This is going to be a fairly self-absorbed one, I’m afraid. If you come here looking for choice games industry gossip or incisive commentary (though if you do then God help you, you seem to be very lost), maybe skip this post.

I’m going to write a little bit about this blog, what I had intended for it, and that sort of thing.

A bit of history first. As you can see from the archives link on the right there, I started Mainly About Games on January the 16th, 2007. At the time we were in the early stages of a new project at work, and though there was a lot to do, I felt the need for an extra outlet – one that was exclusively mine. I guess I was also aware that I was writing a number of posts on various online forums, mainly on the subject of games, and they were quite scattered. It would be nice to collect them all in to one place.

The amount of writing I have managed has fluctuated since then, usually on a monthly basis. The first year I managed what I consider a fairly impressive ninety six posts, down to last year’s frankly rubbish twenty five last year.

You see, I have a serious problem with motivation when it comes to writing.

It certainly doesn’t help that distractions are around every corner when I’m online (as I am when I’m using WordPress) – as I write this I have TweetDeck in the background, and Facebook and Something Awful forums open on different tabs.

But even the computer isn’t everything. Between the last two paragraphs I played with our cat and her toy for a few minutes, then remembered that I needed to text my wife about something.

I don’t have particular trouble coming up with ideas for updates – right now I have sixteen draft articles sat in various states of half-written, the oldest of which is from February 2009 and is the basics of de-constructing my old Half-Life maps page. I will sometimes dictate whole updates in my head while I’m showering, or lying in bed.

It is really the act of sitting down and streaming some words that I am happy with onto a page that is the hard.

At the start of this year, when I moved Mainly About Games to its new domain, I set myself the goal of proving its continued worth by beating my previous yearly update total. And also, and this is the really self-indulgent part, getting my readership figures up.

It probably won’t surprise you to know that this blog is not high traffic. Google Analytics suggests I have had 350 visitors in the last month, and Webmaster tools says my feeds have 53 subscribers. I suspect there is a lot of overlap between those two figures.

There are cheap ways of increasing readership, of course. I could repost articles all over the place, seeding my links on gaming forums far and wide (this is known as the Bruce on Games technique, blogging fans) and hoping that enough interested parties stick around for my ongoing adventures.

I could write in detail about my work, or the company that I work for. Guaranteed to shoot readership through the roof. Also guaranteed to shoot my career (and this job that I like) right through the face. So that is definitely out.

(Whoops, there’s another quick check of Tweetdeck, and Flickr. Nothing interesting going on, though I did almost reply to someone. Stay on target, Gowland.)

No doubt giving away prizes or running some competitions would get readers (though maybe only in the short term). But as my friends would attest to, I am quite a vain and big-headed man – just raising readership is not enough. I want people to visit my site because they are interested in reading what I am writing. Otherwise what exactly is the point of a blog?

And so it comes back to the first goal – increasing the amount of updates (and in particular, quality updates).

Which comes down to having to make myself sit down and write something, at least once a week if I want to have any chance at all of meeting my target (though twice a week is more like it). As soon as the act of updating becomes this regimented requirement, it has sucked all of the fun out of it, and I feel like I have a hard time sitting and concentrating. As I wrote a few months ago, I already have a lot of “stuff” I feel is vying for my free time, I would prefer not to feel forced in to doing bits of it.

(Sorry, the Facebook tab is showing that there is (1) update waiting for me to look at. I am ignoring it, for now.)

I may have mentioned this before, but my blogging hero is the comedian Richard Herring, who has been writing an update once a day for almost eight years, on his Warming Up site. Even though he is a professional writer and comedian, I still don’t know how he manages to be so prolific.

In a recent update (sorry, I’m not going to hunt it out, though the distraction from writing this would be most welcome, even I’m not that flighty – though I have just googled “easily distracted” to see if there’s an actual term for it, because I’m sure there is and I just can’t bring it to mind right now) he mentioned that he tends to write updates as a stream of consciousness, with minimal editing.

I definitely feel this is one of my problems – I am critical of my writing, and I think it’s quite bad by a lot of standards, so I tend to hold on to articles in the thought that I will edit and re-edit them into shape. Except a month down the line either the news story they relate to is hilariously out of date, or I can barely remember the specific points I’m mentioning in a game I played.

(That Facebook update was not very interesting. Just confirming that a friend had been facejacked.)

So, what does this all come down to? I have a blog that I have trouble updating. I’ve taken up photography recently which gives me a much more instant feel of creative gratification, without the feel of being tied to something. I am writing a very dull sob-story piece about all of the above. I have another website that I have to try and keep up to date as well.

Well, I got thinking “how on earth did I write so many updates in that first year? I know that work was very busy, and I was doing a fair amount of overtime” and I went back and had a look.

It turns out I used to post a lot more short updates. A few lines commenting about some news, or a comment thread on Eurogamer that was a particularly hilarious stinker (the gift that keeps on giving). Positive and negative bullet points about something I was playing, rather than trying to edit together something I would be happy to call a review. Re-posting things I had written in other forums, if I thought they were at all interesting outside of the context of the thread.

And more than that, writing in what was basically a stream of consciousness.

So that is what I am going to attempt to re-capture in my writing. Though in the last year I have written some of what I think are the most interesting and useful articles on this blog, I do not think I can sustain shooting for that quality 100% of the time. Not every meal can be steak, right? Sometimes fast food will do (and yes, I do realise that at the point you’re comparing your own writing to Turkey Twizzlers you should probably just agree to stop writing, for the good of everybody.)

I am going to try and clear out my list of drafts. You may see some quite strangely disjointed updates coming. But after that will be clean and pure and fresh “what Tony is thinking these days”. God help us all.

I fully expect my readership to go down at this point. But now I am happy with that.