GamesMadeMe: Blogging About Games

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today.  I've covered IDOCs in Ultima Online, THAC0 from D&D, and InQuest Gamer Magazine.  It feels like something obvious is missing though.  In the spirit of "Introduce Yourself Week" for Blaugust 2023 it only makes sense to close the gap on the obvious: blogging about games!

 In my "So it begins... again!" post yesterday I went back to where blogging started for me 18+ years ago, but I didn't actually talk about what inspired me to start.  First you have to understand where my gamer tag, heartlessgamer, originates from.  I am sure I've posted other recallings of this so bear with me if details have varied.

 My gamer tag comes from the game Kingdom Hearts and the "heartless" enemy featured in the game (little shadow dudes).  Playing Kingdom Hearts happened to coincide with some other key events that resulted in me needing to pick a new online handle.  Prior to these events I was using handles related to character names I had come up with for Star Wars role playing (Hehl Omni and Torno Shren).

 I was a frequent poster on the Vault network forums (think they are owned by IGN now) back in the day and for some reason the forums were changing and we all had to pick new names to go by.  I ended up going with "heartless_" because I was really digging Kingdom Hearts at that moment and time.  The underscore was required and then it was natural to just bridge that to "heartless_gamer".  Eventually that just became heartlessgamer after I nabbed the domain name.

 It is also those very forums that drove me to blogging.  I forget exactly what was transpiring at the time with the forums but there were forums shutting down and posts were going to be taken down forever.  It occurred to me: I don't have any control over this enormous amount of content I am creating on these forums... I should probably start a blog!  That'll show em!

 Eighteen years later and here we still are (I say we as though anyone actually comments on posts anymore).  There were several lean years in my blogging history as I became a father and realized there is more to life than punching the post button (and I needed spare time to play games of course; not worry about blog posts).

 The draught of blog posts ended in Sept 2022 when I said Let's do this - post a day! when I returned to daily blogging.  To be truthful while I had a gap in blogging I didn't slow down on finding platforms like Reddit to continue giving away my thoughts and ideas for free.  If you cant tell; I have deep desire to TALK ABOUT GAMES!

 Talking about games is directly tied to my enjoyment of games. My current jam is New World and I have tons of posts about the game here, on Reddit, in the old New World forums, in Discord, and other places.  Regardless of the scatter shot of places I put stuff I always come back to this blog.  Blogging is like breathing at this point and is as much a part of my gaming experience as anything else.

 In summary: I was writing a lot of posts about games on forums, the forums were going to go away, so I decided why not take control of my own thoughts and put them all on a blog. I have to talk about games. Blogging about games made me the gamer I am today!