Medium Quality is the longest-running creative project I have, and over the years, I’ve attached the name to all kinds of smaller experiments. I started a version of this blog under a completely different name in 2009 as a naive attempt at becoming a video games journalist. It wasn’t until a year later that I awkwardly muttered the words “medium quality” in a YouTube video. The words stuck.
Eventually, I started putting the name on everything I created. Medium Quality is a cheeky rejection of perfection. It began as self-deprecation. I didn’t think I was capable of creating high-quality videos or writing high-quality reviews. Instead of allowing perfectionism to stop me from making anything, the name gave me permission to try different things, even when I wasn’t sure what I was doing.
Over time, the joke became more like a philosophy for this ongoing project. It became curiosity and exploration. The slow process of learning what I find interesting and becoming conversant enough to explain why.
Naive Beginnings
I started writing about video games on my blog, The Epic Backlog, in 2009. My primary goal was to build a following. I didn’t know how to write a review, so I tried to match the style of the popular gaming sites I read every day. I wasn’t self-aware enough to think about my own voice. I just wrote about mechanics, graphics, and story, assuming that if I kept at it, I’d eventually get good and people would notice.
I also wanted to actually finish the games I played. I had just graduated from college and started my first full-time job. Suddenly, I could afford to buy video games, but I had far less time to play them. The blog gave me structure: choose a game, beat it, write about it, and move on to the next one. It was fun to play video games, and it felt rewarding to make something. At the time, that was enough.
Examples:
- Phantasy Star review
- Justice League Heroes review
- And just about anything else I wrote until about 2013
Eventually, I started to feel the limits of what I was doing. If I saw my blog as part of a larger conversation about the medium, I wasn’t really contributing anything by imitating the review style of commentators who did this full-time. I might not have realized it at the time, but that realization was already moving me toward a different phase of the project.
Figuring Things Out
Over the next few years, I kept writing. But the project didn’t stay the same for long before I began making changes. I renamed the blog Game Versus Life to reflect the tension between my hobby and everything else. By 2012, I even wrote a post announcing that I was done with the blog. Only I couldn’t quite pull myself away. I quietly kept writing. I still wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with the blog, but I knew I wanted to make something.
In 2014, I renamed the blog Medium Quality to match my YouTube channel. The channel never really had a clear thematic center (and certainly nothing to do with video games). It felt exciting to bring everything I was tinkering with under a single moniker. I chased whatever seemed interesting. It was an era of trying things, refining them, and seeing what fit. I even experimented with a merch store.
Teaching eventually pulled the project into focus. I had been teaching high school English for a few years, and the classroom changed how I thought about narrative. I didn’t really want to write about graphics or mechanics. I wanted to ask questions about how we are shaped by the stories we read… or play. I didn’t have much guidance on how to do that, so my search for meaning began to shape the blog. As I continued writing, my goal was to find something interesting to say about each game I played. I started writing things I was actually proud of: pieces that reflected the parts of me I was ashamed of and the parts that held my brightest hopes.
This also added a great deal of pressure to something that was, after all, just a hobby. Treating every game like a text that deserved deep interpretation made each new post a massive challenge. The blog was becoming more polished and thoughtful, but also less fun. By the end of 2020, that feeling had finally caught up to me. After writing a reflection on Final Fantasy VI’s depiction of apocalypse during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to quit the blog again.
This time, I wasn’t coming back.
Ok, I’m Back
It didn’t take me very long to miss thinking about video games. So I began by doing something completely ridiculous. I put together a list of every game I’d ever beaten. Then I fed the entire list into a Pairwise ranking tool, which generated hundreds of one-versus-one comparisons. Is Chrono Trigger better than Road Rash 2? Is Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy better than Resident Evil? On and on it went. It was tedious, but eventually I ended up with a ranked list of every game I’d completed, from favorite to least.
I examined this new artifact with a sense of curiosity. It was a concrete depiction of my tastes, but it was up to me to figure out why some games resonated with me more than others. That alone felt like a good reason to keep exploring.
Of course, curiosity wasn’t enough to solve the problem that had driven me away. If I were going to return to the blog, I needed a sustainable way to write that wouldn’t lead me crashing back into burnout. So I came up with a new constraint. I was going to keep writing about every video game I finished, but I had to fit it into a 280-character tweet.
With that, I had everything I needed to return to the blog. The list gave me a context for situating new experiences within my gaming history, and the micro-review format removed the pressure to chase profundity with every post. Soon enough, the micro-reviews outgrew the character limit, and I found myself writing slightly longer pieces again. Not because of any obligation to be insightful, but simply because I had more to share.
I’ve tried to hold on to the notion that if I’m not having fun, then I’ve missed the point. I’m free to write as much or as little as I want about a game. I’m not beholden to an audience (though I’m more proud than ever to share what I’m making). Letting go of that pressure means I’m completely beholden to myself.
And that brings me to now. It’s been almost five years since I began this particular version of the blog, and I’m still learning about myself. I’m driven by a curiosity to understand why certain games resonate with me. Each time I finish one, I place it somewhere in the list and reflect on the experience. I’m still searching for meaning, but now the meaning is personal. The goal isn’t to be definitive or authoritative. The goal is to understand why video games hold such weight for me, and how they’ve shaped me over time.
Paying closer attention to my habits of play has helped me see that my tastes aren’t monolithic. I like different video games for different reasons, and my approach to writing about them should be flexible enough to allow for that. That realization eventually led to a new way of thinking about how I engage with games, an idea I’m still exploring. I hope to share more about that in the near future.
Medium Quality has never been a single, tidy idea. It’s false starts, experiments, stretches of silence, and small breakthroughs that only make sense in hindsight. I don’t know how many times I’ll quit this blog and come back to it in the years ahead, but I’m starting to accept that this, too, is part of the rhythm. The blog gives me a place to explore ideas, to follow my curiosity, and to learn about myself through the games I play.
written 2025/12/16
Medium Quality 