About Shawn Struck: Bio
Shawn Struck has over 13 years of experience in graphic design and web design. He is a prolific freelance writer on geek culture in general, and video games in particular.
His writing has appeared on 1up.com, been featured on the front page of Yahoo.com, and in the magazine PC Gamer. He was also a weekly comnist for 411 Mania, Featured Video Games Contributor for Associated Content (now Yahoo! Voices), and co-hosted the Geekly Weekly podcast for a year with current Staff Editor for the New York Times Photo Desk James Neives.
Shawn Struck has been a social media consultant to small business and his digital design work spans everything from role-playing game supplements to logo, t-shirt and poster design for professional wrestlers.
He lives in a secret underground lair in South Plainfield, NJ. He also feels really weird writing about himself in the third person.
What Industry Professionals Are Saying About Shawn Struck:
Shawn Struck is as close to the soul of Internet geek culture as it gets, having been there almost since the beginning. He was blogging before they were called blogs. He was writing articles on gamer culture before anyone thought of it as gamer culture. He was arranging covers of Final Fantasy music before OCRemix, interviewing Nobuo Uematsu before GameSpot, running forums before "community moderator" ever became a paid position, and doing human interest pieces on gamer parenting for a readership that was, at the time, mostly teenagers--and he's never let up since. For over fifteen years, he's been both a keen observer of nerd culture and one of its great bastions of conscience, cutting through oceans of slick PR and fanboy bickering to deliver genuinely insightful commentary on the issues actually matter to fans: the creative future of popular media, the changing ways in which we enjoy them, the communities we build around them, and the rights of those who are marginalized within those communities. As a game developer, when I want to look beyond the mechanics of a game and into how and by whom it will be played, or delve into the most recent debate or controversy dividing the community, I know exactly who to ask: long before the big gaming news sites can bang out a blog post, Shawn is already there.-- Kevin Chen, Game Developer
Whether it's blog posts on social justice or articles on the gaming industry, Shawn Struck's writing shows the attention to and respect for his craft -- and for people -- that make his work so appealing. His writing is smart without being pretentious and he seems genuinely uninterested in resorting to the sort of lowest-common-denominator copy that the geekblogging world is rife with. What a breath of fresh air!-- Marissa Sammy, writer & former Copy Editrix of Sequential Tart
"Your professional and hands-on experience coupled with your library of informative and well-written Video Game content establishes you as an expert in the field."-- Brenna Boyce, Manager of Community Programs, Associated Content.
"...1UP published one of the most important stories in the site's history... it is glorious."-- Jeremy Parish, Editor, 1UP.com on Shawn Struck's "8 Bit-Lit: Worlds of Power".