Or I was reading a very sad post about how the MMO blogosphere is doomed and if there's one thing that really works for me, it's sadness. If I'm sad, I can take comfort in knowing it will eventually end; which is the opposite for happiness, which always ends, which makes me sad, which is great. If other people are sad, I can awkwardly attempt to comfort them and sort of feel good about that. Or I can laugh at them and sort of feel bad about that, but laugh cures that, so it works out for me either way.
Anyway, to get to my point,
"Look at Kleps: who knows what he’s playing now, but he has another crazy thing to say every day, and thank god for that!" -Rem
I'd first like to point out the obvious problem: god. God is meant to be capitalized. Capitalization implies that it is The One and Only True God Who Can Kick Your god's Ass Because He Is a Total Badass. Whereas lowercase makes it sound like you rolled a few dice to pick one of the pantheon and if you don't pick Zeus you're pretty much screwed. Unless you pick Hades* in which case you're just planning ahead for the fate of your morally bankrupt soul, so maybe that works too. But I digress.
What am I playing these days? A lot of games! It's a strange thing, how not logging into WoW has caused me to play a lot of other games. Somehow, despite my old computer. Maybe if I whine about that enough someone will just suddenly mail me a really badass new computer. Or, the box from one for an epic troll. By which I mean that I would get epically trolled; I'm not calling myself an epic troll. But I have digressed again, which is a funny phrase if you ask me, speaking of which...
Okay, games I am currently playing:
Starcraft: Brood Wars: because I don't have Starcraft 2 but I watched too much Day 9.
Dungeon Raid for the iPhone, which seems to have recently been updated and I should totally write about, because I know this blog is a major attraction for the iPhone gamer crowd.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, which is annoying to type, but is a pretty fun game if you like a sandbox shooter with some variety of weapons to choose (and actually chose rather than one being the absolute best, though NATO weapons are often quite a bit better). I play it on and off when I feel like shooting people.
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword: Conquering the world is fun.
Civilization IV: Colonization: Way better economic game than the normal civ, but the combat is pretty basic and not as much fun.
Splinter Cell: I recently finished a couple of the early ones and really liked the emphasis on stealth rather than brute-force combat. I'm noticing a trend: WoW rogues are the worst rogues ever.
Team Fortress 2: I really like the emphasis on brute-force combat.
So that's what I'm currently playing. I was playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but that faded away a bit. I'm not sure why. Maybe I should start it up again.
I think I play a decent variety of games. This may be good, or bad. It gives me ideas, but often ideas aren't very applicable across genres. Sometimes it's a stretch, like saying dailies and space races in Civ are the same thing. But I do like this aspect: it means I can see other ways to do things, to imagine that how things are now is not how they must be. I remember when I was younger I'd sometimes dream of a game that integrated all levels of play, from the grunt in the FPS to the general in the RTS, all the way up to the galactic level of space-based navies, with everyone pushing all around and fighting their piece. But then I realized that I'd really hate to be the typical marine in a game of Starcraft.
Maybe this is relevant to the malaise. As I play more games beyond WoW, I have more ideas and more to think about and say. But I will also drift away from WoW. While I know that a third of my readers don't play WoW, that doesn't mean it isn't the main topic. So I might write better over time, but less of what people want to read, like some sort of pop band that decided to take some lessons and write some meaningful lyrics and suddenly all the teen girls stopped making them question the concept of age of consent.
Shit, I think I just got myself down. Or I'm just really tired.
OH MY GOD WHO IS GOING TO DO THE PPI AWARDS THIS YEAR!?
I'm going to go cry now.
* Careful readers may notice that Hades is a place, not a person, I don't care, it's all equally Not Right.
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10 comments:
/pat
And I'm not sure we're doomed, obviously a lot of bloggers struggle a little between having been more WoW-centric and now not so much anymore, but do we really always need to define ourselves and stick to a label? do you need a defined 'niche' to write on your blog?
I think not. and I don't think your readers care for it, either. like you said during your TN-chat too (ya, I actually listened to that), you still have plenty of things to say about WoW and playing other games besides that only makes you a more diverse poster. as long as you stay cranky and evul, all is well. ;)
Hades IS a person (if you consider Greek god a person) although his dominion came to be referred to as Hades too. (At least Wikipedia says so, I haven't heard of a place called Hades before.)
Also, there might not be much difference for the blogger between stopping and not stopping but blogging about something else than WoW but it does feel different for the readers, I would say.
As the bloggers turn away from WoW, so do the readers. You should embrace the opportunity and tell them what they are supposed to play now ;)
a word of caution re: splinter cell is that double agent wasn't properly ported and ubisoft has no intention of fixing it. it's pretty much unplayable on a PC
-Ben
"Shit, I think I just got myself down. Or I'm just really tired."
Excellent! It worked: I invented blogger flu. Now you've caught it, do pass it on.
I think Rebecca from the MMO Melting Pot got permission from Larísa to keep up the tradition in years to come.
Believe it or not, I was wondering what entity to thank for your continued blogging, and settled on the lower-case-god to de-emphasize any actual religious implications :P
And what you're playing is indeed relatively evident from your posts, the point being that you have a lot to say regardless of what you're playing!
"WoW rogues are the worst rogues ever."
Take-home message of the week, there, methinketh. Of course, the implication that one learns this lesson best by playing other games is crucial, too.
...as a cog in the great game development machine, it's expected that I play a lot of different games. It's necessary to really understand my job.
Before it was just fun. So it's kinda nice that those dovetail.
@Syl: I need a niche of some sort, perhaps not defined by a specific game or gaming at all, but people would expect something. Otherwise it would be chaos and they could not reliably assume that a post is enjoyable to read.
@Imakulata: "Also, there might not be much difference for the blogger between stopping and not stopping but blogging about something else than WoW but it does feel different for the readers, I would say." Could you rephrase this? I feel like you're on to something here, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the phrasing.
@Nils: Random games that Steam has for sale?
@Anonymous: It's a bit late, it was randomly on sale on Steam.
@Melmoth: Be careful, if blogger flu gets anything close the the reaction of swine flu, you'll be butchered and dumped in the desert.
@Shintar: Please stop interrupting my frightened panic with reassuring facts.
@Rem: So you're an atheist?
@Tesh: I'm not sure rogues can be any better. WoW does not reward solo play and rogues should be a solo class, or at least a class that doesn't play next to the rest of the group. We could look at TF2 for inspiration, but I don't think getting one-shot by teammates would go over well in the current community.
I am indeed. The wider question is though whether it is appropriate to imply that capitalised God, i.e. The One And Only With All The Ass Kicking Attached, should be concerned with the preservation of blogs I like to read. Or whether rolling the dice to pick just any random one is more in line with the issue at hand.
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