My name is Mark Sweet, before I tell you where I am going I want to give you a snapshot of where I have come from. Some of my earliest memories from my childhood are memories of
my fantastic imagination. I was an only child who thrived in my alone time,
using it to conjure up stories of time travel, pirates and space adventures to
rival the best. I was an avid book reader and had a healthy love for movies
from an early age. I was 8 when I received my first gaming console, a Nintendo
Entertainment System. I was instantly hooked, stories you could play out, where
had this been!? I advanced through the gaming generations, from NES to SNES, PC
games for a while then the Playstation 1 &2 but it was the Playstation 3
and the advent of trophies where, I can see now, the problems really started
for me.
The Addiction
I can easily say that Playstation trophy hunting has (not
sure I can say had as yet) become an outright addiction, the want and
need to play a game to competition, or to play something I was totally
uninterested in just for an easy swag of trophies, a digital reward, was taking
over my life. I had lost sight of the reason I fell in love with gaming in the
first place, the thrill of the story and the ability to control it myself,
living through the game. Anyone that is
not familiar with the Playstation in-game trophy system, or the addiction that
it can create, just needs to google the subject to see all the writing on it. While
this addiction had limiting my range of creative intake, it had also helped me to
create a small, and now I guess you could say unsuccessful, social media
profile. I wrote many online guides for fellow trophy hunters, helping other
achieve trophies in games and I also had a youtube channel dedicated to game
playthroughs, trophy guides, game trailers and so on. I put a lot of work into
both over 3-4 years, eventually losing the channel to an (what I believed to
be) unwarranted copyright claim, youtube eventually closing my account. I was devastated,
I felt my entire life’s work was gone. I was lost, what was I to do now? It was
these feeling that started me thinking, I had to do something, I was losing
myself and hating what had, for so long, kept me so entertained.
The Philosophy
During this long journey I lost the ability to create my own
stories, that kid with the wild imagination was gone. Now, 32 years after my introduction
to video games, I find I have given up reading, relying totally on gaming to
provide me with creative release. I feel I need to say this, I have an
addictive personality by nature. Whether it be alcohol, cigarettes, drugs,
gambling, video games, sugar, work, sport, exercise, mowing the lawn on Tuesdays!
Whatever! Anything I get into can seems to take on addictive traits of some
sort, I can’t help it. While it has created a lot of problems for me throughout
my life, drugs and alcohol come to mind; it has also been advantageous at times,
such as sport and exercise. So, I have decided to try and project my addictive personality
onto something that, I believe, might give me great joy and possibly be
something I can look back on as a renaissance of my creative mind. Armed with
this newfound philosophy, I have made the following changes.
Gaming
I have decided that I will no longer be playing video game
purely for digital achievements, I am playing for the love of the story,
looking at games in a new light, or should I say an old light? Returning to the roots of why it captivated me originally. Focusing on narrative on the game.
To help with this I have created this blog, where I will publish game reviews, with
an emphasis on the story, not a traditional review taking into consideration
gameplay mechanics, controls, save features, online play and the like, but
narrative only and the creative flare of the writing. This I believe will help
me rebuild my appreciation for storytelling.
Reading…. and watching
The last book I can remember reading, was…..well I can’t
even remember the last book I read, it would possibly be a Goosebumps book, by
R.L Stine, in early high school perhaps. I might have read a young teen vampire
novel written by Christopher Pike at some stage, that sounds more like it as
Goosebumps was probably more at an early schooling stage, but you get my point!
I can’t even remember the last book I read! Sure, I attempted reading other
books over the years. I would start, read a few pages or a whole chapter, then
lose interest. I would get restless just sitting there reading, my mind would
wander to what else I could be doing, namely playing a video game to earn those
delicious trophies. It wasn’t my lack of ability to read, I just couldn’t find
the commitment to do it, I had lost my ability to get lost in the story. This is
going to change also as this blog will also showcase book reviews written by
myself, I have already started compiling lists of authors and books I want to
read. Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Michael Crichton and Dan brown are on my hitlist
of ‘to reads’, a diverse range to get me started as I try to find my legs and
what I enjoy. While I also want to cover movies, I don’t want it to spiral into
a swamp of small reviews based on an experience that may only last 80 minutes
or so, the length of a movie. I want to write deeper, more meaningful reviews
and while this would be possible on a simple standalone movie, I want to try
and stick to movies based on book, so I am able to make comparisons to the
original book. I wouldn’t mind documenting my musings on entire franchises or
series, such as Paranormal Activity or Saw, I feel it would be interesting to
explore their history and timelines, but that’s a big ‘if’ at this point while I’m
just starting out; it’s good to have future plans though.
Studying
Studying creative writing, this I believe will fuel the
drive to explore my creative mind, helping me unlock that potential I know is
in me but has been suppressed by the force feeding of mass media rubbish. Therefore,
I have enrolled in Curtin University (Perth, Australia), studying online towards
a BA in Creative Writing. A bit extreme? Maybe. Too much too soon? Possibly,
but I want this to inspire me, to almost force me to use my mind for what I know
it is capable of. I’m hoping the assignments I will be faced with will trigger
something, get my creative juices flowing and my addictive personality will
kick in and do the rest. At the time of writing this I am approaching the end
of the first subject of my course; I am enjoying it and believe it has given my
creativeness the shot of adrenalin it needed. As the course evolves, I will post
various articles in relation to it here as well.
Writing
All this has brought me to this point, writing, sharing my
inner thoughts. Well yes, sharing, but mostly just documenting, writing for
writing sake, not caring if it gets read by anyone else or it just sit’s here
as a testament to my attempt to change. As I have already explained, I intend
to write review posts, my thought’s, on video games (their stories), books and
movies. I am also writing my own stories, in fact, I have already commenced
writing on my first creative piece. Whether it will be a short story or a novel
I am unsure at this stage, although I am now leaning towards a short story for
my first. It would be nice to be able to post here my progress or thoughts on
writing, for feedback or just to record it somewhere.
So, this is it, this is my blog. As I have said, I am not writing with the intent to amass a huge internet following, I do not expect riches and fame to come from this. A simple outlet for what I have inside is all I expect, and if somebody else reads it and likes what they see then that is a bonus. If you have made it this far, thank you. If you intend to come back and read my later writings, well I thank you some more. My name is Mark Sweet, I’m a recovering gaming addict, welcome to my Total Addiction to Fiction.
