{"id":1037,"date":"2008-08-25T10:12:31","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T14:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/25\/what-makes-a-good-gaming-blog\/"},"modified":"2008-08-25T10:12:31","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T14:12:31","slug":"what-makes-a-good-gaming-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/25\/what-makes-a-good-gaming-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes A Good Gaming Blog?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this<\/a> linked by Andrew Sullivan<\/a>, and I thought I would pass it on. I especially appreciated these two:<\/p>\n

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions.<\/strong> People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obsessions take them?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good blog posts are made of paragraphs.<\/strong> Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a blog: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not really a blog.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gaming blogs, like other blogs, are everywhere now. It seems to be the preferred form for what would have been just another gaming website ten years ago; I can easily imagine my two favorite general gaming blogs (Rock, Paper, Shotgun<\/a> and Fidgit<\/a>) existing in a pre-2002 online world. Same with Game Politics<\/a>, easily the best gaming blog that isn’t about gaming.<\/p>\n

News blogs were the new big thing for a while. Kotaku and Joystiq clones that tried to cover a lot of material, and existed mostly to link to other people’s work or ideas and providing little original insight. At their worst, news blogs are just RSS feeds with more writing. At their best, news blogs offer the sort of commentary that was germane to the blogger’s original purpose – freeing individuals to write about what interests them and provide unique insight into an ongoing story.<\/p>\n

Bit by bit, though, people are coming back to the focused “here’s-what-I-think” format for gaming blogs, either on particular genres or particular issues. MMOs are the heavily blogged genre because there is a lot to talk about and a lot of human drama and have always been popular blogging subjects. Then we have video blogs, which have the weakness of irregular updates and the fact that most people have no idea how stupid they look on camera.<\/p>\n

So, gentle readers, what do you look for in a gaming blog? And, if you write one, what do you try to do to keep your readers happy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw this linked by Andrew Sullivan, and I thought I would pass it on. I especially appreciated these two: Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-gJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}