Catching up on the theme weeks with “How I stay motivated”, and this is… hard for me, as I don’t really stay motivated.

What do I get from blogging? Not really that much. The most “real world” acclaim I’ve gotten was from my bridge blog – I’d get towns asking me for permission to use my photos on their websites and stuff. That was nice.

But for gaming… not so much. I don’t really play popular games. Even when I do, like when I played FFXIV, I can’t think of anything really interesting to say about them that doesn’t echo every other person’s post, so there’s really no reason to add to the noise.

Blogging takes time away from gaming. I don’t really game a lot anyway, and the days I could come home and spend the night in an MMO are over. I just don’t have that kind of patience, and in most MMOs, it’s hard to find people at my level. My low level, that is – even at my best, in the EverQuest days, I was never hardcore. I played a lot, back in the day, but I mostly just wanted to hang out, not so much to dominate the server.

Ultimately, in gaming, I just want to play with friends and not really worry about progression.

So… writing. Since I have had analytics of one sort or another running since I returned to blogging a year, year and a half or so ago, I know what sort of posts get traction. These are compiled from the beginning of August.

Top four are about AI art or my home page. Next is a game review, the answers to Exapunks puzzle, reviews of mobile games, how to increase your chaos frame to get the best Ogre Battle: MofBQ ending, a cache of Persistence of Vision models I haven’t touched in a decade, and a joke post I created to see if I could craft a post that would get search engine referrals.

What isn’t here are any of the Blaugust posts, or any of my tabletop gaming posts or, you know, the kind of posts I like writing. I am kind of happy the Symphony of War review is being read. Almost all the titles here were specifically written in order to be the kind of article that invites clicks.

So pretty much I don’t write about tabletop gaming or MMOs anymore.

I don’t believe people really read blogs anymore – not mine, clearly (aside from some fellow bloggers whom I treasure, you know who you are), but I wonder how many single author blogs really would make enough money to allow someone to do it full time. I’m sure there are a few, but I would imagine that would take a significant commitment. At least two worthy articles a day.

Not blogging for money or fame or community… I think my personal blogging is more some form of narcissism than anything else.

These days, if you want to create a community, you don’t use words. You use videos. You adopt an onscreen persona and create videos on a schedule, and you never ever miss an upload day or people will abandon you. You learn to never, ever stop talking so that even if you’re not on camera, people know you’re talking to them. You become a content creator. You chase the popular topics and react to anything that touches upon your area of expertise.

If I were smart, I’d just haunt popular commercial blogs, like Kotaku, Ars Technica, Polygon, Massively Overpowered and the like. My comments would be read way more than my posts here, and who knows, maybe I could get some freelance articles posted.

I’ve had a lot of fun, this Blaugust, going to other people’s blogs and interacting more. Maybe the best lesson here is that I should just boost discussion on someone else’s blog, rather than wall off a discussion in a hundred smaller blogs.

But I guess we all do like our walled gardens.

Wouldn’t Blaugust make more sense to just have a special Blaugust blog that we could all post in? I think so.