I did something of a quasi-reboot to my LinkedIn profile when I went on vacation a couple of months ago in light of Twitter, y'know, but as someone who's frankly never been interested in white collar rat races and just likes to sit down and Do The Work I like to do, god, I cannot bring myself to voluntarily post anything there ever. The only thing I've shared on there was a quick notice I'm attending TGS and that's it. Engaging with the platform any deeper than that is like pulling teeth out of me and speaking as someone who's been going to the Japanese dentist's office a lot lately, I would quite genuinely rather keep doing that! Plenty of industry friends are on there and I'm not passing judgment to those who are actually active there, but that entire site's culture is frankly anathema to my personality and how I want to go about achieving my personal and work goals. Just so much self-aggrandizing and wagon circling, I genuinely do not know how the people who work in-house at developers and publishers immerse themselves in that sort of posting environment day in and day out.
At the risk of sounding naive and unrealistic, deep down, my mentality has always just been to do good work and let it speak for itself, that it'll get noticed by the right people in the right places. And as much as I know that rationally meritocracy is a capitalist illusion and nowhere near as objective as proponents like to portray it as, at the same time, y'all know what my credits list looks like. Sure, sometimes I have to do the hustle and introduce myself to find new work leads when things are dry, but it's an approach that's borne some pretty amazing fruit to work on from time to time, if I do say so myself. The longer I'm in this job as a freelancer and the more that approach continues to deliver results for me, the less I feel inclined to enter that traditional fray so many others understandably find themselves.
With the Twitter well drying up in terms of networking and work leads, partly by my own choice and partly because, again, you know why, I'd be lying if I said part of me isn't worried that I'm going to be entering an extended period of wheel-spinning as I plot a path forward. That's part of the reason why I'm trying to be more proactive now that I'm back in Japan for good by going to things like TGS. Deep down, I feel a need to expand my work repertoire at least somewhat, even if it's still very much within my current realm. I genuinely love translating games even in my ninth year of doing this and, circumstances permitting, I won't be leaving it any time soon. But I do also feel in my gut that I really should break into original game writing, as well as do something more with this advocacy work I've been doing pro bono for Japanese games forever. What that is whether it's more writing (I'd love to crank out at least a book or two on dating sim history one of these days) or something else, I dunno. I just can tell that I'm getting to a point where I want and need to start doing more with myself now that I actually managed to move back to Japan after all these years.
I'm honestly not even sure why I'm vocalizing all of this; I think it's just to put some of these thoughts out there that have been simmering for some time and also reassure myself that my work instincts are actually decent if I've made it this far on my own as a freelancer without the industry chewing me up and spitting me out, despite its best attempts at times. I know it's a lot of navel-gazing, especially when I try not to do a whole lot of that on this site in particular, but yeah. Just been having thoughts floating around in my brain about where to take things and how to do it on terms that I'll be comfortable and happy with, if that's even feasible. I don't know! Trying a lot has gotten me this far, though, so I guess I'm gonna stick with that and see where else this train takes me.
