FAQ

When people ask me questions about my journey, I often hope for one I've not been asked before, my current favourite from a certain lady in Australia being:

"how many pairs of underwear do you carry ?"

I'm not sure I'll post the answer here.

What kind of games and sports are you looking for ?

Most people have never thought about what their indigenous games and sports are.

There are various reasons for that.

So sometimes I refer to them as "traditional" games, which often sparks the thought process, reaching back to simpler times when they didn't have a device welded to their palms.

I might also reference them as games that are "originally from here" and most importantly reflect the culture of the people that play them. Sounds complicated, but it's not really. Where is cricket from ? England, it's a very English game steeped in English culture.

But how about Senegal, what comes from there? Njom traditional wrestling of course. I didn't know that before I started my journey, but now I know how important that sport is to the local people.

It could be a board game, storytelling game, dancing game, something we call a sport or anything else that involves the activity of play.

How did you finance your journey?

I ran out of money the first time in Senegal, and would wake sweating from nightmares of returning to the UK.

I hade made a good friend, Julien Vergne, another ex games developer like myself, meeting by chance in the Sahara Desert, both making videos, mine about games his being comedy sketches made with local talent. Strange coincidences like that one are what make this kind of journey so entertaining.

We were both broke in Dakar and hatched a plan to offer our services as a video production team. We landed a professional video production job that week, something neither of us had done before, undertaking the entire process from script to screen. We worked for 1 month, splitting the proceeds on which I survived without needing to work again for the next 11 months.

Money wore thin again in Ghana, but as luck would have it there was plenty of video production work, so much so that I could have started a business there, but turned down the extra jobs for my life back on the road.

On reaching Madagascar I was cordially introduced to the ex pat community around a large bar table, conservationists on one side, oil & mineral exploiters on the other. None were interested in my skills making video games or videos.

"Can you build a website ?"

Asked one of them.

"A very basic one yes"

I responded.

That was the beginning of my new job as an IT consultant to technically challenged ex pat business owners in Madagascar. This is how I've managed to keep on the road all these years, working as I go.

Turns out I've been a digital nomad since 2004.

Where have you been?

Europe, Africa, South America, North America, Oceania and now in Asia.

Why are there so many blank or incomplete pages on this website ?

I've only made this site live quite recently and have a lot of work doing the data entry. It's a mountain of work!

What is your privacy policy ?

I will not share any information provided to me through this website or any related service.

When does a game become a sport ?

This question is most often asked of me by native English speakers, but less so from people of other languages, where "game" and "sport" are somewhat synonymous.

Whilst we often think of football as a sport, we refer to it as a game most of the time, "the beautiful game", "fancy a game of footy" etc. The ancient Greeks labelled all such activity under the verb "ludo" and in the romantic languages such as Spanish this still holds true; "I play a game" = "yo juego un juego".