It just hit me like a face-full of water how these years have passed -- and where my dedication to writing about this hobby has brought me. I took interest in video game journalism close to eight years ago when I truly took notice of Gamespot's work ethic and meticulously well-crafted reviews and articles. Your everyday kid in my age at the time --nine years old-- would have had dreams of becoming a soccer player, race-car driver or maybe even a singer; but me? I knew I wanted to become a full-fledged journalist who writes about culture --or more specifically-- video games.

Fast forward eight years later and I'm one of the key people of PlayerAffinity's PC Department and a writer for Darkstation, I also have a fairly well-established Youtube channel with close to 16 video reviews and tons of other video-game related content. Almost half of my life has been about this and I still can't help but to laugh whenever I notice how much I fail to live up to the typical late-teens teenage stereotype. I could have chosen to be any ordinary 17-year old; a guy who parties a lot, tries to get laid at every opportunity and someone who doesn't have a clue what he wants to spend the rest of life doing. But in all honestly: screw that.

I've been playing video games for 14 years now and to abandon that indefinitely would be borderline ludicrous. Like Kevin VanOrd so carefully put it: "Videogames aren't just individual parts cobbled together; they're experiences that you can't have anywhere else". I like to look at this medium from many different perspectives, but most notably from a professional one, which is why I then adopted my interest for video-game journalism.

I've proven to myself that I can get wherever I want to get through pure, uncompromising dedication and that the only roadblocks that might spring up along the way are derived from no one else but me. I've come a long way since my first descent into video-game journalism, but I barely feel like I've even scratched the surface.

What's your experience with the wonderful medium known as videogames?