A Haven for Her Soul

Submitted by Patrick Hickey, Jr

"... there will never be a shortage of passion and perseverance on our end."

​The other day I was thinking about the fact that my dad had 12-year-old twin boys at my age. My parents spent their 20s working to provide for our family and raising my brother and me, while I spent my 20s going to college and establishing my career. Now in my early thirties, Josie Ann, my first child, is only five months old. My parents taught me so many valuable lessons, and I hope that I am able to teach my daughter a lot of them too. As my wife and I raise our little girl, we want to try to give her as many opportunities as we can while instilling some strong values. We want her to know that ... 

There will never be a shortage of passion and perseverance on our end. Our home will be a haven for her soul, a place where it's OK to daydream and imagine. We will do whatever we can to help her dreams come true.

One of the reasons I wrote my new book, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews with Cult and Classic Video Game Developers is that I wanted my daughter to be proud of me. I wanted her to understand that you can take your love for something, in my case, writing, education and video games and turn it into something that does good in the world and inspires other people to do wonderful things of their own. I wanted to set an example for her so that she could see that she can do anything she wants to do if she's willing to work for it. 

Right now, I wear many career hats; author, educator, and journalist are a few of them. One of the things I'm currently focusing on is helping to create an ecosystem among authors who write about video games, so that we can all share best practices and more success. Just last week, I was able to interview Leonard Herman, one of the fathers of video game journalism. It was a thrill, and the results of that interview are featured on my Review Fix web site. The day after I posted the story, Leonard let me know that he'd sold some books the previous day, and that he could only attribute the increased sales volume to my story. It was great that he shared his success with me, and it made me realize that the hardest part of being successful is finding people to be legitimately happy for your success. People like Leonard are the reason why I work so hard, and why I'll always be there for people that have that fire in their belly to affect people in positive ways. As a parent, I know that my daughter has many of my features, my eyes, my silly smile, but if I can give her one thing, it's that ability to put her head down and shatter any obstacles in her way and do things in a  way that makes her happy and the world a better place. Over the last five months, I've realized this is my new chief objective in life.

When we all work together toward common goals, we're able to offer each other authentic enthusiasm and reinforcement, and we share in each other's successes. My wife and I want to be able to celebrate our daughter's successes with her and to teach her how to celebrate others' successes with them. We expect that our career experiences will be one source of the lessons we plan to pass along to her.

​Patrick Hickey, Jr. is the Founder, Editor-in-Chief, Master Jedi and Grand Pooh-bah of ReviewFix.com and is the author of, The Minds Behind the Games: Interviews with Cult and Classic Video Game Developers (Fall 2017 release). He is also the Assistant Director of the Journalism Program at Kingsborough Community College, in Brooklyn, NY, as well as the former News Editor at NBC Local Integrated Media and a National Video Games Writer at the late Examiner.com. He has had articles and photos published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, Complex and The Syracuse Post-Standard. ​

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Read more about Patrick Hickey, Jr.:

• "The Minds Behind the Games Author Discusses His Time With The Creators Of Classic Video Games", Forbes, July 2017
• Huffington Post Interview, June 2017