I haven’t seen one of these posts in a while, so I figured that I’d take it upon myself to keep the tradition alive! After all, I relish any opportunity I can get to talk about myself. Right out of the box, here’s some straightforward facts:

My name, as you might have guessed, is Matt. I'm 23 and I live in the slightly boring city of Columbus, Ohio. I own an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo DS, though I occasionally still play my SNES and N64. I love RPG's produced by Bethesda and Bioware, but I'm also a sucker for Pokemon and a shooter or two. If I had to pick out my proudest gaming accomplishments, it would probably be getting all of the achievements for Oblivion, or possibly catching all 151 original Pokemon.

I posted my first Bitmob article, “The Joy of Pressing Start” back in October. It got promoted to the front page and was even featured in the February 2011 issue of GamePro. Needless to say, this got me excited about the opportunities available to the community here. I never studied game design or anything quite related to that while studying at the Ohio State University, but I don’t regret it. I’m terrible with computers and math and I’m sure it would have been a lot of unnecessary stress.

I'm actually at a Harry Potter midnight showing. Man, those kids can't take a joke.

What I did study, however, was film. Strangely enough, it wasn’t the typical film degree that everyone assumes it was. You’ll probably never find me behind a camera or setting up lights or gods forbid, sitting at a computer trying to have my way with an editing suite. So when I say I studied film in college, I meant it quite literally. I watched countless films and simultaneously tore them to pieces. In the process I learned a great deal about the history of cinema as a medium as well as the theory behind it. My focus area was screenwriting, so I also learned about the great deal of craft that is required to ready a story for the big screen.

Aside from being a film buff, I’m also a voracious reader. Last year I read 40 books, and I keep all the books I read every year on a little list so that I can remind myself of how awesome I am. My reading tastes range from classics like Dante’s Divine Comedy to Ernest Hemingway to modern authors like Michael Chabon or Cormac McCarthy. Most of my reading time, however, is spent in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, a fact for which I beg forgiveness. I’ve read all the novels and nearly all the comic books at great cost to my bank account.

I’d like to think that what I bring to the table is not only an extensive knowledge of other mediums, but a critical eye when it comes to the style, content and theory of video games. I love taking the skills I learned to use deconstructing films and applying them to games. I’m aware that there’s already a large variety of writing about games, be it academic or otherwise, but I’d someday like to see a game studies degree available right along side film studies and English.

Sigh. College. Later that night I cleaned up at Left 4 Dead, believe it or not.

As far as career aspirations go, I’m as susceptible to tunnel vision and pipe dreams as I hope some of the rest of you are. I’d love to get into game journalism, but one of my greatest aspirations would be to craft stories for games themselves. Most of the writing I’ve done lately has been more focused on journalism, but I still find time to write creatively when I can. I’ve written several children’s plays that have been produced by a local theater back home. They’re usually pretty campy, sarcastic genre exercises – the kids aren’t usually used to that stuff, so they seem to like it a lot.

No matter what my career path is, I just hope sincerely that it doesn’t involve any more kitchen work. As a 10+ year employee of the food industry, I’ve just about wrung all I can out of myself. Either way, I’m sure I’ll still continue to absorb popular culture at a frantic pace for the rest of my life, for better or worse. I spent most of my time with my fiancé (a word we both hate, but it is what it is) and I cry a little when there’s not beer in my fridge.

This is a great site, a fantastic community and I hope to continue dissecing every aspect of this culture with the lot of you for as long as my ideas are fresh!