To be a blogger in 2020 is to be anonymous.
To be an MMO blogger in 2020 is to simply not exist.
I'm talking about blogging in the traditional sense, of course, although the Influencer crowd would have you believe that Tumblr and YouTube channels --not to mention Instagram and TikTok-- are also blogging. While I don't doubt that the effort it takes to put together a good Influencer photoshoot can be pretty extensive and take up a ton of time, putting words on virtual paper in a blog is a pastime that has seen its heyday come and go. Those of us who continue to blog these days do it for the love (or compulsion) of writing, not to become internet famous.*
But just starting up a traditional blog in a TikTok world, and a gaming blog at that, is to be akin to shouting at the Void.
And if there was one way for me to participate in the online community and remain (relatively) unknown, this is it.
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In case you're wondering, I'm actually happy about that.
Back when blogs such as Righteous Orbs and The Pink Pigtail Inn were gathering places for one of the most popular video games on the market, getting into the blogroll was a bit of a big deal. It meant that Tam or Larisa actually read your blog and commented on it, which would give you a semi-official stamp of approval.**
Even so, the biggest bump we ever got was from a couple of hundred hits per day to 3000, and that was when the old WOW Insider promoted a series I did concerning the Draenei and Sindorei, titled Two Sides of a Coin.
Nowadays, the blog watering holes are gone*** as people blogfaded, moved to other hobbies, or had real life intervene, and the MMO industry has shrunk considerably. Even the blogs that would bring in a lot of readers from outside the immediate WoW community, such as From Draenor With Love, have brought their stories to a satisfying ending.****
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All of this isn't new, of course, but on the anniversary of WoW Classic just a few days ago I read all of these anniversary blog posts and I realized that throughout the entire year --with the lone exception of Ancient from Tome of the Ancient-- I didn't run into a single person in game who I used to play WoW with, blogger or no.
Obviously some of that is because quite a few of the current bloggers still playing Classic are overseas, and Blizz still won't let European players hang with North American ones, so there's that. But for others, real life dictates schedules and once you get settled on a server you tend to want to stay put. It's nothing like the blogger guilds of yesteryear.
As an experiment, I googled my co-mains and "Myzrael" just to see what would pop up, and my suspicions were confirmed when the first entries for each were this blog as well as Ancient's. In a WoW Armory era, there would have been tons of links for that before you'd see anything about blogs.
But given the lack of interest in MMO blogs in this day and age,***** the likelihood of someone trying to find info about a toon outside of the game are practically non-existent. Okay, not non-existent, but someone would have to have a real burning desire to try to find someone that way, despite knowing that there is no WoW Armory (and that Google doesn't search Discord servers/channels).
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So I can blog to my heart's content and not worry about being recognized in game. Not that I ever really worried about that, but after the past year's worth of WoW Classic blogs I started to wonder if I was saying too much in some of my posts. (Like, you know, the last couple of posts.) But there's only so much sanitizing one person can do, so I'll just live with it.
After all, anonymity has its advantages.
*Okay, some traditional bloggers can become internet famous, but the topics of those blogs are frequently topics that are about reading --such as the Romance genre-- or are sponsored by larger websites, such as the people who would in previous decades be known as columnists for newspapers or major magazines.
**I related the "OMG!!!! TAM COMMENTED ON OUR BLOG!!!!" story back when I was a guest on the Twisted Nether Blogcast back in 2012. And even then, I downplayed my real reaction by quite a bit.
***For a slice of nostalgia, The Pink Pigtail Inn still does exist at http://pinkpigtailinn.blogspot.com/. Alas, Righteous Orbs is long gone.
****I wonder what Vidyala would have thought about the storyline in BfA after having worked on FDWL all those years. I should ask her and see if she's interested in a guest column.
*****If you want to know about something in WoW Classic, you go to WoWHead or WoWpedia or.... you get the idea. Places, like the old Hots and Dots blog, that had full maps and descriptions of Vanilla instance content, are a thing of the past.
I do kind of miss the "watering hole" days. They haven't entirely gone I suppose - Bhagpuss' and Wilhelm's blogs sometimes still feel like that kind of place to me, with how often they post and considering they have active comment sections, though the topics up for discussion are much wider of course.
ReplyDeleteSince I gave my WoW blog a bit of a dust-off recently I was looking for some new related blogs to add to my blogroll (WoW in general, didn't necessarily have to be Classic) and it was surprisingly hard. I'd find lists like this one, and even though it claims to have been updated only last week, even that contains some links that are dead or don't blog about WoW anymore, not to mention that the majority are simply guide sites and not blogs in the traditional sense. And on the rare occasion when I do find a still active WoW-focused blog, it's often nothing but transmog content, which (no offense) bores me to tears, lol.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing.
DeletePeople used to go to Thotbot for WoW info, then the official Blizz forums, and then Elitist Jerks/blogs. With the dominance of WoWpedia and WoWHead displacing Thotbot, the absorption of Elitist Jerks' content creators into Blizz itself, and other reasons, the blogs have little to no importance now.
Everybody knows where to go for info, Discord is important for not only audio chatting/video streaming but also for text chatting, and the need for traditional style blogs --and even guild websites-- is pretty much gone.
I learned the hard way to never delete a Discord server invite (for a raid, typically) because that becomes the finger on the pulse of a guild and/or WoW server.
I personally don't mind the transmog content, such as with Kamalia's blog, because she talks about far more than just transmog, and I'll be frank in that I'm amazed at her fashion sense given the tons of graphical content she can pull from.
Oh, and Shintar, if you're curious I typed in "shintar swtor" into google, and your YouTube channel came up as the first hit. Then your Twitter feed, then your SWTOR blog. Oh, and THEN Reddit. Go figure. ;-)
DeleteFor me Twitter comes up before YouTube, even in a private window. Still, kind of sucks that Google ranks those things above the format that I actually focus on and put the most effort in. :P
DeleteI was about to say that I never experienced the watering-hole thing at all but then it occured to me that I kind of did, only since I didn't play either WoW or Warhammer, the two nexuses of MMORPG blogging in its golden age, the "watering hole" blogs I did visit were part of a different ecosystem. All of that was before I began blogging myself, around a decade ago and I can't even remember what the blofs in question were, other than maybe Beau Hindman's "Spouse Aggro", Keen and Graev and Kill Ten Rats, none of which really focused on a single game.
ReplyDeleteAs for what counts as blogging, I have quite strong opinions on this. We all know the derivation of the word "blog" and it definitely does not demand that bloggers communicate via long-form prose writings. All that's required to be a blogger is that you keep a log of your activities or interests on the worldwide web. How you choose to express that is entirely your choice - photos, music, video, essays, diaries, whatever you like. An instagram account that posts nothing but pictures of dogs definitely qualifies as a blog if the person posting the pictures structures the posting so as to make it one. Equally, it could just be a random bunch of pictures of dogs.
Where I have issues isn't with the platform or the content, it's with the approach. A blog, however you choose to use it, is a personal expression made public. It is not a website. You can monetize a blog in the same way you can turn your life into a performance but a product or service portal on the worldwide web is a website, not a blog.
To me, that's the definition that's being blurred and abused and which needs to be resisted.
So it's the content and structure that is important to you to define a blog, as opposed to the application itself. I can agree with that.
DeleteMy negative opinion on IG and Tumblr style blogs stems typically from the lack of structured content; most of it resembles Twitter posts in visual form, frequently with less contextual descriptions than a tweet.
I guess that's why I separate the newer style "blogs" from the old style prose variety: the old style version had a specific description, and even the usage of YouTube channels for "blogging" had their own specific designation "vlog" without co-opting the "blog" name itself. IG and Tumblr have the same ability to provide content, but in a more free form basis.
As for the watering hole site, I remember Kill Ten Rats fondly. It never got the popularity that Righteous Orbs had, but it didn't burn its creator out as Righteous Orbs did either. Tam and Chas would get a couple of hundred comments per posts, and I can see in retrospect how hard it was for them to keep up with that causing the blog to burn them out on the game they loved. (Cataclysm didn't help either.) Kill Ten Rats lasted longer because it wasn't in the limelight as much.