Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

This is my final story behind the post so I had better make an effort to give some useful advice for  a change and not just advice on how to write posts that no one ever reads! Checking back through Blogger's statistics this is my most viewed post ever: http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2008/12/lotro-forgotten-treasury.html It is a tolerably competent after action report of a fairly challenging mid game instance in Lotro but it didn't stand out in my mind when I wrote it. Yet it pulled in a heap of readers and continues to pull them in to this day. Why was this post so popular? In the first place I think it is because it was a helpful post about an area of a popular game that many players experienced diffculties with. Those who struggled with the instance came looking for solutions and those who overcame it came looking for alternative methods. None of this would have got me traffic however if I hadn't given the post the simplest most obvious name possible.  Eve...

You know you have caught the blogging bug when you start to judge gaming experiences by how well they will write. Getting pod killed in he harsh world of EVE is not a pleasant experience but the first time it happened to me I was inspired to write this post: http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2008/05/podded.html . The game's lore suggests that memories are instantly tranferred to a clone at the moment of death but I used a bit of poetic license to imagine the first thoughts of someone waking up in a clone body with no memory of the fiery death of their predecessor. I think it works and I like the post very much. At the end the newly revived clone dis-owns the foolishness that got his predecessor killed. This was actually a true reflection of my own thoughts about the game at that point. Getting pod killed for the first time is a right of passage in the game. I have heard of several players who never made it past that point. Those who persist are likely to be pod killed man...

One of the nice things about having a blog is that it you don't always have to stick to topic. You may be writing a gaming blog but if there is some other issue you want to get off your chest or just to tell the world about then your blog is your own personal soapbox and no one else can tell you what to write in it. Of course just because you can go off topic doesn't necessarily mean you should. Personally I like it when a blogger allows bits of their personal life to bleed into their gaming blog but I suspect that a blog which strays too long and too far from its core theme is going to lose audience. Amusing stories about a blogger's kids or pet dog entertain me and make me feel closer to the author. Long diatribes about politics, economics or religion bore me and turn me off.  Anyway I have never been one to allow " the rules of blogging " to influence what I write about and this post about "The Dreamer" is one of my favourite posts even though it...

Lotro launched in April 2007 and I played from the very beginning. The launch of  new game is a great time to be a blogger. There are lots of new things to write about and an eager audience who want to  extend their gaming experience by reading. Invariably an impromptu blogging ring forms and you can get a good amount of traffic by linking to and being linked from others who are writing about the game. In my fairly limited experience  I found that "How to" posts that are clearly labelled as such can act as traffic magnets during the early stages of a game.  However the most fun I had blogging about Lotro came from a series of posts written in character about my Dwarven Champion Throg . These posts never got me a lot of traffic but they were great fun to write and still give me great pleasure now when I read back over them. As post of the day I'll pick this one: A Sojourn in the Shire . I think I got the tone of the post just right as my proudly feisty dwarf consid...

I started blogging in 2006 and this: Too Old to be Playing Games is one of my favourite posts from that year. I like it because it is  a story in three parts. The first part is a familiar tale of the pick up group (PUG) from hell. The setting is Guild Wars but it could be any mmorpg. I think is is almost mandatory for every mmorpg blogger to write about the downside of playing with random people on the internet. The second part of this tale recounts the silver lining when one member of that PUG turned out to know what he was doing and how he and I finished the quest together. We chatted as we made progress and it turned out we shared other interests apart from gaming. The third part ... well I think I will leave you to find out the third part for yourself but the third part of the tale is the one that made me think and is the reason I still remember that post almost six years later.