Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

17. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here?

I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.

We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal. I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.

And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead. And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case. As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.

So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.

Still, it was a heady time. There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day. I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere. Look at us.

The community of old

Some of those site persist. Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going. A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates. Others are around, but on different mediums. Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.

More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive. Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.

During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter. They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.

Brent from VirginWorlds got a card

People could afford to be picky. You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following. I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!) Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games. We argued with each other. SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars. I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.

It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.

Sure, new venues show up. There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers. And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.

XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!

But all of those got along pretty well. I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr. I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.

Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that. Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.

Page view for TAGN by year

I mean look at that line. It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.

And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from. The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.

My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.

Highlight of my Presentation

Okay, there were a few more people than that. But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.

And that is certainly one way to look at things. The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.

Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.

I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.

I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim. Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.

If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game. That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.

Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience. Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.

Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists. Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.

Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words? Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.

Should I eschew words and just do pictures? Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?

No, that can’t be it. I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform. Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.

Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.

I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.

I am not sure that is 100% true. Zero readers might be too much quiet. But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined. For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis. Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.

The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one. That one is for another day… or maybe never.” Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.

And there is the pleasure, the having written. The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed. Did I soften on this expansion or that release? Am I nostalgic for some title I panned? Maybe?

Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online. Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes. Was it really that bad? Did I miss something in it? Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?

Probably less likely, in all honestly. My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.

And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture. Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.

Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.

And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust? Look at them all! Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.

I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.

As always, if you can find the time, please visit some of our participants. We all like a page view or three when we can get them.

Some Co-op Crafting Survival Game FOMO

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

22. Únor 2024 v 16:45

This whole round of suvival game focus started for me because the makers of No Man’s Sky, Hello Games, announced their coming title, Light No Fire. The promise of that got me worked up on the genre once more.

Light no Fire… not in 2024 at least

That led to me looking into some possible Valheim alternatives… Valheim being my current gold standard for open world, co-op suvival titles… during the Steam Winter Sale. I actually bought some things and played them!

But none of them quite scratched the right itch and while I got more suggestions, eventually I just wanted to play something, so we kicked off a new Valheim world. Done and done, right?

Of course, the day I put down the credit card to rent a server for 30 days and roll up a fresh world one of the possible alternative candidates, Conan Exiles, goes on sale for half off. I wasn’t willing to experiment for $40, but for $20 I might have.

But I was committed and wanted to play something, though I wasn’t so invested in Valheim that I couldn’t have been derailed… but nothing quite caused me to be so moved.

First up was Palworld, or Pokemon with Guns, which by reasonable measures… dollah dollah bills… has been a huge success and has sold millions of copies. This seemed to be right up my alley, to the point that G-Portal even had server rentals for it right away. This featured on a number of blogs I followed.

I thought about jumping into this… but wasn’t quite convinced. Close, but not quite there.

Then there was Enshrounded, which is also on my Steam wishlist and which also tickled the shared world co-op aspect of my desires, and which was also featured on G-Portal server rentals, and which had also grabbed the interest of some other bloggers. It sounded good and I thought about grabbing it, yet another early access title. But I haven’t so far.

And then this week Nightengale landed on Steam, once again in the suvival co-op crafting genre, and once again grabbing a few people I know, including a couple of the bloggers in the neighborhood. (Belghast was on about it yesterday, as was Bhagpuss.) It is in early access and might need some work, but it did catch my eye. Private servers are not a thing it seems, instead you can share your part of their world with just your friends if I read things correctly… which also means when thier servers are down you’re not playing.

I am sure there was also something else out there that popped up… Last Epoch maybe, or was it some other title… I don’t remember all of them. But it did feel like the universe had decided to mock me a bit for my desire for a Valheim-like co-op experience by throwing all of these new and tempting options at me after I committed to the Valheim.

Then again, I am happy playing Valhelm right now. It has an ease about it that can soak up hours of time, We have been moving through the opening biomes at a quick pace, but that has been helped along by mods and familiarity, which isn’t a bad thing. I suspect that we will slow down a bit at the plains, and that the mistlands will take us long enough to conquor that the ashlands will have finally arrived by the time we finish off that boss, which will give us another biome to master.

So I feel the temptation of these other titles, the fear of missing out if I am not there at the beginning the way I was for Valheim.

On the other hand, if those titles are any good, they’ll be there waiting for us. And I also know that the last three years has seen Valheim improve a great deal. As the song says, fools rush in… and sometimes they get the best seats, and other times they pay the price for being too early on the scene.