10 years of the Ludologist

Today is the 10th anniversary of The Ludologist blog. Here is the very first post, Welcome to Blogdom.

10 years sounds like a long time, but the blog also feels like it has been operating on its own separate time scale all along. I started blogging while I was working on my PhD, but now I have been a full-time academic for almost 9 years. I am also married and a father now (but I could never get myself to blog about personal things).

• I started blogging when “video games” almost exclusively meant AAA games sold in boxes.
• I started blogging before cell phone games had taken off.
• I started blogging before casual games took off.
• I started blogging before art games, indie games, and personal games.
• When I started blogging, experimental game (or interactive art) creators used to emphasize that they were not making games in any way. Now they emphasize that they are.
• Book published since I started blogging: 3.
• Blog posts: 635.
• Blog comments: 2142.
• Best hosting service used: Hostgator. Worst: Dreamhost.
• When I started blogging, there were few books on video games. We were still going over Huizinga, Caillois, and Sutton-Smith, looking for secret knowledge from the past.
• I recently made a list of must-have video game books … got to 100. (I may post the list later.)
• I started blogging before game jams were a thing, and when experimental video games were still considered weird and exceptional.
• Twitter and social media are poor replacements for blog posts and discussion. Because: Twitter comments invariably become snarky and/or misunderstood. Facebook comments disappear in the stream of time.
• Game studies is a big field now. I think we managed to construct the field, and to launch game educations (vocational or otherwise) at a surprising speed. I think that some of the better work and discussion show that we really are getting smarter.
• Though there can also be a sense of history repeating at times. And yet, many of the basic questions (i.e. games and narrative, games and players, design and industry, what is a “good game”) are different questions now than they were 10 years ago. They appear against a different background.
• Becoming smarter seems to entail that many of the discussions that were assumed to be resolvable on a high level … turn out to contain smaller discussions and questions inside.
• Knowledge accumulates, but not in the way you thought it would.
• Blogging and game research remain fun (in a much more pure and unambiguous sense than games are fun, strangely).

Thanks for reading!