Well that was unexpected.

After completing the majority of my 6 Lessons From 6 Years of Blogging series, it became abundantly clear that I needed to follow my own advice, and take a break. I waffled quite a bit on whether to even acknowledge that I took several weeks off. Ultimately, if you’re reading this then you know which side of the argument won out.

It’s just a lot sometimes, you know? Blogging, I mean. I don’t know if others get this way, but I sometimes feel like I need to write things for the sake of writing instead of because I have something to say. That’s not helped at all by how search engines tend to reward you with more traffic for posting with increased regularity. So you don’t want to stop posting because then the gravy train might dry up, which would put all your previous effort to waste. Is that line of thinking weird? It feels weird.

Regardless, my posting cadence isn’t what I wanted to talk about today. No, lesson 6 is far more interesting then that. However, I’m bad at transitions, so let’s start with a story.

Back when I was 8 years old, I was playing Pokémon Silver version for the first time. A lot of my classmates were too. The whole lot of us had received it for Christmas that year, and Pokémania was still in full swing. Every day at school you could see entire congregations of kids gathered around talking about what they’d done last night in the game, and what they’d plan to do once they’d gotten home from school. In a lot of ways it felt like early internet forums, but everyone was talking in-person instead of through online message boards like GameFAQ.

As one might expect, none of us were particularly good at the games. There are so many basic mechanics of Pokémon that completely eluded our 8 year old minds. Seriously. I remember how we used to think that mashing the A button would increase the odds of catching a Pokémon (it didn’t), or how we’d routinely fail to understand many of the game’s very basic puzzles. It wasn’t necessarily that we were dumb – we collectively lacked experience. None of us had leveled up our gamer abilities, nor did we yet possess the mental faculties to analyze and solve a problem.

Naturally, the collective struggle that most of us had while playing these games, pushed us toward helping one another to overcome the various obstacles within the game. It was common practice for a handful of kids to figure out the solution to a roadblock, gloat about it the following day at school, and then teach the rest of us how to solve said problem. This teaching would usually be done to a smaller audience who would go home, perform the solution, and then teach it to other kids the following day on the schoolyard. It’s frankly a miracle that this even occurred, and with absolutely 0 organization, or oversight. These same children couldn’t be made to stand in a single file line by their teacher. Pokémon though? We could climb mountains if it was for Pokémon.

I look back quite fondly on those days of confusion while playing Pokémon. It wasn’t just the sense of comradery that I liked so much about it: the act of teaching was also fun. It was fun to learn how to solve a particular puzzle, and then help someone else to overcome it. All it took was remembering the steps, and the sequence. Then you could relay that information to someone else, and watch their face light up as they finally pushed past the thing that they’d been stuck on. 

To this day, I feel like that experience of helping others in my formative years has played no small part in how I choose to talk about games. When I find out someone is playing a game that I’m really into, I usually ask them which strategies they’re using. Heck, I’ve done this on numerous occasions with friend of the blog Ian from Adventure Rules, and more recently my fighting game training partner Totsu. Whenever I find out they’re playing a card game that I’ve played we end up discussing strategies we’ve been using, and provide insight into how to better utilize mechanics that we’ve been struggling with. It gives us an opportunity to really geek out about a game in a way that I used to believe wasn’t suitable for my blog.

Over the course of 2023 however, I feel like I really embraced my inner geek. I began writing posts covering specific aspects of games I was playing in laborious detail. This has manifested as a variety of articles with a smattering of gameplay tips, but I think the single best example of it is my Beginner Combo Guide for May in Guilty Gear Strive. Such a guide doesn’t at all align with my original vision for the blog, but I found it incredibly gratifying to write. Doubly so because I’ve had a handful of newer Guilty Gear players reach out to me, and thank me for writing it. It reminds me of those times when I was sharing information about Pokémon Silver with my classmate. It also reminded me of why I fell in love with video games in the first place.

So that is the sixth, and final lesson: embrace writing about things you care about. It doesn’t matter what it is, or how you originally envisioned your blog. For too long, I eschewed informative content because I thought of my blog as being a project about signal boosting, and critiquing. However, it’s become abundantly clear to me that I prefer writing information-based posts that allow me to either analyze a game, or share details about how to best tackle its many challenges. Don’t make the same mistake I did for years. Write about what you care about. Trust me when I say, you’ll find it more fulfilling in the long run.

If you made it this far, thank you. Double thank yous for the folks that read all 4 parts of this series, and waited over a month for the final segment. You’re the real MVPs, and I’ll see you in whatever I end up posting next.

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