Last week Duncan Fyfe announced that his website, Hit Self-Destruct, will be closing in six posts time. This is awesome.

Awesome because we are too quick to start things and too slow to finish them. Awesome because blogs are an exhaling balloon and his words deserve a more enduring platform. Awesome because the announcement reminded me a little of Careless Talk Costs Lives, the music magazine which started with an end date, counting down from issue twelve to issue one. But also tragic because, when a post of his pops up in google reader it’s one of the first things I click to. I will miss that.

Before any of this, Duncan e-mailed me with a question. It was: “When was the closest you came to thinking, even just for an second, that writing about videogames is a great job?”

This is a really difficult question. Not because those moments don’t exist; they absolutely do. But because, in selecting just one, you are revealing your core, genuine, unflinching, bald motivation. You can cloak that truth in the detail and flair of the anecdote, but for those with eyes to see, in your answer you show your hand. You’re saying: this is why I choose to do what I do.

Try it for yourself, now: “When was the closest you came to thinking, even just for an second, that what you do is great?” If you’re a doctor or a teacher then the chances are that your motivation is one to be proud of. But when you have a non-job such as writing about videogames, who knows what you’ll find?

Duncan asked a few other writers the same question. Head here to see what everyone said. For now, here’s my response:

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There are lots of reasons to write about videogames for money: videogames and money, for instance. Of course, in time you discover that neither the money nor the videogames are usually much good but even so, for the passionate adolescent gamer (which is still how most videogame journalists enter the field), the perks of free games and exclusive access can be persuasive.

But these perks don’t sustain or nourish over the long-term, which is probably why so few game journalists remain in the job past thirty-five. As with any vocation, true job satisfaction comes from doing enjoyable work and doing it well. In terms of writing about videogames, that can be the moment you describe a game world or system in a way that puts into words what readers were feeling but unable to articulate themselves, or the moment that you make some fresh analysis that frames the discussion in a new way.

But for all good journalists, no matter what their field, the height of professional satisfaction is surely found in rooting out an interesting story and telling it in an interesting way to an interested readership. This is a rare opportunity in game journalism because so much of our story-writing is PR-led, writers acting as mere conduits for publishers, passing preset information from developer to consumer. As such, most of the stories the gaming press deals in aren’t really stories at all.

Indeed, the tussle to be the first to publish a list of developer facts is as undignified as it is un-enduring. Once Wikipedia has been filled with the details of your latest Final Fantasy, Metal Gear or Halo interview, what value is left in the remaining husk of your work? There may be a certain frisson in being the first to report on a new title in a beloved franchise, but that story would have broken with or without you, in much the same way. The realization of that reality brings with it little to pull you from your bed each day.

So, for me, the times when I’ve felt most fulfilled in this industry have been those times I’ve been able to write a story about a game that’s somehow enduring, usually by exploring the humanity behind or within a product, or the culture that surrounds it. It’s in writing something of value that, in one way or another, might not have appeared if it weren’t for your seeking it out and writing it down.

By way of illustration, last year I had the chance to interview the maker of an obscure Japanese-only Sega Dreamcast title, Segagaga. It’s a videogame about a console-maker on the verge of collapse, made by a console-maker on the verge of collapse. Released in 2001, on almost the exact same day the Dreamcast was discontinued and Sega began their withdrawal from the console manufacturing business, it offers its player the chance to rewrite history. A kind of business-RPG, you’re charged with turning Sega’s ailing fortunes around, making the console side of its business a success and taking the company to the top of the industry.

The idea that a Japanese company whose hardware division was in terminal decline should fund a game in which players were offered the chance to address the very same issues its executives were wrestling with is unprecedented. That the game even exists illustrates why many people hold the Sega of that era so dearly, and yet very little is known about the game’s gestation in Japan or the West.

In interviewing Tez Okano, the man who single-handedly came up with the concept and managed to shepherd it through a difficult and underfunded development to release, I had the chance to tell a fascinating story that touches on all manner of issues pertinent to the industry today.

Okano-san was extremely chatty, in a way that Japanese interviewees rarely are, and the strong flavour of his anecdotes turned a good story into a great one: things that I can in no way take credit for. Nevertheless, it was, in very real terms, a neat story that might have remained untold without my telling it. I wish I could do that more often.