Well, well, well… It's high time a hipster like me did the most 2010-ish thing possible and started a personal blog, isn’t it? It’s pretty nice, the more I think about it: my own little igloo for my ideas and opinions. Completely free expression, no algorithm to hold me back, no dopamine-inducing metrics to crave, no trends to keep up with? Sign me the heck up, PLEASE.
Anywho, I go by Winter Warburton. Most just call me Winter, friends call me Winty, and so on. He/they pronouns for me, please. I may be a human being typing away at my keyboard from the suburbs of Portland, Maine, but I spend a good chunk of my time on the internet pretending I’m a wolf. I like it this way; southern Maine’s a nice place to be, but everyone could use a little escapism in this economy, especially jaded twenty-somethings like me. Wolves are pretty cool too, after all. Ever since I would watch Balto on repeat from our Cartoon Network VCR recording as a toddler, I had a thing for wolves. They’re fierce and majestic, all while living by strong family bonds and social structures. Winter the wolf is very much a representation of who I am but also, in that sense, everything I value and aspire to be. Plus, I mean… just look at them. Who wouldn’t want to be one of these fluffy guys?
If you made it all the way here from who knows where on the internet, there are two strong possibilities: you’re a friend of mine (in which case, hi) and/or you’re interested in the indie game scene (in which case, welcome). I’ve been primarily covering indie games on my Twitch channel since the spring of 2020. You can probably imagine how timely it was that I began this chapter of my life when I did, but seriously, sharing my passion for these games with the world has kept my spirits up like nothing else over the past few years. I grew up with gaming, graduating from JumpStart CD-ROMs to a Game Boy Advance and the world of Nintendo, then eventually to an extensive PC library. Along that path, I was easily swayed by indies, whether they were kooky flash games from around the web, instant classics from the Nintendo 3DS eShop, or just funky little passion projects I’d come across trailers for on Twitter.
It helped that I was always an artsy kid. I tend to call myself an “eternal band geek,” seeing that I joined my school’s chorus and band as early as I possibly could and rode that wave all the way to a music B.A. After college, I even tried to set myself up as an independent musician, but that proved to be quite a challenge. Twitch streaming was admittedly an easier way to scratch my creative and geeky itches and I’d already found some success in it, so you could say the rest was history.
Now here I am, still gaming, still very much on the internet, but with no webcam pointed at me, no vtuber model to hide behind, and not even a microphone in my face. What the heck am I doing here, you might be asking? Well, I’m not gonna lie, this all kinda started on a whim. All those points I made back in the first paragraph were pretty darn compelling, for one thing. As much as I value all the ways technology and the internet have changed my life, it’s gotten exhausting to keep up with the times. There’s a certain freedom in finding a way to express myself that’s much more low-tech but still techy. Also, I don’t know about any of you, but I’ve come to prefer getting my news and think pieces from written media. Reading gives me the freedom to absorb information at my own pace and ignore the noise, if only for a bit. For all the benefits we get from soundbites and video clips, we also get plenty of flashiness and fluff that makes me think these meetings could have been emails. So… Here are the emails!
All of that said, I do have specific plans for what I’d like to write here. Where my live streams capture more of my real-time reactions to gameplay without much of a filter, this blog will be a place for me to share my more structured, digested thoughts on things. I don’t get that many chances to discuss games after I play them and mull them over. Don’t expect any deep IGN-level reviews, but I definitely want to put more thought and detail into what I say here compared to anywhere else. In addition, I’d like to experiment with some recommendations and formats that revolve around larger groups of games. You might have seen my 1-minute reviews on TikTok or been to one of my convention panels where I did a whole rundown with a Powerpoint and everything. I imagine folks who’d make it all the way out to a blog of mine would appreciate a place to get that information without having to memorize an hour of a busy convention or risk missing bits of it in the mess that is the For You feed. I think, in the end, I just want to talk about game stuff; I can say whatever I want on a place like Twitter (albeit briefly), but here I can articulate what I mean and actually talk. …I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but maybe after a few posts, I’ll get better at it.
Thank you for making it this far! It’s gonna be an adventure turning this little website into “a thing,” but I have so many ideas on the backburners already and I’m excited to have you all along for the ride. I’ll see you in not very long with a new post. Until then, I’m Winter Warburton. Stay frosty. :3