Well originally, like most, I just joined Steam to play games on my PC with friends and never really cared about the community aspects of it, because at that time I was also part of a lot of online forums where I enjoyed making little graphic designs for people and helping people with questions. That mostly filled my desire to be part of an online community. However as time went on the forums I were apart of sort of died out and I started getting more into Steam to scratch that itch of online community. I started discovering the group feature and the discussion boards Steam had to offer and tried my best to use Steam to replicate what I enjoyed and missed about online forums. As I met more people on Steam, I noticed a lot of people were making their Steam profile into their little corner of the internet. They'd often share tidbits about their life, and use the features Steam had to offer to display art they had created or pictures they had taken. The level of personalization and artistic vision some people had for their profile really struck a chord with me and reminded me of the old days when I used to make graphic art on forums. I love creating visuals, so I decided to try my hand at my own customized profile. Thanks to my past visual art experience I was able to create exactly what I had in mind, and the limitations of the Steam showcases really forced me to get creative and it was such a fun challenge. A lot of what I wanted to do had never really been done before so it was a learning process, and at this point I had also started a Steam group for those who also enjoyed profile customization. As the group grew, so did the people visiting my profile. And this kind of led to a lot of people asking me how I achieved certain aspects of my profile. How I designed certain art and used certain text formatting, etc. I was happy to answer these questions and help others because helping people was something I really enjoyed from my old forum experience, and it was so cool seeing people be able to achieve their artistic vision for their Steam profile with a bit of guidance from me. Over time I started receiving the same questions over and over again, and it became a bit tiring to answer them all one on one, which is why I decided to start using the Steam guide feature which allows you to write and publish tutorials that use text and images. At the time, most Steam guides were on the topic of games, and very few were focused on Steam as a platform. So it was a bit of a niche and an unexplored topic for a lot of people, but I figured I'd write one guide on my most asked question regarding how to identify Steam backgrounds. (Each profile can set a background, and many people didn't know how to find out what background someone was using.) So with my guide topic ready I went to work on writing a guide for it, and at that point everything just clicked. It was everything I loved from my forum days. I could write something that helps people, while also using graphic design and creativity to make the guide visually appealing. I had a lot of fun formatting the guide and making it as straight forward as possible. It was a fun artistic challenge. When I finished it and I was ready to publish it, I didn't care if it would be read by a lot of people, because it was so enjoyable to make. So I clicked publish and announced it over on my artwork group. To my surprise it went over very well and people seemed to enjoy my format. So from there I figured why not continue the process and make more guides to address more of the questions I had been getting. As the artwork community on Steam grew, so did the customization ability of each profile, and so more and more topics were available for me to make guides on. So that's what I did, each time I saw a question people were asking I'd write a new guide on it. It's been a great hobby and slowly over time I've built up a community and large resource database of guides for anyone to enjoy. I think Steam profile customization goes beyond just a gaming profile, I think for a lot of people they've made it their home on the internet. A lot of their personality and design tastes go into each profile, and it's very fulfilling to know that in some small part I was able to contribute to that.