Jamie Marsden

In the past, I mentioned that I wanted to expand my writing. The end goal of this was to get a job as a writer somewhere in the games industry. For a good half-decade or so, I’ve had my eye on a few companies. I’m thinking now is about time to start being a bit more active in that. Right now, I don’t have any experience in the games industry though, so I’m looking to work my way in first, before applying to one of the bigger, more well-established names. I recently got into a new genre of game after returning from Japan, and found a company that translates games from Japanese to English. My Japanese is okay, but not anywhere near the point of being able to translate. Besides, I can only speak and listen. I can’t read or write at all. That’s not what I’m aiming for – translation is an entirely different skill. My goal is to write to them and try to get a position as a kind of “proofreader” or “sense-checker”. Based on a few of the works they’ve translated, English isn’t the first language of the translator(s) in their team, and so, their products come off feeling a little lacking in terms of being polished. With English being my first language, and having the translation bit done, I could look over the scripts and fix any grammatical errors I may find. That’s my plan, anyway. Of course, I still have my regular job I don’t plan on leaving any time soon. I don’t think what I described above is enough to fill a full-time position, and I’m treated far too well at work to even consider going elsewhere. I may be (literally) working myself out of a job by solving all of the problems I was hired to solve, but I only plan to do this as a voluntary measure. At least then, should I apply for a “real” job in the industry, I’d have at least been working on games in some capacity. That’ll be much better to any potential employer than having no experience at all. Finding a new job is something that’s come up at work too in meetings with my manager. It refers back to that earlier statement of working myself out of a job, but it’s also because I was planning on being gone by now. The initial plan was to go to university to study in a course for anti-terrorist operations. After being metaphorically turned away at the door, it led me to pursue plan B. So here I am, taking that next step forward, that, two years ago, wasn’t something I could picture. For once, I’m actually looking forward to it. Jamie Marsden is twentysomething writer who happens to have Asperger’s syndrome