This blog is getting old. It’s getting very old. I can honestly say I never even imagined it would stay alive for closing in on six years. I’m amazed and happy about it. However, my life has changed in the past five years, so I think it’s time for my blog to change as well.
Five years and kicking
A while ago, I decided to post a fixed amount of articles – 3 per week. It meant I would write the articles in advance and schedule them to publish in the same time slots every week. My hope was that this would cut the amount of time I spend writing and free up more time for the actual playing of games, which was the whole point of my Diary of a game addict to begin with.
It worked, to a degree. More often than not, I have over a week, sometimes even over two weeks of articles scheduled for posting. However, I’ve been reading some of the more recent articles and I’m not happy with the quality of most of them. It actually feels like I’m padding them for meaningless content, just so I’d have something to publish. This won’t do.
Of course, my early articles from back when I started this blog are even worse, but the recent ones are bad to.
I don’t consider myself a great writer. The primary reason for starting this blog in the first place was because I had so much fun reading similar blogs I’ve stumbled into, such as deKay’s Gaming Diary, for instance. I remember finding his blog for the first time in the early 2008 and spending the next two or so evenings reading all of his articles from 2005, when his blog started to that day. It looked like he was really having fun with his games and I wanted that for myself.
Things have changed
In 2008, I was in college and I wasn’t exactly a hard-working student. I would usually spend most of the day playing one game or another. I wanted to play them all, and I had the means to play a lot of them, due to the fact that I didn’t feel the need to pay for any of them. The consequence of that was that I would play a game for a few hours, maybe a few days with a longer game, and then I would grow tired of it and move on to something else.
If you compare that to my days of PlayStation, when I had to pay for every single one of my games and actually only ever owned about a dozen of them, it’s easy to imagine how games and gaming in general started to matter less to me.
I started this blog mostly to try and change that, and it worked, amazingly well.
First, I used it to force myself to complete almost every game I start playing. Then, it was part of the reason I considered turning my back on game piracy (I still pirate a lot of things, just not games). Now, it makes me think about games I play instead of just mindlessly consuming them. It makes me think about what I like and dislike in games, why I love and enjoy some of them, but don’t truly enjoy others. It helped me take a step back from all the hype and look around – to realize why gaming was always such a big part of my life and why I love it.
However, times have changed. I’m not a student any more. I’m a software developer. Ten hours a day, I’m away from my computer. Eight hours a day, I have to sleep. I simply have much less time. Writing an article takes an hour, easily, especially with screenshots. Writing three a week means three hours a week less that I can devote to other things. What’s worse, forcing myself to write three articles a week means at least two of them will probably be crap.
This is why I decided to change my philosophy, once more.
From now on, I will not track my games in detail any more. I’ll write when I have something to write about and publish when I have something to publish. I might publish ten articles in a week, or just one article in a month, but hopefully, they’ll be a more interesting read and maybe even cause you, the reader, to engage more.
Also, readers, if you exist, and Google says you do, please do engage more. Insult me, ridicule me, ask me stuff, criticize. Do whatever, just engage. I really think I’d have even more fun doing this if you did that.
Now, I think I’ll go back to the Trpimirović dynasty in Crusader Kings II.
