The time has come to open discussions
about the changes in my blogging. I will briefly describe my
intentions, then open the floor to the players of the Game to raise
any issues they might have. Here are my current plans:
Tuesday will remain a Focus
essay. This will generally be philosophy-focussed, although by
necessity some forays into religion are expected. I will be trying
to encourage discussions about this post throughout the week, and
most of the other changes are designed to keep the comments roll
clear for this purpose.
Wednesday will still be the
Games post, but it will occur on my company website
(ihobo.com) instead of here. I will cross-link round-ups of the
content at the ihobo site here, but with comments disabled. All my
major game design and games industry content is going to the company
blog now – which should give plenty of comments bandwidth for
that, and solve the “bus load of tourists” problem when an
aggregator picks me up.
Thursday will remain Serial
day, but when I'm not working on a serial, it will be Mystery
day. The Serials produce fewer comments, so they won't disrupt the
Focus discussions, while the Mystery posts are shorter and lighter,
and so tend to be quieter.
Friday will be informal,
but I plan to try encouraging Dialogue by commenting on
someone else's blog, but posting the link here (or at ihobo). I
don't yet know how this will work, but I'm keen to explore new ways
of participating in the blog community I belong to.
That's not all. I have also prepared
some new blogs to cover some of the more esoteric content:
The Minigame Court: this is
a new blog I've created to house the minigames. I plan to post
notifications about the minigames here and/or at the ihobo site, as
appropriate, while the games themselves would be played in the
Minigame Court, unless there are any serious objections to doing
this. I think it would be nice to keep all the minigame content in
one place, but this is open to discussion.
Shadowtail: this is a new
blog I've created to track black squirrel and other squirrel
sightings around the world. I've also made the Google map for black
squirrel sightings open to collaboration. I hope to find one or two
people to help me run this, because I don't have time to handle the
volume of sightings we got recently, and I certainly can't have
those comments filling up the comments roll here. Any volunteers?
An open question is whether I move the
sidebars collating videogame posts to the ihobo site or keep them
here. I broadly favour moving them (and slimming down the sidebars)
but I welcome discussion on this topic.
Let me try and pre-empt some of the
obvious questions.
Q. Will you stop talking about games
on Only a Game?
A. This is and always has been
my personal blog, and I'll talk about whatever I feel like talking
about here. Because I am about to turn “semi-pro” in philosophy,
that's increasingly likely to be philosophy (more on this later...).
But I doubt I'll stop talking about games, because games are a large
part of my life. It's just that most of the major discussion about
games will be at ihobo.com.
Q. I'm only here for the videogames
posts – should I visit/subscribe to ihobo.com instead?
A. Probably. You certainly won't
miss much in the way of interesting game posts if you switch to that
site/feed as it will almost all be there, and you'll also get all
sorts of new extras – like posts from other people in the games
industry. I already have content with Noah Falstein and Nicole
Lazzaro lined up.
Q. I really like the mix of posts
here and I don't want to see it split up! Can you please keep it all
together?
A. Not realistically. Typepad
aren't going to increase the size of the comments roll, and I need a
way to allow discussions to progress in a useful fashion. That means
moving some of the content elsewhere. To begin with I will cross-link
it all here, though, so you can continue to visit/subscribe to Only
a Game and you'll still be able
to follow everything.
Q.
Will you please stop talking about religion?
A.
How would that even work? Some of the most interesting philosophical
and political questions of our age relate to religious tensions
(abortion and gay marriage, to name but two), and I'm not going to
shy away from exploring them here. As a result of following five
different religious traditions, I feel uniquely positioned to address
such subject in a spirit of open enquiry. But rest assured, the ihobo site won't be discussing religion in any way, so if you're here for games you can always move there.
Q.
I'm outraged that you would ____________! I'm never coming here
again!
A.
Sorry you feel that way. I'm happy to discuss your issues in the
comments, otherwise have fun elsewhere!
I hope
that I have some support for these changes, so please let me know
what you think, for good or ill, in the comments. Thanks in advance
for your participation in this moot!