Having curbed my time in gaming over the past few weeks (a lot of it as a result of the endless shenanigans in the gaming industry and gaming communities that has further soured my desire to even want to pay further attention to all of the bullshit surrounding it), I’ve decided now is the time to take a huge step back from it (including blogging about it).
This now close to 14-year-old (if including my prior one from around 2010 which I didn’t transfer the posts from) blog has always been a personal side hobby (with no monetization intentions); it’s something I did to keep me occupied as well as for fun (but when it stops being fun, then it is time to “change the scenery”). Because I had specific goals/made very specific choices while attending college and when I began working full time, many of those decisions shaped my career trajectory and eventually afforded me the opportunity to early retire from my professional career (IT) in the prior decade. I’ve thus kept myself busy with various hobbies including gaming (along with this blog), music, and travel (along with volunteering). My partner on the other hand chose to continue working to keep herself busy.
For myself, gaming (in terms of what I enjoyed/had a preference for), and this blog were a natural outlet for the past 13.85 years. There was a time when I also did find it therapeutic to just do these “stream of conscious” memory dumps about the hobby that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, this industry has become overrun by corporate executives who care primarily about extracting as much money as they can from their customer base versus making games that are actually good (as I noted before, the design premise has been about creating game systems that have a monetization aspect to them with the game design itself being secondary), while treating their most important resource (their employees), like trash. Thus, the past few posting I did recently, were just energy draining/unfun and sent this signal that it was no longer a hobby that was providing me with the sort of fun/entertainment value that I used to get out of it.
I thus came to the quick conclusion that it was best to curb the amount of time and money I spent in gaming (not that I ever whaled in the games I played) where I felt it would be better to redirect what I used to spend (on stuff like credits or subscriptions), elsewhere. As for this blog, I expect my posting activity to drop well below the low of 2016 (where there were only 35 postings for the entire year) since I expect the only two (in service) PC games I will write anything about going forward, is ArcheAge (until it gets shutdown) and Guild Wars 2. Any TERA PC “offline” developments, I will also write about.
This post therefore represents the start of the wind down of this blog (I’m undecided about creating a new one to write about other things). It has nonetheless been an interesting run (where it was mostly me venting into the void because it was never a blog advertised for consumption to a wider audience). But to those who actually found, visited and read this blog, I’d like to express my thanks for actually subjecting yourselves to these verbose entries.
– Murasama
