blogging

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Roundup: The Bloggy Christmas Series 1-5

Bloggy Xmas

I’ve been looking for a place where all the Bloggy Christmas posts were collected together in a nice list and easy-to-click format. There probably is such a place, but I haven’t stumbled on it, so I thought I’d make my own collection of links, with a few taster snippets from the posts together with the odd comments of my own.

Originally I planned to cover all posts to date, and then keep the list updated as new ones came out. But it’s turned out that the way I liked presenting the list, that is really going to be too long for anyone’s comfort, so I’ll try to gather around ten posts per roundup. Here goes with Dec 1st to 5th…

  • Dec 1st… Telwyn at GamingSF: Gaming and Community
    “…there is some je ne sais quoi, some mix of ingredients that online gaming brings and I think community is a central part of that… Interactions with real players can often be fleeting or negative, but they can also be very positive and memorable”

  • Dec 1st… Ikralla at Grimoires of Supremacy: Community
    “I’m not the most social of people… Without World of Warcraft, without this little blog of mine, without that behemoth that is Twitter, I don’t think I’d have met (in a manner of speaking) so many awesome people.”

  • Dec 2nd… Talarian at Gamer by Design: A Family Like No Other
    “So getting into a guild that was LGBT friendly, and active about it, was immense for me. I could be myself without having to worry about what other people think. Folks to talk to in cases when I felt I had nobody else, really.”

  • Dec 2nd… Aywren at Signus.org: Self Discovery and Personal Growth in FFXIV
    “This game was pushing me out of my comfort zone, and I wasn’t giving up. I was succeeding!…I was also learning things about the community and other players. I discovered that there were other people who were new to the dungeons, who seemed relieved to hear me announce “Hey, this is my first time.” Many times I heard “Yeah, mine too.” Or “My first try on a tank. Please be gentle.”…These people weren’t those raging leetists that I feared. In fact, I saw very little of that at all… “

  • Dec 3rd… Tremayne at Tremayne’s Law: The Faces Behind the Avatars
    “Insofar as there’s a moral to this rambling tale… think about maybe meeting up with some of the faces behind the avatars…. it’s not nearly as scary as it might seem”

  • Dec 3rd… Izlain at Me, Myself and I: A Sense of Belonging
    “Just knowing that people read my opinions and care enough to comment or write retorts on their own blogs makes me feel like I belong to something greater, and that’s been my goal for a long time.”

  • Dec 4th… Scree at The Cynic Chronicles: How Gaming led me to my Wife
    “Gaming and the communities it created for me has been an enormous personal blessing to me… It gave me my best friend… It gave me a brother-in-law… It gave me happiness…Best of all, it gave me my wife.”

  • Dec 4th… Ranni at The Flaming Bard: Community is Family
    “When I think in terms of my ‘gaming community’ I think “My PEOPLE!”. People who get me, people who make me laugh, people who take an interest in the same things I do even outside of gaming. I’m included in this wonderful bunch of geeky gamers and it feels incredible”

  • Dec 5th… Asmiroth at Leo‘s Life: An Old Soul
    “With so many games available for our attention, the odds of a single community in a single game are long gone. The bonds last across games but you still need a mechanism to share stories. Blogs are an amazing way to do that.”

If you’ve not read the posts, there is much more to each of them than is conveyed by the short snippet that I chose to give a flavor of them. So do go ahead and read them!

Looking at the collection as a whole I’m struck my how much community has meant to everyone, and the sheer number of extraordinary stories people have to tell. Seeing them all in one place brings it home to me even more than reading them individually did.

There really is something magical about true community.

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A Year of Blogging

TP Blog Trophies

Today is the final day of my first year of blogging at Thinking Play! My first post was published on Oct 17th, 2013, though I was working on the site for a couple of days before making everything public.

I’ve had previous attempts at blogging about various subjects, but I don’t think I’ve ever kept going for a whole year before. The difference this time around is undoubtedly due to the excellent advice and wonderful community provided by the Newbie Blogger Initiative.

Thanks NBI!

The NBI of course is actually people… so most especially thanks to Roger Edwards of Contains Moderate Peril and Doone Woodtac of XP Chronicles who ran the NBI 2013.

Thanks also to everyone who’s taken the time to follow the blog, comment on posts, tweet or share them, or just hit the “Like” button from time to time. Without that bit of encouragement and feedback, quite likely I wouldn’t have persisted in my blogging efforts.

It’s knowing that there are people finding the posts interesting and enjoyable, and wanting to have conversations about the topics, that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

A Year in Numbers

As of drafting this post on Thursday October 16th, there are 25 posts, with 151 comments, 52 likes and 47 blog followers on WordPress.com. There have been just over 6,000 pageviews recorded by WordPress. I wish I knew about the amount of reading that happens via RSS feeds, but if there’s a way to discover that, I haven’t stumbled on it yet.

There also 6 draft posts that were started but not finished yet, including this one.

Page Views by Month

One Year WP View Stats

Top Pages for the Year

One Year WP Top Pages

Followers

One Year WP Follower Stats

Planet Pasduil

One thing worth mentioning is that I’ve also started a second blog, Planet Pasduil. The jury is out on whether it’s actually a good idea to have two blogs rather than putting everything in one! Planet Pasduil covers everything I feel like writing about that doesn’t belong here. So far the topics most covered are books, reading and technology, but in theory any topic is fair game. The posts there tend to be more frequent and shorter than here. If you like what you read here do pop over and see if Planet Pasduil appeals to you as well. If you share any of my non-game interests I’d enjoy having your company in both places.

The Future

One year over, the blogging journey continues. And it continues among the fellowship of bloggers, which is what makes the journey possible, enjoyable and worthwhile.

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To Blog or not to Blog?

shakespeare-in-love

The Newbie Blogger Initiative is in full swing, and many people are writing excellent articles encouraging would-be bloggers to take the plunge. Call me a contrary soul, but that gets me wondering if blogging really is for everyone. To blog, or not to blog? Is the answer ever no?

The first thing to say is that if you’re someone who is thinking about starting a blog but feeling hesitant about it, your own reasons for hesitation are probably not good reasons at all!

Everyone is different and has their own hangups, self-doubts and all the rest of it. Some people might have qualms about their writing ability for example, while others might be worried about the technical side of things. Personally neither of those bothered me when I was wondering whether to start this blog. But what did concern me was whether I was really knowledgeable enough about gaming in general or any game in particular that anything I had to say would be of value. I certainly didn’t see myself as an uber player, and I imagined that even in my main game, LOTRO, most people would know at least as much about it as I do. Who was I to be starting a blog? There are blogs out there where people have published detailed guides to all the LOTRO skirmishes! There are people that have crunched numbers in spreadsheets to find out what skirmishes to do to maximize your rewards per minute! There are people who have lovingly detailed every steed available in the game! There are people who’ve spun epic works of fanfic about their MMO adventures! I am very far from being one of those kinds of people, so who am I to be starting a LOTRO blog?

Now if you knew me in real life.. if you knew me very well.. you’d see that kind of thinking is not confined to blogging. I mentioned hangups before, and this is one of mine. Surely I’d have to be much more senior and have had a much more stellar career to be going after job X? Or to apply to college Y? Surely I’d have to be so much more amazing than I am to ask out woman Z? Actually it turned out (eventually, finally, after overcoming the doubts, and with suitable encouragement) the answer was really: No.

Your hangups may differ in detail from mine, but probably you have plenty of them. If you’d like to blog, but you’re hesitating about doing it, ask yourself if the reasons for your hesitation are typical of you. Chances are they are not some well thought out objective reasons why this particular activity isn’t for you, but more likely personal gremlins that bedevil you whatever you’re thinking about doing, and don’t have much relation to reality.

To Blog

Let’s consider some specific concerns that people might have…

  • “I’m not that good of a writer” – Well, there are some excellent writers out there in the blogosphere, but there are plenty of average ones as well. There are all kinds of blogs and bloggers out there. There are people who post screenshots of their adventures, with short little notes on what they’ve been up to this week. There are people who tell you what’s on sale in the in-game store, and what they think is worth buying. Whatever you like to do, and whatever you feel your abilities are, there is going to be some kind of blog you could make that people will appreciate.

  • “I don’t have the time” – Luckily there is no rule about how much you have to write or how often! (I’ve labeled myself a Fewbie Blogger, because there are newbies with more posts published than me.) If you have aspirations to have a large readership then you’ll probably want to blog often. But you can have plenty of fun and plenty of readers with only a post a month, or even less. In betweens posts you can stay connected with the community by reading other people’s blogs, commenting, tweeting and such.

  • “I’m befuddled by the tech” – Some of the best blogs are the simplest. Get a free WordPress.com blog, start posting, and go from there.

  • “If I build it, will anyone come?” – During the NBI, yes! You’ll get visits from the links the sponsors give. You’ll get visits from your fellow newbies, who you’ll get to know. Without the support of the NBI, it could take some time to get more than a trickle of readers, and it would be very easy to get dispirited and give up before you got there. So the NBI is a great opportunity to get off to a flying start.

Not to Blog

So is there any reason to choose not to blog?

I can think of one very big one: Unrealistic expectations.

What are you looking for from blogging? If in the back of your mind you think there’s a chance of finding fame and fortune and influence, and that is what is really motivating you to consider blogging, you’d probably be wise to give it a miss.

If you just like the idea of expressing yourself for its own sake, and you’re happy blogging for fun and being part of a small community, you’re good to go!

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Reflections on the NBI

NBI Logo

The Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI) is the spark that led me to create this blog. Without it, I’d probably have been thinking the same thoughts that I now write here, but not putting them out there for people to read and discuss.

The NBI formally ran for the month of October, and comes to an end today, so now seems a good time to reflect on it. (I say “formally” because the NBI Forum will remain up, and I hope and believe the community that the NBI gave rise to will continue and grow.)

How the NBI Inspired Me

I’ve dabbled with blogging about various topics before, but it’s a long time since I had an active blog about anything. From time to time I thought about starting a blog about this or that, but it stayed as just a thought. And it never occurred to me to blog about games at all, even though I’ve been playing an MMO pretty extensively for a couple of years, and was a regular reader of at least a few game related blogs.

How did the NBI change all that? A few ways…

  • I was very impressed with the quality of the blogs I came across via the NBI, both the established “sponsor” blogs and the “newbie” ones. Here were a bunch of people who were interested in the same things as me, who had things to say that were worth reading, and seemed fun to hang out with.
  • There was good advice that helped with many of the decisions I’d have to make when starting. (Pen name or not? How often to write? How broad or narrow to make the blog? etc)
  • There was the prospect of at least a few people discovering the blog and reading it! It’s pretty discouraging when you take the trouble to write something and no-one even seems to see it, let alone respond to it. Normally it takes time to build a readership, but the early days are exactly when you need some encouragement and feedback. Without that, it’s hard to tell if there is any point in carrying on, whether you are doing something that will turn out to be very worthwhile eventually or you are doing something so wrong and hopeless that it’ll never have readers.
  • There was a time limit! The NBI was going to last a month only, and as anyone from psychologists studying procrastination to marketers planning a sales promotion will tell you, there’s not much like a limited window of opportunity to get people off their backsides and actually take action.

That’s what tipped me into starting a blog.

The NBI in Practice

So how did the NBI work out for me in practice? All good, with some surprises…

  • I wrote two posts before making my blog public. Thanks to links appearing on sponsor blogs, within a day I had a decent number of visitors, and some fascinating conversations going in comments.
  • Thanks to the advice of the veterans I kept to a comfortable pace for me, without feeling obligated to post more often. In fact I actively refrained from posting more, so as not to set unrealistic expectations, either for myself or for readers!
  • An unexpected benefit was that I found myself commenting on other people’s blogs much more than I used to, and feeling much more like a recognized member of the community. It feels like I’m on the way to making some new friends.
  • I came to realize that sometimes a comment on someone else’s post is as good or even a better way of adding your two cents worth on a given topic than writing a full post. There’s a lot of smart people out there thinking the same thoughts as I do, and there’s no need to go over the same ground which they’ve covered so well. Maybe I should figure out ways to show my comments elsewhere in this blog somehow. And find a good way to highlight other people’s posts when they say the things I’ve been thinking. Probably there are ways to do these things with widgets, reblogging, Twitter and such.
  • At the moment I have a lot more ideas for posts than I have time to write them. But following the advice, I am keeping a list of the ideas so I can use them in the future.

Summary

The NBI has been a success for me. It’s led me to actually start a blog for one thing, which is no small feat on its part! I also feel I’ve become a part of the game blogging community, and that I’ve set out on a path that is both enjoyable and sustainable.

Thanks to everyone that helped make the NBI what it is!

Thanks to Justin Olivetti for coming up with a fantastic idea and running the first initiative, and to Roger Edwards for reviving it in 2013. Many thanks to all the sponsors for their advice, encouragement and help. And last, but not least, thanks to my fellow NBI newbies for their fine blogs, and for creating a welcoming and fun community that makes blogging a pleasure.

Sometime I will write a post about my favorite NBI-spawned sites. In the meantime, thanks again, and I’ll see you in comment threads here and all over the web!