Vertically Rising

So in my last post, I talked a lot about my personal journey on becoming a Community Manager in the gaming industry. Looking back and wanting to provide something for the community, I wanted to make a posting with some actual practical steps that can be taken from my story.

1. Be Active, if even on a volunteer basis.

I started out by just volunteering my time on a forum. Others I know started by writing reviews on community gaming sites. Being active and staying involved helps to show a passion towards being part of a community and the industry.

2. Get on Twitter/Facebook & Network!

If you’re not using Social Media (Twitter – Facebook – Google+, etc.), you should be. Brands and their respective Community Managers all use these as tools to reach their audience. Most of them also have their own accounts that can be followed. …

Growing up as a kid, we all have had our dream jobs and careers. I used to want to be a Paleontologist and discover some new dinosaur. At one point I wanted to be involved in the comic book industry, but my art was terrible, so I thought maybe I could ink (and in the words of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” film, it’s just tracing!).

I’ve spoke about how I started playing video games at a young age with the Nintendo Entertainment System, and while I never quite had a moment in life where I knew I wanted to work in the gaming industry like Cliff Bleszinski, I just didn’t think there was an actually opportunity to walk down that path.

in 2008, I had been part of a group of gamers from my church who played Halo 3 and Gears of War almost nightly. One of them had recently …

For those not familiar, PAX stands for Penny Arcade Expo, a convention of sort for gamers that was started by the website/web comic Penny Arcade. Starting in 2004, it’s grown every year, and even added a PAX East hosted in Boston in the Spring of 2010.

For me, this’ll be my first PAX. I’ll be hanging probably with the ASTRO Gaming crew and a bunch of the Destructoid guys (BTW: As a plug for Destructoid, if you’ve haven’t visited their site yet, you should. They do a great job of bringing in people into a gaming community close to you with NARPS (No Apparent Reason Parties). Going to one this weekend. ). Being that I haven’t been to a PAX before, I’ll probably be like a kid in a candy store, only this “store” has tons of great free play stations with the games that are coming …

Yum, just made some good tasting quesadillas. Though now I’m out of tortillas…I’ll have to get some more. Earlier in the week I made fajitas (who said I couldn’t cook?) and they were great. I bought a pack of 20 tortillas, and ate about 5 fajitas that day, and another 3 on Friday. The rest I just ate….I really like Tortillas…maybe I’ll get the 30 pack next time, lol.

Our Music Department at work won a free dinner at Outback, paid for by our boss. =P She was running a contest for inventory. Inventory is when we here at Berean have a count of every single thing in the store, and we set the product numbers to that. We get a team to come in and they have these counter-things on their belts that look like calculators, and they 10 key in every item (they have a team of like …

Well yesterday was a big long day. Didn’t do too much during the day (in fact, woke up close to 11o’clock, hehe). I went into work at 4:30 for my long shift till 1am. =P We were going to host 4 bands that were performing later that day over at Jubilee Christian Center. Those for bands are Audio Adrenaline, MercyMe, Kutless, and the Swift. Cool guys, all look like very rocky guys (lol, all of them were white too, no asians, african-americans, or latinos in any of those groups, weird).  …