Playing without blogging?

Before any potential worries crop up from the title of this post, let me say that as of now, I have no plans to stop blogging in the foreseeable future. The same can't be said of Larisa of The Pink Pigtail Inn, though, who is expressing doubts about whether she can continue blogging. As sad as I would be to see her go, if she has to, it is not our position to tell her not to. It would be a shame, really, because of the great insight she has provided for as long as I have read her blog, and that post is no exception. The particular insight that inspired this post can be found in this paragraph:

On the other hand I can't help asking myself: will WoW be as fun and enjoyable if I don't blog about it? It's been an essential part of my gameplay for more than 2.5 years. The fact that I blog has changed the game to me. I think it helps me to see things I might not have noticed otherwise. It gives me an incentive for reflection and observation. And if I'm ever in doubt about anything - the game, my guild, myself, I have the entire blogging community to discuss with. The PPI has been my hideaway, my lookout and my outlet for so long. I can't even imagine how it would be to play WoW without it.

Larisa brings up a point that is probably somewhat universal to all bloggers, to varying degrees. As my blogging readers can attest, blogging changes the way you view whatever you blog about. Granted, it changes it in different ways for different bloggers; someone who writes in a role-playing blog will probably view the game differently from someone who writes a blog about raid advice, for they are looking for different sources of inspiration. A roleplayer will probably look for story-elements in WoW he can use to help write his story, while a raid blogger would probably examine raid encounters with a keen eye, looking for various ways he can increase the raid's likelihood of success.

As for me, this blog has really just encouraged me to think about the game in a way I already thought about it before (that is to say, philosophically); writing here just allows me to explore those thoughts, expand up them, and perhaps come to conclusions I might not have reached otherwise. (I frequently start writing a post without any idea where it's going to lead, then have some great revelation in the middle of writing it that tells me exactly where I want to take the topic in question.) I also blog for a myriad of other reasons--it helps me practice my writing, it helps me practice typing faster (I can type 70 words per minute thanks to the constant practice), it gives me something to do, I enjoy it--but the revelations it helps me achieve about WoW are the best part about writing it.

Now, because I use much more critical thought in writing this blog than I do in playing WoW, blogging doesn't really affect how I play the game all that much. But while blogging might not be integral to my playstyle, it is certainly integral to how I navigate the WoW blogosphere. Though I can always put any of my thoughts on someone's post in the comment section, sometimes the littlest thing I read in another blog will inspire a slew of ideas in me that aren't relevant enough to the original post to post in the comment section, so instead, I post them here (case in point: this post). Without this blog as a receptacle for those ideas, they'd simply remain in my head in a shapeless form, never coalescing into something profound or meaningful. The lengthiness of my writing also serves as an obstacle to limiting myself to commenting on other people's posts, for I know that many people are less than enthusiastic about reading lengthy responses to other people's posts, and if I didn't have this blog as a place to write my more lengthy compositions, I would doubtless write longer comments on other people's posts, which I imagine would not make everyone trying to read all the comments on a post happy.

So I suppose the take-away message about blogging and my relationship to it is that, though blogging doesn't play a big part in how I play WoW, it plays a big part in how I think about WoW. As long as I read other blogs--which I will continue to do as long as I play WoW, for reading WoW blogs falls under the domain of "being a WoW player", and I often say that being a WoW player is just as fun or sometimes more fun than actually playing WoW--those blogs will give me the food for thought that allows me to think critically about the game, and as long as I think critically about WoW, I will want some place to record my thoughts, and this blog is that place. So I suppose you could say I couldn't imagine playing WoW without blogging about it; the two just aren't directly intertwined.