It all started because… (Z & Cinder’s Blog Challenge)

… I wanted to participate in the community.

About two and a half years after I began playing WoW, I was playing a lot with my Boomkin. I don’t remember anymore if I was still leveling her or if this was after BTH and I switched guilds and the new guild, having enough healers, wanted me as DPS on my Boomkin rather than as a healer on Kamalia. Anyhow, I wanted to get better at Boomkining, and that led me to Restokin. Reading Restokin led me to a number of other blogs (many of which are now long since in mothballs). Presently, I started wanting to make comments on the blogs I was reading. Eventually, I started wanting to talk about the game on my own platform. More specifically, I wanted to participate in a survey about healing by making an independent post about it rather than by leaving a lengthy comment on the blog that originated the survey.

Cataclysm was announced sometime around the time I began blogging, so a lot of posts in the first year were prompted by the upcoming changes to the world. One of the bloggers I read issued an “Exploration” challenge, for which I wrote a series of posts about the Shaman totem quests. Another issued an “Eleventh Hour” challenge to write a story about a specific zone with a specific plot element in the story; from that challenge came my first story about Kaelinda. I wrote other stories to work out acceptable backgrounds/character concepts for characters that I was initially uncomfortable with the idea of playing — Forsaken and Death Knights. I have continued to write stories to record and respond to quests and events within the game.

I’d also been quite active as a commenter and on the forums of Kirina’s Closet, an early RP clothes blog, so it was a natural transition from writing about RP clothes in that venue to writing about them on my own blog. Although this blog has pretty much always had a signifcant emphasis on pretty clothes, fashion began to dominate my content after Transmogrification debuted. I participated in a handful of Transmogrification contests or challenges in the first year after Transmogrification went live. I also started keeping a running documentation of my own characters’ Transmogrifications.

I’ve met a lot of people whom I like very much through the exchange of reading and commenting on blogs, and I definitely still value the participating-in-the-community aspect of blogging. Although I appreciate every comment I receive and am quite fond of all of you who comment regularly, I think that if I were always trying to write my blog for other people, I would have stopped blogging long ago. Indeed, I blog mostly for myself. I can’t really talk about this game in any depth or detail to anyone in my family except BTH (who got me into it in the first place) because they either disapprove (my Dad, my in-laws) or aren’t really interested/don’t care (everyone else). I don’t write a lot about what I do in Azeroth in my pen-and-paper journal, either — I mention it, but only briefly. This blog is my primary record of my experience with the game.

So I write about anything about the game that is occupying my mind. I comment on events (both in-game and meta-game), I set goals for my characters and track my success (or lack thereof) in accomplishing them, I respond to blogging prompts such as this one, I write stories (which usually languish unfinished in my drafts folder for a very long time before I finally post them), I draw pictures (which I haven’t done much of lately). While Transmogrification is probably the “bread and butter” content of my blog — especially in the past year since I started doing the Sunday Mog Show series — I strongly suspect that my interest in blogging would burn out and die if I tried to make this exclusively a Mog blog. I’d still want to write about other aspects of the game, but it would feel like too much work to try to maintain two distinct blogs that were both about WoW — and the blogging about Mogging itself would become a tedious chore instead of a fun diversion. “Variety is the spice of life,” and all that.

I also feel like blogging — both writing about my own activities and reading about others’ activities — has helped me sustain my interest in the game. Someday, though, my interest in WoW and in blogging about WoW will dwindle, and I will wander away and find something else to occupy myself with. I like to think that when I feel that starting to happen, I will download and archive in some form or another my favorite content from this blog — by which I mean all of the posts linked on the “Stories” page and all of the “Things my [Class] Wears” posts — so that later, I can look back fondly on the time that I spent with this game and the things that it inspired me to create.

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This post brought to you by Z & Cinder’s Blog Challenge #23:

Why do you blog about WoW?
Everyone who has created a blog has done so for a reason. For all of you WoW bloggers out there, what was that reason? Why did you choose to put fingers to keys to write about a computer game? What type of posts do you like to write? Does your blog have a theme to it, or do you just wing it and write whatever you want? We’d love to know!