[big zero]

This is a story of how I found motivation in face of adversity, or how my ambition rose from the ashes of my self esteem, sort of. (My sleep deprivation is making me type weird things... Apologies for the cheesiness).

A few years ago, my favorite gaming-relating website was recruiting columnists. I contended for one of the positions and felt I had a very strong application (false modesty aside, I had the skills, the knowledge and some relevant experience).

Well, the position took longer than all the others to be filled and I held on to hope until the end, but even though they said they were hiring globally, they decided to go with a US-based columnist (I wasn't living in the US). It was a huge blow to my confidence & self-esteem as I was really passionate about gaming and struggling financially at the time. I want to believe they went with her instead of me because of where she's living, but to this day I'll never know.

I went back to their website a number of times since. I see the person they hired is still working there, moving forward in the hierarchy it seems... I groan every time thinking, that could've been me!

But then the strangest thing happened. I figured, well, if they don't want me... I'll make my own website and knock them out of business. I mean, why not? I still have the skills and the knowledge, and now I have an added number of years of front-end web design expertise.

It's a crazy ambition, isn't it? How could an upstart website ever hope to take down a giant website/blog that has been bought by AOL and is partnered with several key players in the industry? Well... I guess time will tell. But whether or not we make it to #1... it really, really feels good to be passionate and optimistic about something again after all this time.

Thanks for listening/reading

[Travelinglady]

Great to hear how you're getting even with the folks for not hiring you! Congrats and I do hope you run them out of business!

[Perna]

I have a good friend who plays a particular game and writes some of their information and adds modules, etc. (all as an unpaid volunteer) and I keep telling him to write his own game (as he complains about this one sometimes). He's a computer programmer and is big into writing/correcting wiki pages too, etc.

I wouldn't necessarily think in terms of taking down another site, if you have an idea for a game, I'd work on it because you would enjoy doing that. I don't think one can predict what other people will do enough these days to know how things play out; I mean look at how poorly poor Facebook did with their IPO? I think nowadays that just working hard on a passion is what it is about instead of trying to predict the market or invent things for the market, etc. The market is too fickle.

[big zero]

Well, writing your own game from scratch is a lot harder than coding an add-on for a game that's already out there. Some friends and I wanted to do it back when game-developing was a bit easier, but once we sat down and wrote everything we'd have to do (from visual/sound design to coding and storyline and everything in-between) we gave up and stuck to what we knew.

I think you misunderstand me ^^; I'm working on launching a game-related website, not a game. I do it out of passion, first and foremost, but... it's nice to know I'm getting back at the other guys, even if it's just putting a dent in their traffic.