Thursday, April 21, 2016

 

Ten Years Is A Long Time

I've been wondering for a while now how I was going to mark ten years on this blog.  Round, even numbers like 10 don't come around very often, and they please us so very much that it seems like a shame not to celebrate them when they happen.

But honestly, I'm not feeling very retrospective.  It's just a blog.  It seems kind of silly to celebrate what amounts to a landfill for all of the thoughts about video games that I need to get out of my head for a while.  Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty happy about quite a lot of the things I've written.  Every now and then I thumb through it with narcissistic contentment, like "DAMN those are some good opinions".  I know I'm the only person who reads this thing.  I'll probably peek in on this a few years down the line and be like, "Yup, ha ha."  Fistbump, Future Me.

If this blog is anything, it's a record of how my relationship toward video games have changed over the years.  I go back to my earliest posts and smile about what a narrow-minded little fanboy I was.  You can see me trying to emulate the tone and style of the professional game review sites, never going any deeper than giving a colorful list of a game's features.  You can also see, here and there, symptoms of burnout -- it was a point in my life when I'd spent a decade acquiring video games with my own money, and I was starting to feel like it was making me unhappy and I needed a different way to relate to them.

Eegra changed me.  Discovering a website filled with people who were both smart and held a passion for video games made me want to try harder.  It took me outside of my bubble and awakened me to the budding indie scene that was developing in the PC realm.

I don't write as much these days.  I've abandoned the idea that I'm writing these articles for any reason beyond my own pleasure, so I tend not to bother unless I feel like I have something to say and I don't see anyone else saying it.  And while I've never stopped buying and playing video games, I have at least slowed down considerably.  I linger more on the experiences that matter to me.

And, in a way, this blog has helped me come to this place.  Instead of constantly watching game news and tracking when the next big thing is about to release, I take a flip through my archives and remember how excited Go Vacation made me, or how cool it is that Fantasy Life has a pacifist path.

So let's mark the tenth year of Electric Dilintia by saying that I'm feeling pretty good.  Video games are as awesome and as horrible as they've ever been.  As long as I keep thinking about them, I'm going to keep writing about them.

And with any luck at all, I'll have something a bit more substantial to mark the Wii's ten year anniversary.

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