A slump in both worlds

It seems the blogosphere is going through a phase where WoW isn't as central to public conscious as it once was. What I mean by this is that WoW blogs--at least, the ones written by people without beta access--seem to increasingly be less about WoW itself and more about... well, other issues. Between the considerations of the prevalence of killing in games and the consideration of gender stereotypes in the geek world, the game that gave birth to all of our blogs seems to be taking a back seat to other points of interest. And truth be told, this doesn't surprise me.

Take a look at the state of WoW itself right now. We are in the intervening months between two expansion packs, and the content of the current expansion pack is starting to feel stale after being experienced so many times. This is, of course, inevitable, so what are we players to do? Well, our choices are three-fold: stop playing until the next expansion comes out; keep doing the same content, in spite of our boredom; or try something new. Considering that our blogs are about WoW, our blogging activities are inextricable from our in-game activities. As such, our choices of what we can blog about are similar to our choices of what to do in-game: we can not post at all, keep posting about the same things we've been posting about, or post about new things we haven't discussed before.

Not posting at all is obviously not a very attractive option. After all, it's our posts that keep our readers coming back to our sites; backlogs and archives can only entertain someone until they reach the end. Even then, our blogging and writing styles evolves over time as we become more practiced, so if someone were to read back far enough into our archives, the posts they discover would probably read like they were written by a different author, a less experienced and skilled one. Some bloggers may have a lengthy enough archive to keep their readers entertained until Cataclysm comes and they start blogging again, but if your posts are enjoyable enough that people would want to read through your archives*, they probably already have. If people enjoy your posts, they'll probably want to read your past posts without you needing to prod them to do so.

What about continuing to post about the same things? Well, as long as there are people still doing the same content, this is a viable option, especially because there will likely be players who get to the game late and start that content after everyone else is done with it. The trouble comes from the fact that many players probably won't take this option for very long, so at some point, people will stop being interested in reading about content they have stopped playing. There's also the issue that you can only write so much on any given topic, and eventually, you're going to start repeating yourself. As you write more on a single topic, you need to either start scraping the bottom of the bucket for things to write about or get really creative when coming up with topics to write about. In other words, this option isn't sustainable.

What about our third option, writing about something new? This is an attractive option for many reasons, aside from the fact that the other two have been proven to not be very pracitcable. When we start writing about something we haven't written about before, we tend to write our posts to be very broad in scope, and thus more accessible to our readers than they would be if we were to write about more specific topics. This is especially important when writing about something that may not relate to WoW directly, like gender equality or video game ethics, since we build our readerships by writing about WoW. Thus, the only thing we can be absolutely sure our readers will be familiar with is WoW, and perhaps the general online WoW community. So in order to be sure that a post about a non-WoW topic doesn't go over our readers' heads, we need to keep it general, for people are more likely to find something that they can relate to in a general post.

Of course, we don't need to abandon WoW as a topic to write about something new, but the same issues of audience commonalities and exceptions apply if we write about a different topic within WoW. Most blogs have some sort of central theme in terms of what they write about; in my blog, that theme is anything WoW from a philosophical perspective. Other blogs may be based around a single class, a single activity within the game, etc. and they build readerships based on that topic by consistently writing about it. If a blogger spends his/her whole career writing about mages, it would be a bit of a shock for readers to see him/her writing about warriors all of the sudden, and the readership that blog has built up would probably be less interested in reading about warriors than reading about mages. However, make that post general enough, and people will usually be able to find something to relate to within it.

So it seems that writing about completely new topics isn't that big of a stretch in these few months between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. And besides, if we take the other alternative, continuing to write about the same topics, we'll eventually need to get so creative in deciding what we write about those topics that we'll likely end up just writing about new things anyways, if we want to avoid repeating ourselves.

*There are some authors whose blogs I enjoy reading but whose posts I don't enjoy enough to make me want to read their blog's archive. Then there are blogs like You Are Not So Smart, whose posts are so enjoyable and timeless that I enthusiastically did an archive binge upon discovering them.