How Spiel Times Became My Sanctuary During the Pandemic

In 2020, a global pandemic hit, and almost all sectors were unable to continue business as usual. At the time, I was working with my father in his construction business as a supervisor, but our president here in the Philippines had halted all in-person work apart from what we call “frontliners,” which were health-related personnel and essential workers.

Burning through my savings for most of 2020 was rough. Everyone at the time was unsure how long the lockdowns would last. It went from one week to a month to more than a year. In 2021, I knew I had to do something. It didn’t matter what it was as long as I had something to look forward to.

The odd one

I started working when I was 16, writing for a local newspaper as a contributor for their editorial section. At the time, I didn’t care much about what others thought about my opinion pieces. Granted, it was in a newspaper and not on the internet, so it was a safe space for me. My mother was the one who really supported me, always believing that I had a talent for telling stories and sharing my thoughts. I am an introvert by nature, and I observe people and listen to them intently. While it was something my former teachers thought was me being “odd” (my brother was always top of his class, and I was the quiet one, you get the idea), my mother encouraged me to use writing to share my thoughts when I was too afraid to speak up.

Throughout my college days, I joined a writing club and opinion-writing competitions and found success in many of them. In my second year as a mass communication student, my mother passed away from cancer. At the time, I stopped writing because I didn’t find joy in it anymore, as I found it fulfilling whenever my mother complimented me on my writing. She used to cut out my articles from the newspaper and keep them in an album. For the longest time, I felt like my mother wasn’t proud of me because of the constant comparison with my academic achiever brother. But when I discovered writing, I felt like it was something that I could do for a living. When she passed, I didn’t see the purpose of pursuing it anymore. For the next year after losing my mom, I worked in the capital city – my first experience working an 8-5 job in the corporate world. Very early on, I realized that the “newbies” had to pay their dues and do more than their job description in a sort of initiation phase.

After more than a year in the toxic corporate world, I reached out to my father to talk about going back to school. He agreed to pay for my college, but on one condition: I had to do a course of his choice, which was related to his line of work in construction. And so, I enrolled as an architecture student. After four grueling years of both studying and working for my father, I finally graduated. However, I knew that it wasn’t for me. Not only was there still discrimination amongst my peers, as they would rather listen to a male than a female, but my father and I also didn’t see eye to eye on many things. On the one hand, I made decisions based on what I knew from my studies; on the other, he would rather make decisions based on his experience. The pandemic somewhat gave me the freedom to do something else and the courage to finally pursue something based on what I wanted to do.

Career Shift

In the last quarter of 2020, I met a friend who gave me the chance to start writing again. He had a startup gaming website that focused on writing game reviews. Of course, it was just him, and we didn’t have the financial capacity to buy these games and play them for proper reviews. So we had to get creative. I would watch Let’s Play videos and full gameplay videos with no commentary and imagine myself playing the game. From there, I would write the reviews. Unethical? Probably. But it was how we could start; we had to be creative and think of ways to begin. I didn’t get paid much, but it was a return to both writing and talking about video games, two of my loves.

A couple of months later, he messaged me to tell me that a friend of his also had a video gaming website that was currently looking for a contributor. However, this time, it was mostly for gaming guides. I was hesitant at first because it had been so long since I played a game, and I didn’t have time to sit down and play anymore. But I knew I could still use that same strategy we used for the game reviews. I could go to YouTube and watch guides and write from what I observed. And so my Spiel Times journey began.

I was overwhelmed in the first couple of months. My background was mainly composed of writing my opinion about something. This time, I had to follow a format and limit what I had to say because writing guides must be linear and concise. Additionally, the website had a certain “look” that, at the time, needed to be followed for a uniform appearance. Slowly but surely, I was able to get the hang of it, although I wasn’t exactly proud of what I was writing (mainly because it wasn’t my forte).

Over time, I was able to build a good working relationship with Pingal (Spiel Times owner), and I believe I gained his trust. I was eventually given the green light to try and cover topics and games of my choice. At the time, I was closely following Pokemon Go, and that’s where I got my first article that gained more than a thousand views (20k in a day, if I remember correctly). I was also able to have that article featured on Google’s Top Stories of the day.

“Spiel Times is not a corporation. It is a family.”

Many articles later and a whole lot of planning, we hired more people to join our group. We knew from the get-go that we wanted to hire those who were talented but weren’t being given a chance in the corporate world because of unrealistic requirements. Spiel Times was going to be that company that they could put on their future resumes as work experience, and we were happy to give them that stepping stone, especially to students. Of course, not everyone who tried to join the team was in it for the right reasons. But I’d like to think that everyone was given a fair chance. I became more of the welcoming committee, showing everyone how to start. I always encouraged those who joined us to write in their own styles apart from following basic standard formatting (image size, headings, etc.), but always made sure that they wrote as their own person and not emulate someone else. I believe that this is the best way to help them flourish in their own creativity and ideas.

As I sit here today, writing this, I look back at the years that have gone by and how the pandemic essentially gave me the right push to pursue a career in writing about video games, something that has always been a part of my being, and actually make a living out of it. My time here at Spiel Times was not easy, mostly stressful, but it is an experience that I will truly treasure. Today marks the beginning of my last few days at Spiel Times.

Part 2: So what happened? Google. Google happened.