So, games… that’s a thing, right?

It’s kinda sad when a blogger fades away. Sadder when it’s me. I’m still blogging, though, more than ever — just not about games. I got fascinated with going around New England with my car and/or my bike, taking pictures of bridges, and having a reason to _explore_. That’s my “Bartle” type — Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, Killer. Except in real life I am not very social, care almost nothing for achievements, and would never kill anyone, so it’s an “E”. The bridge blog is called Life, On a Bridged, and I doubt many gamers would find it all that interesting.
Someday next year I’ll run out of interesting bridges within a couple of hours of here that aren’t all in New York City (I do get some of those now and again), and then I think I’ll start photographing the historic buildings, too. Travel. That’s a pretty popular topic for a blog. Bridge hunting is still kinda obscure, but you gotta start with what you love.
If I’d actually contributed to the New Blogger Initiative, that’s one of the things I would have written about. Write about what you love. Don’t write something just to write about it because, honestly, blogging is 99% for you alone. Your characters and your games will be forgotten, people don’t want to read about that kind of crap. They want to read about you, and your stories, and how the stories changed you. Raw, human stuff. If you can put those kinds of things in a blog, you can write about _anything_ and people will read it.
Start every blog post by writing, “This is a story about me.” Write what follows. Go back and delete the first six words. The bloggers I love the most, the ones I read their every post, the ones I think of as friends even when they don’t circle me back on Google+, those are the ones that most seem like people to me.
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Games! Right! This is a gaming blog! Well, no, this is MY blog, and it’s about me. And games. By the way, I post and write a lot of stuff on Google+ — circle me. My handle is my name. My icon is an 8 bit avatar with dark blonde hair and humongous glasses, just like in real life. I am my own avatar, but slightly less jagged.
I asked Raptr what games I’ve been playing lately. It reminded me that I play Marvel Avengers Alliance on Facebook all the frickin’ time. Before work and before bed. Times in between.
My version of the Avengers has as many dramatic in-fighting and shaky alliances and heroes going off on their own as in the comics. Sif, Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk were my go-to girls at the beginning. Now, Sif hardly comes back from Asgard, what with wedding preparations. She-Hulk is back lawyering. Ms. Marvel and Hawkeye are an item, and we’ll overlook his recent infatuation with Nightingale. She’s not coming. Captain America and the Hulk are my steadfast front line these days. Spider Woman comes calling when the Maggia are on deck. She works alone. Cyclops makes short work of mechanical enemies.
The game is incredibly grindy; you have to repeat each mission a dozen times to get complete mastery and gain the currency that allows you to unlock premium missions and recruit new heroes. But where I’ve come to leave a game when the grind begins — I played through Diablo 3 precisely once and haven’t touched it since — MAA is so rote and requiring such little strategy that my mind runs free and I can make up my little stories for my heroes, do some battles, send them off on their away missions while I am away and that’s that. Playdom recently nerfed the battles so they are much easier.
Other games? Yup, there have been others. Wizard101, another game with some similar numbers in the name that I cannot write about, DDO, D&D4E, others… I’ll write about them. I like gaming still, but I have changed my relationship with games. I’ll write about that, too.