The Tenth Year Anniversary of my Gaming Blog...

The thought occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: “Strewth, I’ve been doing this blog for 10 years!”

My coverage on Batman Begins
remains my most-read blog...

For ten years, I’ve been talking to you about games I’ve been playing, wins, losses, video games, my thoughts on game design, and all that sort of stuff. That’s a long time to keep something going, and while the return isn’t necessarily representative of what you might expect for someone who spends that long on the internet (at the time of writing I’m coming up on 60,000 views across the entire ten years and 325 blogs, and it’s never represented any financial reward) I’ve enjoyed it, people I share it with enjoy it, people I don’t share it with enjoy it, so in some capacity or another, I’ve kept doing it.

My speculation on the 6th edition of 40K was
probably my biggest blog for comments...

Mind you, it did take me a long time to come up with a regular format for the blog that I was happy with. My original intention was to document the games I was playing in Games Workshop, as it still was at the time. I did it for a while, but I didn’t go in regularly enough to blog it in a consistent routine, and even when I did, it sucked some of the fun out of the games knowing that I was going to have to write about them later. The same applied to when I tried to create a journal for the Roleplaying games I was just starting to get involved with; documenting my first character’s journey through Pathfinder’s Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv was entertaining at first but quickly became a lot more work than fun. It didn’t help that I was trying to do the same thing with a music blog every time I did a gig, which meant I was doing a lot of writing! Funnily enough, even though more people I knew in person read my music blog than my gaming one, my gaming blog was engaging a far wider audience. I kept writing on and off about some hobby games I was playing, and some video games I managed to beat, even writing about a game of pool at one point, but it took a long time before I found a format that I was happy to do regularly.

I covered Lego Star Wars in the
original No Game New Year...

Then in 2014 something happened: I came across a Youtube video from a guy called Brian Castleberry who had been talking to his friend Norm Caruso a.k.a. The Gaming Historian about a concept called No Game New Year. The idea was that they had built up a huge backlog of games, some of which they rarely played, so they set themselves a challenge and invited others to join: Don’t buy any new video games for 2014. Instead of that, we were supposed to play through all our old games, keep the ones we liked, get rid of the ones we didn’t, and really try to tackle our backlog. There were roughly 30 people on board to begin with, but by the time the year ended, only a few of us remained, including me, though I had come close to falling off the edge by erroneously buying a new copy of Final Fantasy VII! I don’t know how much of their backlogs the other people involved in the challenge managed to clear, but what I did notice was that without permission to buy new games, they were actually playing games a lot less – and doing more things with their families. That can only be a positive thing! Part of the challenge of No Game New Year was that we were all supposed to update each other on how we were doing with either a video, blog post or even just a Facebook status, (we had a group for it which I still share even to this very day!) so I tried to do the blog in a weekly format. It worked for a while, but I eventually found myself with very little to say without repeating myself, so I changed the format slightly and only wrote about games when I’d beaten them. This is the format of what eventually became Backlog Beatdown, my longest-running series that I created after No Game New Year.

Age of Sigmar was a refreshing change...

I went through some significant life changes in the following few years. I’d taken up singing lessons, started a self-employed music business, became a regular at some of the open mics in Wolverhampton and became a Dad. I found a lot of my spare time was taken up with all of that, so I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much time in hobby shops as I had prior; most of the games I played were video games and while I kept the roleplaying groups going a little longer, I had decided not to write about those experiences anymore. The fact that I’d bought what was at the time a reasonably powerful laptop capable of playing PC games was also conducive to this, so I kept my blog going with Backlog Beatdown.

Mordheim's been one of my favourite games
of the last decade...

As part of my quest to try to play all my games, I found myself listening to the Co-Optional podcast while I played, featuring TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and a guest for the episode. It was a three hour show in which they would all talk about, amongst other things, the games they had been playing that week. And somewhere around September 2017, I found myself thinking “wow, people are actually interested in this!” and decided to have a go at it myself. Thus, I began my biggest and most popular series of blogs: Last Week’s Games.

Painting this boxed set was an achievement...

The idea was simple: write down what games I’d played in the week and find something to say about them. This usually amounted to two or three games every week, and if I found anything to say about the painting or hobby gaming I’d been doing that week, I’d write that down too. I’d try to release them on Mondays, (regular readers will know that it doesn’t always work out that way!) and run it as a weekly series that I’d share on Facebook and Twitter. I was able to include some of the hobby games, including the one Roleplaying group I managed to stay in. Quite quickly, though, I needed to put a restriction on how much I was writing, because I didn’t want it to become more work than fun. What I decided to do was keep the blogs to exactly 700 words each: this is about a side of A4 paper and is about as much time anybody has to read anything. I quite enjoy editing the blogs to fit in with the word counts, and I rarely stray from it. It was a challenge to do this every week without repeating myself, and I didn’t always manage it, but I did find a massive uptake in my readership – I was getting a lot more views with regular content than I had before. Most of them were from overseas, funnily enough; Russia and Italy are two countries that often have people reading my blog!

TotalBiscuit - Gone but never forgotten.

This carried on for about a year, up to the point when I moved out of my Mom and Dad’s house for the first time. I found myself needing to re-balance what I was doing in my spare time, owing to the adjustments I had to make to accommodate both mine and my partner’s working patterns and my daughter, to whom I was able to provide a home for the first time. But in the new year of 2019, I started the blog going again and apart from a couple of wobbles where I found myself caught up in all sorts of things with little to say about gaming, I have kept it going ever since.

Murder in the Alps - an interesting, if
not-well-paced mobile game...

At this point I would like to interject that around 2014, as a result of No Game New Year, I created a list of all my Xbox 360 games. I’ve developed it to include all my systems and games and keep track of how many I own, have played, beaten and 100%ed on an Excel spreadsheet. The original plan was to share it on the blog; I never did this because looking at the numbers is frankly embarrassing. But it did give some structure to what I’ve been playing and when, rather than blindly buying and trying games every so often!

Pandemic became oddly prophetic...

All of this makes me wonder where to take the blog from here. I’ll keep Last Week’s Games going, I still enjoy that, and I’ll keep Backlog Beatdown going when I remember to do it! (At the time of writing I still need to write a review to Gears of War 2 which I played last Autumn.) But the way my life and hobbies have changed over the last couple of years has given me some different things to say. For a start, I don’t talk about painting on Last Week’s Games anymore; I put that in a separate blog called Last Month’s Painting – I don’t paint anywhere near enough to make it a weekly series!

Nice to let games become
a family thing...

Also, having huge stacks of games around my house is all well and good, but here I find myself with more to say about how that relates to my daughter. She was pre-school age when I first bought her a board game, and she enjoys playing with me. It’s very interesting to observe her level of engagement, and her enthusiasm for certain games over others developing as we’re going along, to the point where it’s something she wants to do to entertain herself, rather than something she wants to do with me specifically – though that’s still an important point. I’m at the age now where many of my contemporaries are starting families – in many cases already have – and they’re wondering how their hobbies and interests can relate to their children. It’s nice to be able to talk about my experiences in that area, and it may become something I focus on in the future, but I certainly don’t want to make a job out of playing with my daughter so I’ll approach that with a certain amount of care.

The UK Game Expo is a lovely opportunity
to see my long lost friends from Swindon...

There were some plans that fell by the wayside. I wanted to start attending tournaments and blog that, and I tried doing a blog series called Tournaments and Tribulations. Unfortunately, that never really got off the ground, as my week allows little time to rock up at tournaments and spend weekends playing games! My experiences in this area are mainly confined to games I’ve played at the UK Games Expo. I also wanted to do a series of blogs where I go through the campaigns of some of the Dungeon Crawling games that I own (Space Hulk, Descent etc.) That never happened either, though it would have been a mission to coordinate even before Covid-19 became a thing we were all going to have to get used to hearing about! I’d still like to try it out at some point though.

The Horus Heresy: Legions is a game that
took up a fair amount of my time.

It’s also been suggested to me that I record video footage of games I’ve been playing and put them up on Youtube or something similar. I have thought about it and even had a go at streaming The Horus Heresy: Legions at some point. The problem is that making videos takes a fair amount of work and time that I don’t necessarily have, and the equipment I own isn’t up to it – I can’t get a decent framerate out of my laptop if I’m running recording software on it; domestic laptops aren’t designed for that, and I don’t have the hardware necessary to record footage from my consoles either. I could address both of those issues, but that would be a large investment to make for not necessarily a huge return – most games I play are several years old, and common interest in them has waned.

And there’s the fact that somewhere, out in the world, there’s a small sub-set of people who still like to read the written word every now and again…