Today is the 10th anniversary of The Ludologist blog. Here is the very first post, Welcome to Blogdom.
10 years sounds like a long time, but the blog also feels like it has been operating on its own separate time scale all along. I started blogging while I was working on my PhD, but now I have been a full-time academic for almost 9 years. I am also married and a father now (but I could never get myself to blog about personal things).
- I started blogging when “video games” almost exclusively meant AAA games sold in boxes.
- I started blogging before cell phone games had taken off.
- I started blogging before casual games took off.
- I started blogging before art games, indie games, and personal games.
- When I started blogging, experimental game (or interactive art) creators used to emphasize that they were not making games in any way. Now they emphasize that they are.
- Book published since I started blogging: 3.
- Blog posts: 635.
- Blog comments: 2142.
- Best hosting service used: Hostgator. Worst: Dreamhost.
- When I started blogging, there were few books on video games. We were still going over Huizinga, Caillois, and Sutton-Smith, looking for secret knowledge from the past.
- I recently made a list of must-have video game books … got to 100. (I may post the list later.)
- I started blogging before game jams were a thing, and when experimental video games were still considered weird and exceptional.
- Twitter and social media are poor replacements for blog posts and discussion. Because: Twitter comments invariably become snarky and/or misunderstood. Facebook comments disappear in the stream of time.
- Game studies is a big field now. I think we managed to construct the field, and to launch game educations (vocational or otherwise) at a surprising speed. I think that some of the better work and discussion show that we really are getting smarter.
- Though there can also be a sense of history repeating at times. And yet, many of the basic questions (i.e. games and narrative, games and players, design and industry, what is a “good game”) are different questions now than they were 10 years ago. They appear against a different background.
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- Becoming smarter seems to entail that many of the discussions that were assumed to be resolvable on a high level … turn out to contain smaller discussions and questions inside.
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- Knowledge accumulates, but not in the way you thought it would.
- Blogging and game research remainĀ fun (in a much more pure and unambiguous sense than games are fun, strangely).
Thanks for reading!
Congratulations! My blog has only 1,5 year and I’m proud of that, imagine when it get 10 years!!
keek bloging, keep working!
Congratulations :) Pleas do post that list of 100 books. I own about 60 that I consider must-reads so there must be a few dozen on there I need to be made aware of ;)
Why is research more purely fun for you when compared with games? And, super congrats!
Thanks all!
@Jzungre What I mean is that even when a research project fails to achieve anything, you have still learned something (that the given line of thought was no good), so I always have a sense of getting somewhere when I work on research. Games are more likely to make me feel lost and useless …