Four Years of Thought

This is going to be a bit of an odd video this morning, and largely one without any screenshots.  There has been a side project that I have been working on for some reason.  Like I am not purposefully being vague, but more that I am not entirely certain why I started down this path or what exactly has kept me going.  In theory it is going to lead to some sort of a year end post, but I am still working out the details there.  The important part is that this side project has caused me to go back through every post between 2013 and 2016… aka the period where my blog has actually been prolific.  For reference… there are a little shy of 1500 posts on this blog, and all but about a hundred of those have occurred during the window above.  It is really when I started doing the daily posting thing, that my blog became of any actual relevance…  and even then I have backed off that significantly with only doing week day posts.  The strange thing about this process is that you can learn an awful lot about yourself when you sift through roughly four years worth of posts… or in truth 45 months.  It was bizarre seeing how I have changed and how my thoughts have evolved during that period.  I’ve always prided myself in being someone in a constant state of flux… picking up new ideas, evaluating them and then either keeping my old one… or jettisoning it in favor of the new information.  This is extremely evident when you look at that first year versus what I am currently writing.

The weirdest take away that I was not expecting…  is that I am simply not interacting with other bloggers as much as I used to be.  At face value that seems odd because I am actually talking to other bloggers on a daily basis be it through social media, a private chat network like slack/discord or now the brand new Imzy forum.  What I mean instead is that there is not quite the blog to blog exchange of ideas that there once was.  While going through my posts I noticed that so often there was another blog post that would ultimately spawn me to talk about the same issue, or a tweet that kicked off an idea.  That just isn’t happening nearly as much as it once did, and I think that is a multi fold issue.  Firstly I am much more sluggish in reading blog posts than I used to be, thanks to trying to write a blog post column…  and as a result ballooning my RSS feed to include over six hundred gaming blogs.  However the other thing going on is that it feels like as a broad community we are simply not creating the same gaming think pieces that we once did.  We are no longer dragging out mechanics and tropes and investigating what works or does not work about them.  That is not to say that some people are not doing this…  but it feels like less of the community is and as a result the constant flow of ideas is not really there.

The other thing that I noticed is how much of a chilling effect Gamer Gate had on our community as a whole.  There are a whole lot of folks who simply left the game blogging community during that time and have never really returned.  Some of my most constant collaborators from the past…  simply don’t blog about games anymore.  Even more however seemed to greatly reduce their regular posting around that time.  It is as though we all got afraid to talk to one another, at least in a public venue like our blogs.  Now that same discourse is happening, but it is playing out through walled gardens like slack and discord, and not out there in the open for anyone to spawn an additional topic off of.  I know that personally I am significantly more guarded for fear of a wave of horribleness washing over my blog and sweeping me out to sea. The fear of this wave however has eroded more of the community than the wave probably could have itself.  The new normal after these events seems to be that we largely have kept our thoughts to ourselves, or shifted our attention to other communities to talk about.  Movies and Media for example seems to be a popular offshoot from our community for example.

I am not really presenting any remedy here, but just mourning the way the community felt… and how it influenced my blog.  I’ve always been a bit of an island here on the Aggronaut, but in the past I would take in ideas from outside myself…  sift through them and present them in my own way, and I just find myself not doing that nearly as much as I once did.  I think there is a general feeling that something is missing however, because of the rapid effect that a random twitter storm ended up spawning the Imzy forum.  I think there is a general sense that something changed, without a real understanding of how to get back to normal afterwards.  I might just be talking out of my ass here, but I have definitely felt it and for the last year and some change I have largely felt “off balance”.  It is only recently that the clouds have felt like they have tangibly parted for me… and that I can once again see any glimmer of the sun.  The past year and a half has been a time when we are constantly barraged with a shit storm of forces well beyond our control, and I honestly felt battered by it to the point of not being able to think much past the current week.  Things are not better, in fact things seem to be getting worse… but in many ways it feels like I maybe have my “sea legs” and have figured out how to return to some sense of stability.  I am attempting to stream again… and I am contemplating trying to reboot “Bel Folks Stuff”.

Literally everything in this post might just be a “from my perspective” sort of thing.  Maybe it is just me who has been in an odd place, and have detached from the community.  My entire life I have alternated between periods of engagement and periods of retraction when things got too chaotic.  I tend to think of these as “turtling” when I pull my head back up inside of my shell.  The past year has felt like one long turtle period, where I was constantly in hiding from whatever perceived thing was chasing me.  All of that said… it still feels like our community has also retracted during that same period.  Folks are largely doing their own thing now and I think in a large part it has been our way of forward momentum.  I guess I am ready to poke my head back out and return to what used to be “normal”.  I am wondering if others are feeling the same thing.  I am not happy with myself, and have not been for a very long time… but that too can change.  I realize this is a bit of an odd morning post, but it largely has some things that I have been mulling over and wanted to throw out there.  Reading four years of your own writing can make you extremely introspective… and in truth I wouldn’t suggest doing it.  That said I still think the project I am currently working on is going to be interesting at least.

6 thoughts on “Four Years of Thought”

  1. Gamergate is what pushed me away from Twitter, everyday it was just long-time gamers and bloggers yelling about something or another, and I got into a few rounds of it. Waste of time, loss of friendships. My positive feelings toward acceptance of others clashed with what still seems to be an insiders club when it comes to the game dev/journalism/media circles. There were two different arguments going on at the same time, and separating them was impossible. You were flagged as one camp or the other. Nonsense really, sad times indeed.

    I still have my blog, and switched focus more on my D&D stuff for a while when my campaign was running. Posting every couple of months isn’t exactly hitting the spot for followers and comments. Now I’m pretty deeply invested in another project that takes up a lot of my time that I would use to blog. I currently have interesting stuff that I could find reason to post about, but my primetime has long since passed. I mostly keep the blog around for people wanting some Warhammer nostalgia, or googling random D&D related things.

    I hold fond memories of the community and still poke my head in occasionally.

  2. I have definitely seen a change in content, both from new entrants and old hands. I made a decision when I began that I was going to blog almost exclusively about MMOs and I’ve by and large kept to that. When I started most of the blogs I read were doing the same. Now they’re not.

    I also very much agree that Gamergate had a hand in this. A number of bloggers I follow – I won’t name them but I remember who they are – posted quite specifically that they were either self-censoring or giving up blogging because of a fear of what might happen if they attracted the attention of the baying horde. I have always been cautious about what I choose to blog about – it didn’t take Gamergate to make me censor myself – but I did turn up the sensitivity on the “Do I really want to post this?” meter around that time.

    On the other hand, I used to be able to read all the blogs on my blogroll/Feedly every day. Now I can’t. There are too many and the posts are too lengthy and detailed to skim. I don’t at all feel that blogging per se is declining in popularity or presence – if anything the opposite. Blogs that mainly write about MMOs, though, those are getting a lot harder to find.

    I’m not particularly concerned. I mostly blog as a form of personal diary and also as an outlet for my lifelong obsession with writing. In that respect I can and probably will keep going even if no-one reads me but me. I do much prefer it when there’s the kind of blog-to-blog interaction you miss, though, and I try to keep that up as much as I can.

    We don’t seem to have anyone doing the old “Blog Round-Up” thing that Tipa, Liore and Eri/J3w3l used to do. Those were pretty essential in keeping the whole “all in it together” thing going, I thought. Syp does his best with his regular blogging link posts on MassivelyOP but that’s not the same as having someone on the inside doing it. It must be very hard work though – I wouldn’t want to take it on, I know that.

  3. It’s not just you. I’ve felt this happening too, especially over this year. I’m not big on Slack/Discord interaction (I’m just not much of a chatter), and my Twitter usage is spotty at best, so I’ve really felt less and less connection to other bloggers lately. I still post stuff, but the comments and conversations I used to enjoy on my blog and other blogs has dwindled to almost nothing.

    This isn’t me grumbling about lack of comments – I love comments as much as anyone, but the feeling of this is something bigger than just that. Lack of comments and community comes from a larger underlying issue. I don’t know if it’s Gamer’s Gate, but it could very well have started there. I don’t know if communication such as Slack/Discord is edging out blogging, but I’m seeing less new bloggers and a number of the long-time bloggers taking a break.

    I’m also trying to comment more to… well… be the change I want to see. I really do miss the feeling of the community we had when I first seriously started my gaming blog. I know that things come and go, but I’ve been doing some soul searching myself on what kind of blog I want to run, and how my content can benefit others. Or if I should take a break.

  4. I just recently started blogging again kind of because I got tired of getting into arguments on social media constantly. But as a console gamer and a very old, very cranky, very sensitive and very introverted person I’ve always been a fringe element. I tried Imzy but I just don’t have the energy to debate and defend my points. I’d rather throw something out there and you can choose to read it and choose to agree or disagree on your own terms. I’m not really interested in a discussion most of the time because virtually all discussions that take place in an open forum like Imzy or Twtter wind up devolving into some kind of attack. (My definition of attack is much broader than most people’s…see above re very sensitive.)

    But more directly to your point, earlier this week I wrote a post about skimpy outfits in games and I was actually very nervous about posting it. I asked Angela to read it to see if she found it offensive. She didn’t but even that didn’t put me at ease because she’s fairly moderate and tolerant in her views. I know there are a lot of people super angry about gender issues and I wasn’t really sure if I was going to poke that hornet’s nest. I don’t know if this is specifically gamer gate related, but in general I feel like people online are often looking for something to be outraged about. I finally did post it but I very nearly hit delete. I think you may be right that with so many angry people online, some bloggers just decided they don’t need the headache. (In the end I forgot the fact that after leaving a blog to lie mostly fallow for a few years, no one outside your ‘inner circle’ reads what you write anyway!)

    I think in the next few years the world is going to become very unpleasant indeed, and that has made me go back and try to see things in a different perspective. I’m trying to get past pushing people aside due to minor differences, because when the bombs start to go off (literally or otherwise), the fact that a person hated the game console or TV show or MMO that I loved is going to be inconsequential and whether that person is trustworthy & dependable and basically good is what is going to matter. It’s hard for me though. I have so many buttons that people can push that make me crazy. I need fewer buttons. If anyone has a button removal tool, please let me know. 🙂

  5. I think there’s a kind of reticence from the field to admit that MAYBE the game might have ended. Looking out into the stands and seeing fewer occupied seats, or the backs of people as they’re heading for the exits…

    We don’t WANT the game to be over because A) it’s fun, and B) it’s kind of what we do, how we met people back when blogging was king, and C) it’s an outlet for us to have a space which feels personal and private, but with a wink and a nudge, we know is public.

    I’ve mostly left blogging. I’m still keeping up with my D&D recaps, but that’s about it. Originally, blogging was a big, massive introductory post used to try and get people to want to know me. It’s been hit or miss over the years, but I finally got a place where I’m comfortable with what the blog has done for me. It’s now time to stop trying to get my reach to grow, and time to start working on what has been achieved by working on the actual interaction with people that social media and blogging has put me in touch with.

    The Imzy project has been going really well. We got a lot of eyeballs, and once we threw in an Introduction post we got some of those lurkers to come out of the woodwork. But beyond that, we’re TALKING more. That was the blog’s one weakness — it was a pulpit. Comments were hecklers, or maybe a book club discussing a book with the author periodically popping in to respond. Personally, I never felt that blogs were a good way to create a community because there was always someone quite visibly at the head, and everyone else was transient with no stake.

    It’s been difficult to admit that I’m kind of done blogging, seeing as how I can ONLY write in blog form (!). But that’s something I have to work on, and I’m able to work on it through other mediums when I realize that I’m not the one people are looking to in order to pump out content for them to respond to. Pundits have been saying that thanks to social media and video, the Blog Age is winding down, and maybe that is the case, and I think it bears consideration even if it could end in something unthinkable.

  6. I kind of went the other direction. I was more active in social media and the blog(s) were an extension. But it occurred to me that the social media interaction was not only shaping blog posts, but my opinion, and I was seeing problems people had in their lives, health, money, and it was affecting me. Making me see problems others had that seemed to mirror things on my life. And I had to leave.

    What I am trying to do now is use the blog, and account to discuss and talk to people without the restriction of 140 characters. And I have to say it it more refreshing to actually talk to someone without fear 800 people will chime in and send a simple sentence into the black pit.

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