Blaugust #24: It’s All About the Eyeballs

“Content creation” — it’s one of those words like “influencer” or “social media” that seem vague but have come to have very specific definitions in modern times. Content creation, as I understand it, is stuff generated to be ranked highly in search engines in order to entice people to follow it to your website, at which point they will be monetized and you will eventually get paid.

Today’s writing prompt, from Joar’s Warcraft Alt Addiction, is:

How did you get started in content creation?

I don’t create content any more. I blog occasionally, and it’s more for myself than anything. I find I like looking back on things I’ve done, games I’ve played and such, because otherwise, it’s easy to forget.

Once, I did, though.

Way, way back in the previous incarnation of this blog, I had been blogging for a few years, mostly about my EQ guild, but occasionally about other things I was doing. Part of my real life job was designing brochures for women’s clothing, and so I was learning Photoshop and photography and all sorts of cool stuff like that, and I’d write about that.

I go through phases where I pretend there is something else I’m better at, than programming, that maybe I could just step away from the high tech life and just live more simply, but with video games. Writing is fun, I could try that…?

Back a dozen or years ago or so, blogging was a real thing that normal people did. Now it’s all video, but back then, Tumbler, LiveJournal, GeoCities, Google Reader and even MySpace brought together a lot of people who were really brilliant writers. Some of them still write today, but most of the ones I idolized are gone (many of them into game development). I more than anything wanted to be part of that group, and back then, that meant writing.

I wasn’t very good at writing. But I did not let that stop me. I wrote every day, about anything. I commented on other people’s blogs, and linked back to other people’s blogs from my blog so that they would come and see what I had written, and maybe comment. If other people were writing about something, like, say, Warhammer Online, then I’d start writing about it, too. I’d analyze the traffic to my blog and focus on the things that people seemed to enjoy the most. I learned the secrets of reader engagement, which I’ve shared elsewhere.

I was incredibly excited when Massively started. It had originally been a World of Warcraft blog, but it was spreading out to cover other MMOs. WoW didn’t then and doesn’t now really interest me, but Massively covered really cool stuff. It made a huge splash among the bloggers I followed.

I started commenting at length on their posts, occasionally linking back to my blog, and sometimes I’d see that something I’d talked about made it’s way to Massively. When they advertised for new writers, I applied and got the position. They already knew me. I was among my people.

I’d stopped being a blogger, and become a content creator. Now I needed to pull in the views. At first, it was easy enough — I had a lot to say, but soon all my ideas dried up. There’d be a pool of topics in the writers chat, and I’d grab any I thought I could contribute to. I learned some evil tricks to get people’s attention, and used them, sparingly. But I did use them.

Eventually I found myself spending a lot of time just rewording press releases, and very little time doing anything else. West Karana (the blog) was dead, of course. If I had anything to write, I’d write it for Massively. I did spend mornings writing about the best content I could find in the blogs of my friends (my Daily Blogroll), and sometimes I’d be able to give an article of theirs a little more visibility.

I found the secret master rule of content creation at Massively. It is better to have an opinion than to have no opinion. There is no corollary rule that says, for instance, that it is better to be right than wrong. Nobody actually cares about that, since it’s so binary. If you have an opinion, though, that’s yours. Nobody can take it from you.

I’m just going to have some random opinions right now.

Pong is the best video game ever created

This is an easy one. Pong is not only the first video game, but arguably the first video game franchise. The game that would become Pong, Tennis for Two, was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham. The game had two paddles, for two players, and players knocked a ball back and forth. He was also supposedly really, really good at it.

Before Higinbotham, no video games. After Higinbotham, video games. Nolan Bushnell eventually cleaned up the physics and added scoring, but he didn’t invent it.

It was first, and it created the industry, but was it the best? When you think about it, it’s really the arc of getting better at something. Whether you’re trying to get better at writing, or driving a car, or speaking another language — you’re just iterating on what Pong teaches. It looks simple. You try it and find out it is harder than it looks. You play awhile and get a little better, but then you come across people better than you. Through practice, you achieve greatness.

Anything more than that is just fluff. Pong is the pure stuff. The source.

Pong is the worst video game ever created

Forget creativity, forget personality. What Higinbotham created was nothing more than a tool to turn people into hyperfocused machines without emotion or ambition. The bright bouncing square against a dark background has a hypnotic effect that would only be enhanced by such twitch fests as Space Invaders and Pac Man.

But Pong was first. Pong was the game that convinced marketers that people could be enticed to come stare at a screen and lose all sense of self as they sluiced off everything that made them special and unique until they became a silent machine, twisting a knob. And when the game finally released them, they would pay for the privilege of sinking into a trance again.

Turning people into automatons — that began with Pong. Being able to slaughter faceless people by the millions in shooters and eventually real life — you have Pong to thank for that.

The video game industry could have been started in a hundred different ways (for instance, in the physics-teaching game Spacewar!, now largely forgotten to history), but instead we got Pong.

It’s easy.

When I wanted to succeed at content creation, I first learned to just have an opinion. ANY opinion.

You’ve seen cable news, right? It works.