When a gamer becomes a father.

On Monday June 27th, at 5 am central standard time my wife to be will be in labor and delivery and some time after that my son will be born. Alexander James Sloan will be apart of our lives forever. This will be my first child and going into this I’m not really sure what to expect. 

To give some background on myself, I have been a gamer for going on twenty years now. My first console was a Sega Genesis in 1991 and my first game was Sonic the Hedgehog. Ever since games have been apart of my life in almost every aspect of it. In fact in a future blog entry I plan on doing a year by year retrospective on which games meant the most to me in the last twenty. 

Now that’s out of the way let’s get the to the meat of this piece. Becoming a father is definitely going to be the best moment of my life. What I don’t know is how this will affect my aspirations to break into video game journalism. Don’t get me wrong I’m no stranger to hard work and long nights and I will do my best to make sure I don’t miss anything my little man accomplishes. That being said I know that to make it in this industry, you have to be on top of everything that is hot in gaming and at the very least keep tabs on the most relevant happenings. 

This will be hard to do because I don’t make very much in the way of money and while I did have just enough to keep myself well off in interesting games, with the new addition things are going to get tight. Not just in the finance department, but as it is now with work and things I have to do around the house I usually only average about seven to ten hours a week playing games. That number is sure to decrease even more once baby Alex is here. 

There’s also thinking about trying manage what kind of games I play around him when he gets older, will I try to impose restrictions on him that I had when I was a kid? What type of content will be in games by the time he’s able to hold a controller? Am I going to push him toward game because they are my passion? All very valid questions that I have absolutely no answer for. 

I guess in essence I’m just thrusting further into adulthood. My ability to deal with upcoming changes will shape my ability to not only reach my goals, but provide Alexander with all of the opportunity that I can possibly provide the little guy. After all I’m not just living for me now!