Last month, on this very site, I blogged for the first time ever. Twice in the same week. Now, a month later, I’m caught in a twisted blog spiral.
I’m doing fieldwork at Execution Labs. I love my work. I get to watch games being made. I geek out on this. Getting to meet great speakers, like Eric Zimmerman this week, is just icing on the cake.
Jason Della Rocca, one of the co-founders, suggested that I start blogging about my work on their site. This blogging has escalated. I may need an intervention. My first post is on game canons and the language developers use to design with. My second post is about how I am now an accidental feature blogger at Gamasutra. And my Gamasutra blog is here.
This is weird for a number of reasons. The first is that I come from a background of Surveillance Studies. This means that I’m really careful about what I post online. I don’t want rants, pictures, or just half-baked ideas to come back and haunt me. My barren facebook page attests to that. But, isn’t the point of blogging to post half-baked ideas?
Secondly, I spent years of my life lurking on Gamasutra articles and blogs (for the reason why, you’ll have to read my second post). Now I have a blog there, I’ve become my very own research subject.
Thirdly, I want to be a more public academic. But it sometimes means people telling me that I’m wrong. In a public venue. Like on the Gamasutra post. Now this is really discomforting.
Finally, this weekend, instead of laying on the couch reading postmodern theory and metaphysical poetry (okay, watching Deep Space Nine and Archer) I’m caught in a deadly blog cycle. Tomorrow will be spent writing my next blog on being indie in an incubator (goodbye, Borderlands 2). Who knew that blogging is time-consuming?
I’m putting my money where my mouth is and trying to provide developers with a more sociological perspective by sharing my work with the industry I study. It’s a start. But sometimes it feels a lot like shameless self-promotion.
-Jen