photo credit: Colin Purrington

The difficulty with projects like personal blogs is that you tend to start doing them when you have a lot of time and attention. Then, unless you are a much more diligent person than I am, you let them lapse when other exciting (paying) projects come up and fill your time.

When I started posting regularly on Quiet Babylon, I had just left my position at Capybara Games, a company I had helped start. Burned out from the hours, looking ahead and seeing success for the company but not immediate relief, I made one of the more difficult decisions of my life and walked away. Slightly adrift but still in love with games, I decided to make Quiet Babylon an outlet for a lot of my ceaseless thinking about how games are made, how games are designed and how games are played.

At the time, I had it in my head that I’d maybe teach myself some programming and start working on a project of my own. I did begin down that path, messing around with Java in my spare time, sketching out a few simple ideas that I could implement in a reasonable time frame as I learnt my way around a language and so on. I put all of that on hold for a genuine vacation in August, intending to ramp back up when I came home.

Instead, I was hired to work on the Canadian election.

The fact is that I’ve been on the road since May and aside from The Penny Arcade Game (release weekend) and Prof Layton (this past weekend) I HAVEN’T BEEN PLAYING GAMES. There comes a point where writing about other people’s writing about games instead of games themselves means you aren’t really adding anything to the conversation.

Looking back at the, frankly, embarrassing early posts and reading through to the last time I updated, there is a clear development in my writerly voice that is away from some kind of contrived I-have-no-idea-what-I-was-thinking to just-me-talking. The natural next step is to lift the self-restriction on posting only about video games, added in the vain hope that a focused blog would attract a readership. (It didn’t, Neither did all the obsessive futzing with the back-end.)

So hello the 50 of you that are subscribed via feedburner! Maybe you will will like where I go with this or maybe you will not. Doesn’t especially matter anymore. This is a personal blog now.