IT’S the dream of many gamers to grow up and be able to play games for a living.
However, it’s a competitive industry, and only a handful of people will be able to break through and make a name for themselves.
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While women make up a huge portion of the gaming population, it is still seen as a male-dominated space, making it even harder for them.
Despite how difficult it may be, it is possible with plenty of women role models for girl gamers to look up to.
One of the most popular is Lucy James, who works for Gamespot and one of gaming’s most popular channels, Giant Bomb.
We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit down with Lucy and talk to her about her humble beginnings as one of gaming’s biggest personalities.
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As a kid, she didn’t have a console in her home, but she used to go to her friends’ houses to play the Sega Mega Drive.
Then her dad bought a PC for the house and this was the turning point for James and her love of games.
James tells GLHF: “My dad is very… He loves a gadget.
“He loves the process of researching something, comparing everything, and then eventually pulling the trigger.
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“Every time you go around, he’s like, ‘Here’s my new thing’.”
She connected with her dad playing games like Tomb Raider, Quake and Doom, classic games from the ‘90s.
Like many, The Sims opened the floodgates when it came to her love of gaming, and she managed to convince her mum to buy a PlayStation 2.
Playing more story-based games like Kingdom Hearts and Prince of Persia awakened her to how powerful gaming stories can be.
James explains: “I think there’s a point in my life, pre-2010, where I was just playing games purely to muck around in them.
“I don’t want to put all the blame on Red Dead Redemption, but that felt like a turning point, and that’s when I started to seek out gaming narratives and more interesting stories.”
While she went to university to study psychology, it was games that kept bringing her back.
She considered being a criminologist, doctor or lawyer, but in her words: “I became a degenerate gamer instead.”
A month-long internship at GameSpot made her see that being a professional gamer was a profession she could see herself doing.
She says: “My second day on the job was filming Start/Select with them.
“I got to go to a Mass Effect 3 preview, which was crazy for me because I was such a big fan of the series.
“I played it like two months early and I was just like, ‘Oh my god, this is a job.’
“I learned so much about video production. They taught me how to edit videos.
“They taught me how to capture. I interviewed developers from Creative Assembly.”
She ended up hosting Ginx TV, one of the biggest video game shows ever to be on the air, and from there her career soared.
She’s been an official presenter at the launch of the PS4. She’s presented awards at the BAFTAs.
She’s written comics, interviewed the biggest game personalities, and helped to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for various charities.
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James has been paid to travel all over the world to play video games even before they’ve launched, and that’s a pretty sweet deal for just a ‘degenerate gamer’.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
