Why My Gaming Blog Has Stopped - For Now...

It’s been quite a while since my last post, and I find myself making a new one to tell you all not to expect any more for the foreseeable future…

I’ve had some significant changes to my life occur over the last few years, and while most of them are positive, they’ve also affected the amount of time I can put on writing blogs like this. Most saliently, I finally moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time in nearly 33 years. That’s brought with it a lot of flexibility to do things I wasn’t able to do before – I won’t go into details – but also a lot of responsibility to look after my new home and be a lot more efficient in managing my time and my money.

What this means is that I don’t have time to write regular blogs any more. It’s a shame, as I had a number of things I wanted to write about. Access to Kirsty’s PS4 means that I can play a whole lot of games I couldn’t before. I was planning a retrospective look at some of the games I’d played in my past which was going to become a weekly post once I’d written enough of them. And after my experience at the UK Games Expo, it was my intention to enter some hobby gaming tournaments and write about my experiences with that. I was going to call it Tournaments and Tribulations. But I barely have time to play these games anymore, let alone write about them! I’m sure, to most of you reading this, taking the 45 minutes it generally takes me to write a 700 word summary of what I’ve been playing this week isn’t a huge imposition on me, but as I spend the vast majority of my time these days either working, supposed to be working or asleep, there just isn’t the time. Welcome to the real world, eh?

Also, blogging doesn’t make me any money. I know how that makes me sound, so let me clarify here that I never expected any substantial amount of money from this. I only ever did it for my own enjoyment, and it was great to see some other people enjoying my posts as well, a few of whom I know in person (mainly from the gigging circuit, and for similar reasons I don’t do anywhere near as many gigs anymore!) But with my schedule as packed as it is, a lot of other things to do (sometimes work, sometimes not,) and my own personal enjoyment my only real incentive to write the blog, it’s fallen by the wayside.

Will I ever do it again? Perhaps. There are things going on that are still quite “up in the air,” so to speak; a lot of situations are developing and I haven’t quite got settled into a routine yet. If such a time comes when I do, and I can find a regular amount of time in the week to put into playing games, I might be able to write about them in a regular blog again. But it’s not going to happen without a re-assessment of exactly when I can get everything out. In the past, I would put Last Week’s Games out on Mondays, Pick-ups and Trades out on the first Wednesday of every month (at least, that was the plan; it rarely worked out that way!) and on those occasions when I managed to beat a game, I’d write a Backlog Beatdown post about it for the next Friday if I could. If I manage to post anything out in a regular schedule again, it won’t be anywhere near as busy. There may be some changes to the content as well; I might find myself playing more handheld games as I’m out rather a lot these days! We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, I thank you all for reading my blog. There were roughly 60-100 of you a week at its peak, and more would come along later to look at archived posts. I hope you know I appreciated each and every one of you, and I hope to be back some day!