State of the Rez: To Blog or Not to Blog

The last time I posted anything on Waiting for Rez was in July of last year. Since then I have continued to play MMOs, and continued to participate in conversations on Twitter and on the Massively OP website however the lights were off here on my blog. What happened? Since I’m currently deciding whether to continue blogging or not, I figured a good place to start would be to explain the silence.

When I first chose to start this blog, it was because I enjoyed conversations with other commenters on Massively about specific MMOs and the industry. I saw bloggers continuing those thoughts and ideas and decided to do the same when the old Massively site was closing down and the new Massively OP was still just an idea. My goal was to write once a week (it then became three times a week) and the assumption on my part was that writing would take the place of one of my gaming sessions, taking only about 30-45 minutes of my time.

Instead I spent hours on articles that I wrote and instead of supplanting a night of gaming it became an activity I did in addition to the MMOs. Between playing, writing, and reading other blogs on MMOs my hobby was consuming too much of my time. I work full time, I’m married, and I have two kids and all of these things are more important to me than MMOs. I’m a member of a local church and love my church family and I love Jesus Christ even more and these things are more important to me than MMOs. However if you were to make a pie chart of how I spent my time, you would have (rightly) assumed the thing I valued most was MMO games and the communities that surround them.

So I stopped writing. It actually came as a surprise to me too, I never planned on closing down Waiting for Rez or set a date for when my last post would be. Instead I just lost interest seemingly overnight and moved on. I don’t know how something like that looks from your perspective, but from mine— especially in hindsight—it was a clear indicator that God had cut the umbilical cord linking me to harmful, obsessive behavior.

For months now, whenever I have thought of writing again I have shrugged my shoulders and decided I didn’t really want to spend the time available to me in that way. I still look at the amount of time I spend gaming and feel like it’s still a bit obsessive but at least I’m no longer spending hours almost daily writing and reading blog posts. That needed to stop and I’m glad that it did.

So why start up again now? Well, I’m not sure that I actually am. Like I said, I think about it off and on and I certainly have regular ideas that I could blog about but ultimately up until today I’ve chosen not to return. For me to start blogging again a few things would need to change:

1. I need to schedule a time for writing that is not in addition to the time I normally spend playing MMOs. I have to make a choice and if I’m trying to write again in the evening when I should be with my wife or my kids then I will stop blogging again.
2. I need to learn to write shorter posts and to be okay with one round of editing before publishing. I can no longer spend 2-3 hours making sure a post is perfect; it never was anyway.
3. I cannot try to read everyone else’s blogs, and the ones I do read cannot conflict with family time. Just as with the writing, it either must be done during the time I would normally game or not at all.

In the end I may be done with writing about MMOs whether I’m able to stick to these three things or not. At the very least I’ve been wanting to post one more time to explain the disappearance. As much as I enjoy feeling like I am a part of the MMO blogging community, it’s more important to me that I belong to my family and church first and foremost.

And if I don’t see you all on WordPress, you can still find me in game.