Phew

Just between you, me and the lamp-post, I'm kinda pleased that Top Ten thing is over.

For one thing, I've wanted to post other stuff here, but haven't wanted to break the continuity. Plus, I've had to wait until I'm in the mood to rave about a particular game before I can post it, so this whole process has taken longer than I thought it would, even though I've only spent about 10 minutes or so on each actual post.

Plus, who cares what I think, eh?

Oh, and I've taken the hit counter thingy off the site. It was playing up a bit, anyway, and I guess I could always get another one, but I'm not sure I really want to know who's reading this. I think I'm better off just shouting into the void, as it were.

I'm also at the point now where I want to rethink what this is all about. Basically, I've posted semi-random thoughts about videogames up until now, and there are a couple of reasons for this.

1. The main reason for doing this, at least initially, has been to get into the habit of simply writing something down every so often. Even at this modest task, I've only managed partial success.

2. I don't really want to write a journal of my feelings, wants and desires. Or tell you about my friends and what they're up to. That's of interest to nobody. The only people that would want to read it are the people who it's about, and more often than not you're going to end up pissing those people off anyway.

3. Thinking and writing about videogames is pretty much what I do all day anyway. It's my job. So I don't really have to shift gears too much to jot this stuff down, and I've always got plenty of material. As I say, I really just wanted to get into the habit of writing *something*, so I figured it was easiest to stick to something fairly close to home, at least to start with.

So, there are several ways I could go with this. On the one hand, I'd really like to try my hand at writing some fiction in blog form. Just to, you know, get those mental muscles going. The readership for something like that would almost certainly be zero, though, so I might just start up a whole separate ficiton blog, just to try it out, for my own benefit. As I say, I think it's getting into the habit of writing frequently that's the all-important first step to actually achieving something worthwhile on that front. It's as if you've got to push through volumes of shitty words, getting them out of your system, before you can squeeze out the few precious good ones that you have deep within you.

On the other hand, I'm still arse-deep in videogames, and increasingly involved in talking at conferences and thinking about them more broadly, along with actually making the suckers. Perhaps something of a more general interest (at least within game development) would be to start to write pieces more resembling articles. I'm not sure how scholarly they'd be, but there are certainly aspects of gaming and game design that I think are worthy of more serious discussion than they get, and these are topics on which I most definitely have opinions. Opinions which I usually wave around at conferences, in lectures and at panel discussions and all that, but which I never really set down in any enduring sort of way. Perhaps this is the correct format for something like that.

You're always welcome to comment, of course, but if you've got anything to say about this issue, I'd particularly appreciate a little feedback.