Eight Years Retrospective

The date is probably a little bit off, but in an unusual twist of fate I started this blog in January of 2010. The fun part of that is that the age of the blog is super easy to keep track of. What month and year is it? Well, that's how old the blog is - provided you just use the 1s place of the year.

If you didn't know, the blog started over on Live Journal under the name "Art of Gaming" - might have been all one word. The idea is pretty simple to guess off the name. I wanted the blog to be my "art of war." I didn't think myself some grand gift to GMs, but enough people told me I was good that I believed them and I really enjoyed delving into the philosophy and mechanics of what makes for a good GM, what makes for a good game, what makes for a good group, and all of that.

That said, I am prone to some fits of arrogance. For example, along the way of the blog I came up with my "grand theorem" of GMing. Five years later - and some change sure - and I still mostly feel that way about GMing. If you want a good game, make the game and gameworld make sense with what the players are doing, and let the players make meaningful choices. Easy peasy, right? :P

Still, it is kind of crazy to think this blog is eight years old. They say you become a whole new you every 7 years. That means last year I became a totally different person than the guy who started this blog. I don't feel totally different, but I do know I see the world in some key ways very differently now.

So where do we go from here? Eight years is a long time to be ranting about RPGs. When I started the blog I figured I could talk every day about GMing and never stop. In some ways I feel I have done that. Over the years the blog has gone from updating daily, to updating Mon-Fri, to just 3 times a week. I think the 3 days a week schedule is good, but I'd be lying if I said I haven't missed some posts.

This blog never broke out huge. That's fine, it was never supposed to, but we all like to dream we'll hit that 1 in a million strike. Then again, I'm not even sure people do blogs anymore. They kinda died, didn't they? Everyone does youtube and twitch now it feels, and even those are on their way out.

Motivation can be hard. But I don't want to quit either. So the plan for now is this: we continue forward. We keep the same schedule. I do my best to not miss any more posts without damn good reason - and early notice. And we keep talking about gaming. We keep talking about what it means, and ways in which I can be a better GM that I hope will also help you find your own way forward.

My thanks to all of you - whether you stopped reading the blog 7 years ago or more, just read for the first time right now, or have been a regular. It's been fun talking to all of you, even if only in the small snippets we get.