Writer Introduction: WTF is a Scrumpmonkey?

Published on by John Sweeney
Our newest contributor introduces himself! Welcome Scrumpmonkey to the SuperNerdLand Team!

header2

I am not a jour­nal­ist. I hold no jour­nal­ism de­gree or cre­den­tials. I would feel in­ept break­ing a large sto­ry of real con­se­quence be­cause of this fact. But I be­lieve that as “just a blog­ger” you have to have a set of stan­dards and let an au­di­ence know where you are com­ing from.

A lit­tle about me: I’m British, in my ear­ly 20s and po­lit­i­cal­ly I would say I am pret­ty cen­tral, I’m a loony lefty by some people’s stan­dards and a dirty right winger to oth­ers. I trained as a Mechanical Engineer. I be­lieve in free­dom of ex­pres­sion and free­dom of thought above all. In terms of gam­ing I am most­ly PC fo­cused and my writ­ing may re­flect that. I pre­fer more com­plex FPS games, Real Time Strategy and RPGs.  I sup­port GamerGate and will un­til I feel it be­comes use­less for talk­ing about issues.

I think it’s very im­por­tant for me as a writer to let the au­di­ence know ex­act­ly where I’m com­ing from. If a site like Polygon was up front about their pol­i­tics in their ar­ti­cles, dis­closed all their per­son­al con­flicts of in­ter­est and was hon­est about their pref­er­ences and where their sub­jec­tiv­i­ty came in, I would have no prob­lem with them. There is a dif­fer­ence be­tween “sub­jec­tive” and “bias” and if I were to cross that line I would ex­pect peo­ple to let me know. You need to lev­el with your au­di­ence and that’s the foot I want to get off on here. The right one.

For in­stance I would nev­er ex­ag­ger­ate or know­ing­ly put false or mis­lead­ing in­for­ma­tion into any of my writ­ing, even to “make a point”. I want peo­ple to un­der­stand my point and per­suade them to share my be­liefs, but not at the cost of these be­liefs. That’s part of why I’m here. I want to put into ac­tion the idea of “Don’t just com­plain about it, re­place it and do bet­ter.” We of­ten talk about the idea that game crit­ics should at least gain an un­der­stand­ing and at­tempt the cre­ative process of mak­ing the games they want to see. Before you loud­ly de­mand some­one else do some­thing, look in­side your­self and think “could I do bet­ter? Would my cre­ative en­er­gy be bet­ter served mak­ing some­thing I want to see rather than de­mand­ing the de­struc­tion of things I don’t like?” As I right­ful­ly pull up the un­eth­i­cal prac­tices of oth­ers I want to at least try to be that change I want to see; to in some small way make the land­scape of games writ­ing con­form more to what I think gamers want to see.

I’m not here to tear down. I’m here to build up.

Scrumpmonkey can also be found on YouTube, on Twitter and on Medium

 

The fol­low­ing two tabs change con­tent below.
My Twitter profile

John Sweeney

John Sweeney is a ter­ri­bly British man with a back­ground in en­gi­neer­ing. He writes long-form ed­i­to­r­i­al con­tent with analy­sis of gam­ing, games me­dia and in­ter­net cul­ture. He also does the oc­ca­sion­al video game ret­ro­spec­tive with a week­ly col­umn about Magic the Gathering thrown in for good mea­sure. He also does most of our in­ter­views for some rea­son, we have no idea why. A staunch sup­port­er of free speech and con­sumer rights; skep­ti­cal of agen­da dri­ven me­dia and sus­pi­cious of un­ac­cou­table au­thor­i­ty but al­ways hope­ful for change.