About 10 months ago, I started a university course about how to write an acadmic paper in the context of game studies.

About 6 months ago, my teacher said my paper was of high enough quality that I should consider sending it to an actual academic journal or possibly a conference.

About 5 months ago, my teacher told me that he would not review my paper anymore after I badgered him to look over my changes for the 5th time, and suggested I just fix the two corrections he added and send it out.

About 10 minutes ago, at 10:40 PM, I finally submitted the paper. It took me like, maybe an hour to edit, and another 30 minutes to format it to the required specifications. I will not learn from this mistake.

Anyways I’m super excited. I feel a level of guilt because of how much I procrastinated on the damn thing, but goddamnit, I might actually have an academic paper to my name at 23. Right now Game Studies have a serious issue of lacking academic analysis of game mechanics (as opposed to visual asthetics and cultural context, which there is a swathe of), so I hope my paper analyzing mechanics could help push for more research on the topic. That’s a lofty ideal but it’s a problem I’ve had with this field for a while now.