Catching up on the theme weeks with “How I stay motivated”, and this is… hard for me, as I don’t really stay motivated.
What do I get from blogging? Not really that much. The most “real world” acclaim I’ve gotten was from my bridge blog — I’d get towns asking me for permission to use my photos on their websites and stuff. That was nice.
But for gaming… not so much. I don’t really play popular games. Even when I do, like when I played FFXIV, I can’t think of anything really interesting to say about them that doesn’t echo every other person’s post, so there’s really no reason to add to the noise.
Blogging takes time away from gaming. I don’t really game a lot anyway, and the days I could come home and spend the night in an MMO are over. I just don’t have that kind of patience, and in most MMOs, it’s hard to find people at my level. My low level, that is — even at my best, in the EverQuest days, I was never hardcore. I played a lot, back in the day, but I mostly just wanted to hang out, not so much to dominate the server.
Ultimately, in gaming, I just want to play with friends and not really worry about progression.
So… writing. Since I have had analytics of one sort or another running since I returned to blogging a year, year and a half or so ago, I know what sort of posts get traction. These are compiled from the beginning of August.
Top four are about AI art or my home page. Next is a game review, the answers to Exapunks puzzle, reviews of mobile games, how to increase your chaos frame to get the best Ogre Battle: MofBQ ending, a cache of Persistence of Vision models I haven’t touched in a decade, and a joke post I created to see if I could craft a post that would get search engine referrals.
What isn’t here are any of the Blaugust posts, or any of my tabletop gaming posts or, you know, the kind of posts I like writing. I am kind of happy the Symphony of War review is being read. Almost all the titles here were specifically written in order to be the kind of article that invites clicks.
So pretty much I don’t write about tabletop gaming or MMOs anymore.
I don’t believe people really read blogs anymore — not mine, clearly (aside from some fellow bloggers whom I treasure, you know who you are), but I wonder how many single author blogs really would make enough money to allow someone to do it full time. I’m sure there are a few, but I would imagine that would take a significant commitment. At least two worthy articles a day.
Not blogging for money or fame or community… I think my personal blogging is more some form of narcissism than anything else.
These days, if you want to create a community, you don’t use words. You use videos. You adopt an onscreen persona and create videos on a schedule, and you never ever miss an upload day or people will abandon you. You learn to never, ever stop talking so that even if you’re not on camera, people know you’re talking to them. You become a content creator. You chase the popular topics and react to anything that touches upon your area of expertise.
If I were smart, I’d just haunt popular commercial blogs, like Kotaku, Ars Technica, Polygon, Massively Overpowered and the like. My comments would be read way more than my posts here, and who knows, maybe I could get some freelance articles posted.
I’ve had a lot of fun, this Blaugust, going to other people’s blogs and interacting more. Maybe the best lesson here is that I should just boost discussion on someone else’s blog, rather than wall off a discussion in a hundred smaller blogs.
But I guess we all do like our walled gardens.
Wouldn’t Blaugust make more sense to just have a special Blaugust blog that we could all post in? I think so.
Is anyone in this corner of the blogosphere actually blogging because they hope, let alone expect, to be read outside of a tiny niche of roughly likeminded individuals? It seems to me the only bloggers I hear mentioning it are the handful still around who were doing it well before I started and I’ve been at it for over a decade.
Those are the ones who mention a whole load of blogging websites that I’ve only ever heard of in their reminiscences, places that apparently used to act as clearing houses for gaming blogs and which drew a large, external audience. I’ve been reading blogs for nearly twenty years, almost twice as long as I’ve been blogging, and I never knew about any of these places when they were supposedly active, so it’s all a bit of a puzzle to me.
The other thing that always comes up is the boom in mmorpg blogs around first WoW and then WAR before it launched and crashed. I neither played nor had much interest in either of those games until well after all the hype had died down so again, even though I was deeply immersed in the mmorpg genre, I paid no attention to any of that and in fact never even heard about it until after the fact.
My expectations when I began blogging were very low key. I intended to write for myself and maybe get a few comments now and then. If anything, I’ve had a significantly larger response than I ever expected. I based those expectations on what I saw and read at a number of blogs at the time, one of which was West Karana, which I considered than and still consider to be among the best mmorpg blogs I’ve read. (I do hope you get the domain name back.)
I guess if someone does have expectations or ambitions to make money or further their career by blogging, the kind of level at which most Blaugust blogs operate would be very disappointing. I really doubt anyone actually does have those expectations though. I think it’s much more like having something like amateur dramatics as a hobby. All we really expect is to have fun and put on a bit of a show for friends and family. No-one’s expecting a Hollywood talent scout to turn up and start waving a contract about. That would just be weird!
I was considering deleting this post, and I still might. No, I don’t write only for myself, and I treasure conversations here and on other people’s blogs.
I read on blog after blog that, during Blaugust, there’s too much to read, and few people are going to go to a hundred blogs each day looking for something new. Your drama example is great — but I think the situation for most people is renting a hall and performing one person plays to nobody; maybe every couple of performances someone wanders in, stays a couple minutes, then leaves forever. How long before you’d just give up?
Blaugust is divisive, in the sense that it encourages people to go out on their own and start their own blogs instead of collaborating with others on a shared blog. A stick can be broken, but a bundle of sticks is strong.
Next year, I’m going to suggest to Bel that we have an optional, common place to post stuff, see what that feels like. I think for those who don’t really want the pressure of writing a new post every day, it might be just the thing that keeps them writing through the year.
Hey! Bravo! You’re braver than me for putting up a post with the exact thoughts I’ve had. Well, not for the common blogging area; that’s quite unique! I’ve had thoughts of quitting blogging all together after this Blaugust — not to anyone’s fault but my own mind you. I will say that one thing Blogging does for me is it allows me to read my own thoughts outside of my head and analyze it because it gets kind of noisy inside there. It’s a gaming therapist of sorts.
I know I’ve told you this before, but West Karana made me fall in love with the idea of game blogging long before I jumped on the band wagon. I still remember your Everquest comics quite fondly. Just to reiterate what Bhagpuss said, you’ll always be a big fish in the little fishtank of game blogging in my eyes.
btw, if I was to analyze my site traffic, my most popular post ever was on Moshi Monsters, and Moshi Monsters banned my account because of it for some reason LOL.
I think maybe you mean the Crimson Eternity website 🙂 Those comics were fun, but they’d take a weekend to do, and I was spending so much money buying fonts!
Blogging sure was different back then.
Oh, also — I really love reading what you write, whenever and whatever you write. And since you usually are under NDAs for your current work, I hardly ever even know what you made until you do one of these retrospectives 🙂