By Paco Garcia Jaen
I am a firm believer in Paying It Forward. I have been running my website, podcasts and videos largely following that principle and I intend to continue doing so for as long as I can afford it. If you don’t know what Paying It Forward entails, it basically means that, instead of repaying a favour to the person who did you the favour, you repay to another three people instead.
Without asking for anything in return. That’s pretty key.
Since I started my website, I have tried to do more deeds to people than the deeds I have received. I have never asked for anything in return and I very rarely ask for review games. When a game is given to me, I do the unboxing videos and/or the podcast review and/or the written review. Sometimes it takes me a while, I admit, but every game gets the deserved mention.
I do the same for most of the games I buy, including Kickstarters. And many, many times I have backed Kickstarter and other projects just because I want to pay it forward for someone else. And oftentimes I buy products and do reviews or any promotion just because I like the people and they are friends.
So I’d like La Base Secreta to work on similar basis.
The cafe will hopefully become hive for gamers to come and play games, so I want to use that to help promote games that could have it difficult to find a distributor or publisher in Spain.
I want to turn the cafe into the centre where distributors and publishers big and small can come to try games and decide if they want to publish it in Spain. I am going to make sure that we keep a very detailed and up-to-date inventory of both board games and role playing games and make it freely available for anyone to read and play at the cafe any time and every time they want.
And I will continue to tweet, talk about it in Facebook and Google + and do the reviews, both written, podcast and videos for every single game we will have at the cafe.
And I want nothing in return.
And of course I will benefit too. Hopefully that’ll bring people to my cafe and hopefully they will buy drinks and food that will keep the business going. But they won’t have to buy anything.
And I know a lot of people who’ll say I’m mad. I don’t care.
Because I have faith in both the gaming community and because I believe is the right thing to do.