One Impactful Year: A Thank You
Perspectives
Hello everyone, Alex here. I
wanted to take the opportunity this week to write a special little perspectives
for The Impact Factor. This won’t be about games. This will be about me. This
will be about the blog. This will be about you. I hope you don’t mind me
getting sappy for a bit. If the idea of a short retrospective and ‘thank you’
post isn’t for you, that’s cool. Just check back here this Friday as the normal
video game posts continue. Now onto the reminiscing.
One year ago today The Impact Factor posted it’s
first real video game content. Aside from a short pair of introductory posts
earlier in the month, it was on this day, January 19th, that The
Impact Factor had its first article. I started it off in the only way I knew
was right, talking about 2014's
best games. From there I went on to discuss how EA spent 2014 trying to
rebuild their image, why mobile game ads at the Superbowl are here to stay, and
a review of Spec Ops: The Line. It
only kept going from there. Now one full year in, The Impact Factor has 191
posts, including this one, with nearly 10,000 page views.
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| No, of course I don't obsessively check my numbers. Pfft. |
From the outset, and if I’m
being truthful from the present as well, The Impact Factor has never been about
finding an audience or being the next big name in games punditry. The Impact
Factor was about dealing with a difficult time in my life. As you all know, I’m
a Ph.D. student in biomedical sciences. As I write this post, it’s from the
relative comfort of a 4th year graduate student. I have an outline for
my thesis project. I have a roadmap for the experiments I need to run for the
next six plus months. Should things go well (a dangerous phrase in experimental
science), I hope to have a manuscript together by summer, which once accepted,
will mark the beginning of the end for my Ph.D. training. A year ago, this was
absolutely not the case. Third year is infamous among biomedical science Ph.D.
students as the ‘dark times.’ You have just finished your qualifying exam (a
test that serves as the make or break to continue working towards your Ph.D.)
and are thrown back into lab to make headway on your project. You’re filled
with tons of ideas and now have nothing in your way from doing experiment after
experiment. The thing is, at this time you’re trying to figure out what works
and what’s actually worth pursuing.
The process can be absolutely demoralizing. You can struggle for weeks or
months at a time trying to get one thing
to work, which ends up never quite right. You bounce around trying everything,
most of which bear no fruit. At least for me, around January of last year, I
felt like I had made no progress whatsoever in the months since 3rd
year started. I felt like a failure who was going nowhere in his life. It was
terrible.
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| Visualization of my third year. Biomedical sciences Ph.D. training has its rough patches. |
A career development program
I started taking in my 3rd year suggested trying out new things.
Exploring new avenues. This sounded perfect. I wanted to do everything in my
power to keep my mind off lab stuff when out of the lab. From the process of
trying to better understand myself, and what would make me happy, came The
Impact Factor. I’ve always loved games. About midway through high school and
onward, I became increasingly interested (and knowledgeable) about the video
game industry, new releases, genres, trends, gameplay, etc. My now fiancée
Justine couldn’t get me to shut up about them. My free time not spent doing
stuff with her is monopolized by games. So I wanted to take that energy I spent
playing games and try to make it into something concrete. That’s The Impact
Factor.
I’ve tried to make things
better and better as I continued with this process. From formatting my articles
better, to strengthening my writing, to redesigning the site, I wanted The
Impact Factor to reflect my goal of moving forward. This meant that I also
wanted to branch off into doing more than just writing. In May I started
something I had wanted to do for years: a video game podcast. That same month I
also started streaming some of my gameplay to Twitch, though it wasn’t until
September that I started streaming regularly each week. Throughout the year I
went to video game related events in the bay area and shared my experience
here. So pardon me the brief indulgence, I’d like to give a timeline of some of
the year’s biggest events:
Phew, that was even more than
expected. A year really is quite a long time.
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| My organization of TIF content is a little neurotic. Just a little. |
The Impact Factor has been
more than just a destresser or creative outlet, though. It’s been something
that is constant in my life. It’s also been measuring stick for me. At the
beginning of 2015 I set out to accomplish one big goal: to never miss a week of content on the blog. That meant every Tuesday
would be a new review/article/perspective/parallels, and every Friday would be
a News & Views. Come May, it also meant recording, editing, and posting a
new podcast every week. Come
September, it meant sticking to a regular stream schedule each week. It’s hard
to say it without sounding corny, but it meant a lot for me not to miss my
goal. To fulfill the promise I made to myself. And… I did it. I never missed a
week. Sickness, vacation, busy week in lab, it didn’t matter. I accomplished my
goal. It feels good.
I’m writing here to today to
say, more than numbers or links or what it’s like to be a graduate student:
thank you. Thank you to everyone who has consumed my content. Thank you to
those of you who have been here since the beginning. Thank you to those of you
who came in the later months. Thank you for the people who pop in-and-out,
checking out the content that appeals the most to them. I’m not delusional: I
know The Impact Factor is, and never will be, some internet sensation. But The
Impact Factor has a community. A
family. This goes out to everyone who is reading this post: you mean a lot
to me. You really do. I hope you’ll stick with me throughout 2016.
As this year goes on I hope
to keep making The Impact Factor something worth checking out. Articles,
reviews, podcasts, streams—all of it will continue in 2016. Thank you again to
everyone who has joined me on this journey. It’s meant more to me than you can know.
