More thoughts on WoW’s story

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With all the continued discussion of WoW’s story lately I wanted to spend a couple more minutes working through my feelings. I want to try to convey a bit more clearly why I am so unhappy. Spoilers for WoW’s current story, cinematics, etc. ahead.

Say what you want about Blizzard’s choices for WoW lately, but they sure have people talking about the game. Amongst my friends and people I follow on Twitter I’ve seen many different reactions and perspectives. A small few seem to love this story, but most seem unhappy with it for one reason or other. Quite a few of my Horde friends are going through the same kinds of feelings we all experienced when Garrosh was warchief. This isn’t my Horde. Why would the other faction leaders go along with this? These feelings touch on one of my biggest problems with the current story: we’ve been here before.

The Horde has had a blatantly evil leader who went against tradition and honor and needed to be overthrown. As a Horde player it felt crappy then, and it feels crappy to see the same wheels in motion now. I hated practically everything about Garrosh’s story, from the moment Thrall chose him, through Cairne’s death, to the confrontation in SoO, and Thrall’s final kill steal in Nagrand. The only good thing that came of all of it was that Vol’jin ended up in charge. He was a cool lore figure, a pragmatic leader, and of course he barely got to do anything before he died.

Vol’jin’s death at the start of Legion felt almost like an afterthought. It was something to balance Varian’s more noble and cinematic end, and it was a plot point to cause faction strife. The circumstances of his death were designed to give the Alliance cause to suspect betrayal, and to put the most divisive figure possible on the throne. And Sylvanas didn’t even want to be there.

Forgive me for being bitter after seeing the Horde led into ruin, our capitol city sacked, our most promising leader killed in service of faction conflict, and our most interesting (IMO) leader stripped of all complexity and turned boring, rash, and ready to re-live the mistakes of the past.

And here’s the piece that frustrates me about the folks asking for calm, to wait and see, to trust that it will get better. I’ve done that. It got me through Garrosh, with hope that things would change and there was room for more interesting story to grow. It got me through pissed-off Jaina, obnoxious orc bros, and Illidan the chosen one, and it left me here, exactly where I started.

Even if this all turns out to be (insert lore conspiracy theory that fixes this somehow), it doesn’t change that Blizz chose to set things up this way. They chose to tell this story that they’ve already told me before. They chose to stoke faction-based strife that I never cared about much and am actively sick of now. It doesn’t change the fact that since MoP I feel like they keep putting up bigger and bigger warning signs that this game is not for me. All I can do is try to figure out if this is the moment that I finally start heeding them.

Thanks Folks

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Thanks Folks

Yesterday I made a blog post with one intended purpose, but it wound up being interpreted in a completely different way.  I thought I might talk a little bit about this because as a blogger this is going to happen.  We all view our posts through the lens of our experiences.  No one can actually be inside your head or completely understand what it was that you meant by something.  This is in part why I spend a lot of time retracing things I have already talked about in my blog posts because in my head…  no one actually reads my content.  The corollary of that however is that I feel like I need to write something that would make sense to someone who is hitting my blog for the first time.  I do a lot of things like “for the uninitiated” call outs where I back track and explain why a thing is important to this topic.  Granted this ends up increasing the length of my posts, but the hope is to keep someone from needing to furiously crawl through my back log of now over 1800 posts.

Ultimately for me personally, when something is so widely interpreted in a way I stop to think…  is that ultimately the post I wrote without intending to.  There are so many times that once fingers get started on the keyboard that posts sort of develop a mind of their own.  I know there are writers out there that carefully choose every word and sentence to build a strong discussion about the topic they are referencing.  Then there are others like me that get started and let the post develop as they go.  The problem with that method however is that things can veer off in unintended directions.  My intent in yesterdays post was to be some sort of a positive post about “these are my demons that I deal with but I still manage to get up and write every single day”.  The idea was to share my personal struggle so the folks out there who are going through the same thing can know that they are absolutely not alone.

However I feel like maybe a little too much of those demons were on display, and the post maybe came out a little true to life.  The hard truth is that I do not see in myself the person you all see in me.  I find it as impossible to reconcile that as it is to develop the internal infrastructure to accept a compliment.  That said… there were many times yesterday where I was almost brought to tears as the comments came in throughout the day.  I had every intent to sit down and respond to each and every one of them…  but I am still to this very moment a little too overcome with emotion to try tackling that task.  I didn’t write a post with the intent of getting reinforcement from my community, but that was ultimately the result.  I got a virtual war-cry from my friends to the equivalent of “we got your back!” and I appreciate it greatly…  even though I am not entirely certain how to process it.

There is no real hyperbole intended in yesterdays post, because I sorta accidentally opened the door a little too wide to the self doubts that I hear inside of my head every single morning.  That said I still hold my breath and hit that publish button.  I am glad that there are people out there however that apparently believe in me so much more than I believe in myself.  So many of the things that I have done in my life I did only because I felt like there was no one else out there to do them.  I lead my first guild because I was concerned about what the future might bring for me if I didn’t step up and do that.  I moved into a leadership role at work, because no one else was and the challenges that we were dealing with required more management than a bunch of independent developers.  I stepped up to my current management position only because I was afraid for what might happen to the unity of our team if someone else took the reigns.  A lot of the decisions I make are not out of a faith in my own abilities, but a fear in what might happen if I don’t do the thing that appears to need doing.

I was afraid that if I waited much longer that whatever was left of our community what fade away.  It was my hope that it was not yet too late and by the fact that we have now tied our best year in participation it seems like I might have accidentally picked the right time to do this.  The last couple of years have been extremely rough on this community, and my ultimately hope was that we could get back some of what we lost.  There are blogs that are gone and likely never coming back, but we are bolstering those holes in our wall with brand new bloggers that will hopefully infuse us all with a level of excitement.  I think it is impressive how far we have come in so short of a time.  Each year the initiative has picked up steam as the process has gone on and the flood of topics pulls people out of the woodwork.  Here are the numbers of past years…

  • 2014 – 52 Participants
  • 2015 – 88 Participants
  • 2016 – 62 Participants
  • 2017 – 0 (I failed to get it organized)
  • 2018 – 88 Participants (so far, it is not too late to join in)

Also impressive at this point is we have 92 members active on the Discord with a large number of people who have just joined to participate in the conversations even though they may not be officially participating in the event.  I do believe…  we may have a community again and an extremely active one.  Ultimately that was the thing I was missing the most, being part of something much larger than myself.  There have always been some of us that spun topics off one another, because quite honestly we refused to accept the pronouncement that blogging was a dead art.  It is my hope however that this version of Blaugust will be more forgiving when it comes to the after effects on the community.  There are a lot of bloggers that in the crush to get their 31 posts in…  have burned themselves out in the process only to close up shop shortly after the event ended.  My hope with this year is that we are providing folks the tools to run the marathon, not the sprint and keep going for the rest of the year.

There are so many mornings that I feel like a little kid pretending to make a newspaper or sitting in a hollowed out cardboard box pretending to be on a television show.  The truth is however that people are out there reading this and I am thankful of the kind words that you have shared with me.  I will do my best to try and figure out how to accept them.  I have more of a support structure than I deserve, and I am extremely thankful to everyone who has joined me in this madness.  We are on a really interesting journey together and I don’t quite know where it is going…  but I feel like it is going somewhere very special.  So in so many words… thank you so much for the help and love and support and random hugs.  Thanks for having my back.  Lets go do awesome things together!

Blaugust: Topic Brainstorming Week

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Blaugust: Topic Brainstorming WeekBlaugust is off to a strong start! This week’s theme is Topic Brainstorming, to help generate some ideas that everyone can mine for posts for the rest of the month.

First I want to talk a bit about three categories of blog posts that it is useful to think about if you’re a newbie blogger. I like to mix and match different kinds of posts so I don’t burn out too much. The three main types are:

Diary: These are the easiest kind to start with. They’re the catalog of what you’ve been up to, in-game or irl. They can be as simple as a few screenshots with captions, or as detailed as the full RP write-up of what your character was thinking as they explored their world.

Dialog: The meat of most blogs. These are where you expound on a topic of interest, or respond to something you saw elsewhere in the blogosphere. Share those opinions and hopefully you’ll start a discussion.

Deep-Dive: Guides. We all love them. We should all show their creators a little love too. Writing guides and walkthroughs is time-consuming but it can be really rewarding. You don’t have to be an expert to write one, either. Your creative solution to a problem might be exactly what someone needed to help them succeed.

Now let’s brainstorm some topics for Dialog posts!

  1. Talk about the first game system you remember playing, or a favorite game from childhood.
  2. Single-player or multiplayer games? Why? What are the exceptions?
  3. What gets you hyped about an upcoming game?
  4. Do you have gaming insecurities? Something that makes you feel like a “fake gamer”?
  5. What is your gaming environment? A messy desk? A comfy sofa? What would your perfect gaming setup be?

Talentless Hack

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Talentless Hack

The other day Chestnut did an excellent post about Impostor Syndrome that you should check out if you have not.  The fact that it is a real thing, doesn’t actually help me personally get over being mired in it at times.  Right now I am fighting it massively as yesterday was the official first day of August and as such the beginning the periods where the posts start counting towards the totals.  The problem is I am personally feeling overwhelmed with doubt.  I am questioning who the hell I was to be thinking I should bring back Blaugust and at the same time try and cherry-pick aspects of the Newbie Blogger Initiative and other blogging community events.  What gave me the right to be the one to do all of this?

Even more so…  I question who I am to be giving advice to anyone.  Most of the time I feel like a talentless hack that somehow mastered the ability to get up in the morning and spew nonsense into blog form.  My claim to fame has always been longevity…  not actually being good at anything.  Who am I to even suggest anything out to another human being out there that is quite honestly probably already better at this than I am?  My experiences are not unique and my gaming interactions aren’t particularly interesting…  so why would I think that I should be documenting it and pushing it out there into the world.  To make matters worse…  I am not even good at life in general and I spent my days waiting for my workplace to catch on to the fact that I don’t actually know half of the things they think I do.

Ultimately…  this is what my brain sounds like every moment of every day.  There are times where it is really hard to push aside those little voices and keep moving forward.  The thing is though…  that I know I am not alone in this.  Almost every friend of mine that I get to know, has their own version of this cadence playing in their head telling them that they are not good enough or strong enough to do something.  It is very easy to let the voices win and slink back into the comfortable shadows trying to keep anyone from noticing you disappeared.  The early days of my blog is filled with periods of time where the voices won, and silenced me.

I would accidentally find myself falling behind in posting because life happens, and then it became this massive barrier to get past to start again.  I kept thinking that in order to make a post… it had to be good enough to make up for the amount of time I was gone from the blog.  So if I was gone a month…  then when I started posting again I needed something truly epic to talk about in a time when nothing in my life felt epic at all.  Even to this day I never really understood what prompted me to start the experiment of getting up every single morning and writing anything that came to my mind.  But the repetition and routine allowed me to push past that barrier and just start up again and the track record of doing it for so long…  gave me empirical proof that I could in fact pull a post out of the ether every single day.

I am not a good writer.  There are people who are participating in Blaugust that absolutely are, and take their craft extremely seriously.  My blog is not one of those.  I have come to accept that fact and instead focus on sharing my story with you the reader.  I occasionally have nuggets of wisdom to pass along, or an interesting life experience…  but more often than not it is the simple act of getting up and sharing something real with you every single morning that keeps this process going.  It is a weird protracted one sided conversation that I am having with you, serialized a single day at a time and largely that is the method of communication that feels the most comfortable at times.

I can imagine that I have no readers at all and that I am just chronicling my ideas for my own purposes.  I can imagine that I have a large audience out there when I want to feel more important.  The act of creating something and thrusting it out into the world can be extremely therapeutic at times.  I will admit however there is not a single morning that goes by that I don’t have to sort of hold my breath and push the publish button without thinking about it too much.  This is why I don’t really edit my posts and you get them in their natural raw state…  typos, word swaps and all.  If I were to think about what I was just about to throw out into the world I would mire myself in the all too familiar cycle of analysis paralysis and self recrimination.

There are members of this initiative that talk about how they carefully edit each post to pair down the number of words, and that is brilliant advice if you are in fact the type of writer that can take it.  For me personally…  this blog is more compulsion than willful act at this point.  The more I think through the process the more likely said process is to fail.  The more I examine something the more I get caught in a loop of inaction because sitting in that silent place where I am forever weighing the outcomes occasionally feels good.  The inertia of analysis is a pleasant thing.  Every single morning is a struggle and to make up for my own failings…  it is like I have tricked myself into hitting that publish button when I am still very much half asleep.

Over the last several years I have built up a level of honesty with my readers and part of that is sharing my own failings.  I am not good at this and I have no right to be kick-starting the return of Blaugust.  I did it however for the purely selfish reason of wanting to see more people out there doing the sort of thing that I do on a daily basis.  I want more windows into other worlds where I am can sit down and partake of these elongated one-sided stories myself.  I missed having a thick blogroll full of tales to experience any time I needed that to escape from my own frustrations and troubles into someone else’s world.  I have no right at all to give advice but I will continue to share my experiences, because it seems to be the thing that I need to do each day to feel normal.