So.

Boy likes videogames. Boy likes thinking, talking, writing about videogames. He meets with some people, commits thoughts to words, and keeps doing this for no reason other than his love for videogames. He meets with several degrees of success – initially a pet of hardcore sites, then a newcomer to physical magazine publishing, then his presence is scattered across the internet. Highs and lows.

During the process, boy understands the need to talk about videogames with others beyond his immediate friend circles. He begins investing time into translating his words, and it pays off. He now has several people, as close to friends as one can have over the web, he found during this process. Most of these friends have a clear advantage over him, however. Not being indebted to more than one language, they can gain momentum with their blogs, publish several times a week if need be. Boy’s attempt to open a gateway to others is successful, but draining.

Boy thinks writing in the third person about a blog which, some exceptions aside, registers very few visits is weird, even more so when he considers if he should keep writing or not. The problem isn’t one of success – he never wrote to be noticed. He never talked to draw attention on himself. While it’s arguable videogames are truly interactive, if they can present more than play sessions where one has to guess what designers want, their effect is anything but elusive. They’re a virus that propagates and colonizes our perception, our ideas, our imaginations, our way of life. To write about videogames, then, is the cure, the exorcism. Awesome, stupid, intriguing, dull: whatever they are, they are mine. And so it follows that by extension, they are everyone else’s as well. That was always the point. It was never the numbers, the reviews, the Top Ten lists, the pursuit of superstar developers who keep promising worlds and only deliver puppet shows. It was always about what videogames meant to us. So boy writes, talks, plays.

But he’s not sure he can keep it up.

Time is always the main villain. It’s never death or disease or heartbreak; they’re the sidekicks, appointments along the way. There’s this wonderful episode of the Twilight Zone series called “Time Enough At Last”, where the lead character, whose reading hobby is constantly jeopardized by his wife, his boss, the world around him. One day he is trapped inside the vault of the bank he works in and an earthquake strikes. Waking up some time later, he finds the world a desolate place, where everyone is gone. “Time enough at last” to read, to prove his undying love for the written word, to absorb all the prose and poetry he can. Until, at the steps of a library, his glasses fall and break. He can’t read without them.

Time enough.

Boy think his current situation is similar, though less post-apocalyptic in nature. At the end of the day, it comes down to this: to maintain this communication channel between two different worlds or to focus on only one. Boy loves the fact that videogames have such astounding critics, defenders and writers that he sometimes feels he can’t cope with it all. He’d like to be there, side by side with them; writing about games in English was, at least, an attempt to communicate. Or at least send out an SOS. “I’m trapped in a world where no one raises eyebrows at reviews that claim Journey has the best sand since Uncharted 3″. Or “I’m trapped in a world where people take the term “hack’n slash” so literally it is now used to describe Ninja Gaiden”. Or “When are people going to realize that when they say they like RPG games they are saying they like role-playing game games?”

Or just “I’ll pay for the shotgun, you just bring the shovel and the truck.”

So yes, boy is me (“An epic plot twist” – IGN). I’m not convinced that I can continue writing in both Portuguese and English. What you love, you do with all your heart. But there’s always the villain (no sidekicks in view, fortunately).

So Juxtapixel isn’t going anywhere (“What else is new?” – Sarcasm Ed). I’m thinking of several things right now. There are still some articles I’m trying to write for the blog, including translations for them, though it’s unclear what I’ll do after those. One idea is to eventually aggregate all texts after a while, translate them and print out a nice *.pdf file to freely distribute. This is easier than working at some simultaneous publishing for two different versions, but the odds anyone will still care in the future are slim at best. Another idea is to just stop writing immense walls of text; I’m receptive to this idea, though a part of me is angrily shouting against what it feels may become a less productive mind (then again, being productive isn’t the same as being good).

In the short run, what this means is I’ll still have some more articles for the blog in the next months. After that, I don’t know. So if for whatever reason you’ve visited the blog, and on some cosmic improbability you enjoyed what I’ve written, my heartfelt thanks. And if that’s the case, apologies for the chance that the blog won’t be further written in English – though I’m probably disappointing myself more than potential readers.