Ten Years of Game Blogging

Yeah, it’s been ten years of this. Some guy calling himself “Jeffro” took a notion to play a bunch of old games, write session reports about them, and then pontificate about it all. It was terrible. No, really… those first several years were just plain awful.

I forget at times what I was trying to accomplish at various points. I remember once thinking how awesome it would be to get on peoples’ blog rolls… right there next to “Grognardia” and “Jeff’s Gameblog.” One day… it finally happened. I was elated… until the guy took me off the list a few days later. Heh. Of course, within a year or so I would end up replacing “Grognardia” there, so it all worked out in the end.

Ah, so… ten years. That’s a lot of water under the bridge. A whole lot of trying things that didn’t work. Taking the one thing that sorta kinda worked, and then trying to do it again… but better. And of course, there’s doing the series of posts on a particular topic and then going one post too far. Every possible way that the shark can be jumped… you can go back through the archives and find examples of it. Somehow, people seem to remember only the good parts. I guess it’s the nature of the medium when it’s so easy to “next” somebody while still keeping them in your feeds.

I really shouldn’t be doing this, of course. The sort of writing I do here has very little in the way of market value. And it’s not like I can just transition into science fiction or game design, either. Those are entirely different things. As different as back end perl hacking is from front end javascript wizardry. And while I occasionally wonder what could go into a Jeffro’s Space Gaming Book, well… it’s just crazy to think of, so why bother….

Why do I do it? Well… these games. Some of them, I really just like a whole lot. Some of them, I cruise over to the Board Game Geek page and there’s just nothing…. Or the stuff out there about these games just doesn’t capture what I think is quintessential about them. Whether I nail it or not, the people I meet in the process are exactly the ones I want to be hanging out with in my spare time, anyway….

But when it gets down to it… I just love getting up at 6AM and pounding away on the keyboard. It’ll be maybe a thousand words in an hour, but it just pours out.  Nobody can interrupt me, shoot me down, elbow me in the ribs, walk away from me in mid-sentence, or put me on a completely different project. I know what to do and I’m free to finally just go after it. It’s called… “being in the zone” and it’s gotta be some kind of drug or something.

It’s been fun. I don’t know what the future holds, but I hope to see you there.

To all my friends, colleagues, nemeses, and opponents out there in gamerdom… thank you for supporting Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog. You’re awesome.