Blaugust AMA

This is post 16 of 31 for the Blaugust event. To check out more Blaugust posts and sign up to participate, visit the Blaugust Nook!

Syl came up with a grand idea for Blaugust with a sort of AMA chain--you ask a question to the person above you, and they answer it!

Rowan Blaze of I Have Touched the Sky posed the following question to me:

I don't see a lot of blogs devoted to Call of Duty and other single-player games. Do you think the social aspect of MMORPGS spills over into the blogosphere more than for SPGs? Or is there some other factor? Or is it simply the circles we run in?

This is something I've also wondered about, myself. And I can think of a couple various reasons, though, I'm no expert, so I may be completely off the mark.

1. I do think part of it is the social atmosphere associated with MMORPGs. I know that the reason I have so much to talk about, sometimes is from doing content with another person/people. And sometimes, it's just that I had this super-awesome conversation with someone and it spurred my blogging juices and I had something to write about just from a conversation in TeamSpeak or tells. Granted, one can also have social interactions with single-player games, but I feel it is rarer and less immersive, or in-the-moment.
2. I feel that part of it is also the content types and updates you find in MMORPGs versus SPGs. Obviously, being and MMO means lots of people around to run various group content for goals, whereas in a SPG, you may be running similar content, but there's no real goal or point to run it again and again. There are also constant updates to an MMORPG versus SPG. Patches and expansions provide expanded worlds and content to complete. In an SPG you may get DLC or updates, but they don't seem to provide as much replayability as MMO content can.
3. And I do feel it's the circles bloggers run in, a bit, too. Most of us who started blogging got our inspiration from someone, who got their inspiration from someone, etc. It's a nice big circle. And most bloggers follow a core set of bloggers and have interactions with them, depending upon the game(s) one plays, or other interactions you may have had with a blogger in the past.

The caveat to all of this, however, is that as a person who prefers MMORPGs to SPGs I don't go seek out blogs devoted to a single game, or SPGs as a genre. And I think that is a big reason, as well. I know they probably exist, just as, for instance, LARP blogs do, but as a person who only dabbles in SPGs, my favorite blogs are also folks who write about MMORPGs but dabble in other things as a whole.