About Maverick Van Houten

Hi there! My name is Maverick Van Houten. Actually, that’s just my pen name, as the “real” me doesn’t like to have an online presence (not even a single Social Media profile)! That said, despite the pen name, what you see is what you get. Maverick does not pretend to be something he’s not (he doesn’t have any social media either).

I have been gaming since I was very young, which is somewhat unfortunately over 3 decades ago by now. I started with Frogger, Digger and Outrun, playing on my father’s computer. The first game I loved to death on my first own computer was Populous: The Beginning.

I got pretty good at Populous, but not because of innate talent; just hundreds of hours of practice. I have more natural skill in RPGs (both turn-based and real-time) than in strategy games. The story of a game also became more and more important to me. It’s natural, then, that I started focusing more on those genres as I got older.

My favorite games now are those of the Trails, Yakuza and Persona series. In the realm of “neverending” games, you will most often find me playing Path of Exile on most seasons, while dabbling in Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds during PoE’s “off-seasons”.

Answers For Gamers is not my main job. I work as a copywriter, quality assurance freelancer and also take on some light project management. You can find some of my thoughts on this on my site Random Business Bits. Don’t expect it to be as updated as this one, though, I only post there when there is something worth writing about.

About Answers For Gamers

Okay, so you know by now that I’m a fervent gamer. There are many of those, they don’t all feel the need to create their own site, so why do I? Well, it’s mainly because in recent years we have been moving more and more towards video content for video games. I want to provide an alternative.

There is nothing wrong with video content, of course. Still, some people prefer reading or want to look up something quickly on the go without putting a video on full blast. The main reason I prefer sticking to text content for video games, however, is to prevent spoilers.

YouTube and video game spoilers… it’s hard to name a more iconic duo. The problem isn’t so much in the videos you end up watching, it’s the recommendations. I got stuck in a random substory in Yakuza 0 and to this day still get spoilered about the most recent games in the series. Watching the content in incognito helps a bit, but it’s annoying.

Compared to other video gaming sites, I try to differentiate myself by giving you what you came for right away. I don’t first define the problem, give you a full background story on why you may want to know the answer to your question, assure you that I’ll get to answering it a few hundred words later, etc. Like the site’s slogan says “No Hassle, Just Answers.” If you want to see me rant about myself you can do so on this page, it doesn’t need to be on every other page.

All written content on this site is by my hand, unless noted otherwise.

Contacting Maverick

Want to say hi? Feel free to send me an email at maverick@answersforgamers.com!

Examples of things you can mail me about: constructive feedback, content suggestions, advertisements that make sense (no guest posts or other ads disguised as content)

Examples of things I am not interested in (and will simply ignore): buying your product, having you write an article on my site, writing an article on your site