about the editor and site designer:

There are four things that I like to do in my spare time - reading, writing, watching anime, and playing video games. The desire to share my thoughts about the things that I'm interested in led to me taking a writing gig at one of the biggest independent media sites on the Internet. While I enjoyed writing there for almost three years, I grew increasingly frustrated with the direction that the site was heading as well as the severe lack of quality control from the people in charge. After I left, I wanted to continue to write as long as I could do it on my own terms. My need for an unrestricted outlet with which to express my ideas, talk about what I find interesting and cool, and tell others about things that they otherwise would have missed out on led to the creation of otakuxgamer.

As far as technical skills go, I am currently a senior-level Flash/ActionScript developer with experience working at various start-ups. I have working knowledge of how PHP and CSS work, so making the site look the way that I wanted was not as difficult as it could have been. Unfortunately, I am not a designer, so I had to stick with keeping things as minimalist as possible. This works out nicely for me since I prefer clean and simple to overdone and messy.

history and purpose:

My original vision was for OXG to be a news site that would be updated constantly throughout the day. However, I found that doing that was neither fun nor rewarding and often led to news pieces that lacked substance. In addition, I felt that writing stories about things that I myself did not care about was a disservice to my readers.

This led me to rethink how I wanted to do things. I soon realized that the main advantage that this site has over others is that I do not have to rely on it to put food on my plate since I make more than enough at my regular job. The result - license to pick and choose what I want to talk about and how I say it. An added benefit is that I don't have to rely on BS headlines or acting snarky in order to generate traffic. Nor do I have to troll by bashing things that I don't like. Unless there's a really good reason, there is no need to go on and on about things that suck when there are plenty of cool things out there to focus on instead. I could simply write about things that I think are interesting and hope that people with similar interests check the site out from time to time. Obviously, I wouldn't mind getting tons of views and making boatloads of cash from this site, but not if I have to compromise my writing to do it.

In the month leading up to TGS 2010, it became clear that I could not implement a lot of the ideas that I have for otakuxgamer until I learn how to read Japanese. So, I scaled back on the number of stories that I've been writing and put more emphasis on cleaning up and updating the inner workings of the site so that when I am ready to take OXG to the next level (i.e. when I'm comfortable enough with my Japanese), the groundwork will be laid out, allowing me to do exactly what I want without much effort.