On other MMO blogs I read sometimes that there aren’t anymore arguments to talk about, or discussions to have. If you feel so, it’s because you failed.

I remember clearly why I started this blog. At that time it wasn’t simple to voice opinions. The Waterthread community didn’t have a good opinion of me and liked to ban me periodically and good discussions were going to be invariably lost just because they also periodically wiped the boards.

I started a blog because I wanted to voice my own opinions and build something on them. Not because I wanted to boost my ego, or because I thought my own opinions were indispensable for the world, but because what I wanted to say was different. In a similar way I was also looking for other voices out of the chorus. I started to read Lum when he was the voice out of the chorus. I continued following the community when he became the chorus. I continued looking for and reading those blogs with people who had something to say. I started my blog because I had something to say. A lot.

You may agree or not with what I wrote along the years, being interested or not, think it was utterly stupid or pointless. But it was different. I always looked for other points of view, then make my own opinions. There was this First Rule that made blogs interesting in their own way: THE HATE.

Today people will say that ‘teh hate’ is a thing of the past. The unconstructive hate. I always thought that the hate stood for something valuable: the critical point of view. *I* read blogs, Lum in the first place with his site and community, for a very simple reason. The voice out of the chorus was critical. It was subjective. But it was also honest and without filters. That was the point.

At the time mmorpgs were such a clusterfuck that you needed both consciousness of the thing, and find new solutions. Those “critical”, “hateful” communities figured out things way before the market itself recognized and adapted. They were AHEAD of everything.

So I sneaked there because it was extremely interesting, stimulating. It was alive. There were things to figure out, to study, to find solutions for. It was a “field” that was growing, becoming more important. And it was necessary to learn from those communities.

When I stopped writing about MMOs it was not because I was bored or because I ran out of things to write. But because life pushed me in another direction when instead I wanted to invest MORE time in this thing. The more I wrote the more I had things to say. Different things to say. Relevant in my mind, so on a blog to be offered to whoever was interested.

And today I read of bored bloggers, or complaining that they ran out of interesting arguments. Why are you writing on blog? I always knew my answer.

Today we have an higher number of bloggers. This will always be a good thing. Many are gamer blogs specialized in one game, mostly a tale of experiences in the game more than game design ideas. This doesn’t make them worse or better but from my point of view the today blogs are lacking what yesterday blogs had aplenty: the critical point of view. The desire to change. Make things better. Participate.

As with everything, the culture absorbs subversive attempts and makes them a popular trend shallow and alike. That’s my view on the blogs of today: shallow and alike.