interested in game recs and reviews, my thoughts on the medium and state of the industry, or what I’ve been up to in recent years, you’ve found the right place. I’m a dad to two beautiful kids; I’m recovering from years of media-industry burnout; I play a lot of games on my computer. My dog, Sam, whom I got in 2011—the same year I became a professionally published writer—hasn’t been doing so hot. The vet says he’s nearing the end, and that’s been really hard for me and the rest of the family, but I like to think we gave him a damn good life. I don’t know where the time went.

If you’re curious what I’ve been playing lately, you can check out my Player.gg curator profile, but my next post will likely be a rundown of recent favorites, with excerpts from a handful of the reviews I’ve published on Backloggd and YouTube in the last couple months. I’ve been busy, I intend to stay that way, and I hope you’ll find something to enjoy here. If there’s a topic you’d love to hear my thoughts on, let me know, and I’ll make a note of it. Take care.