Anyone Want To See Some Pictures Of My Pets?

Atherne observed in a comment to my last post that she had no idea I played so much PvP. Ravanel said that her blog doesn't accurately reflect what she does in game either.

Meanwhile, Gevlon, who's recently been trawling the entirety of Syp's extensive blog roll in search of something worth reading (sooner him than me!) likens most of the bloggers he's found there to people who put up pictures of their breakfast on Instagram.: "They are alike the facebook pages of random nobodies that are full of everyday busywork that no one cares about (not even the poster) and literal photos of food. Why does someone cares to share a meal? Or a minipet? Or a storyline."

When I was growing up, one of the very many aspects of the adult world that mystified me and made me mildly apprehensive at the thought I'd one day have to learn to do it was "small talk". I was nervous about small talk without really knowing what small talk was. The concept came up occasionally in books that I'd read but it never seemed to be properly explained.

I could tell it was something that the characters were instinctively either good or bad at but being good at small talk didn't seem to confer any great value or status, while being bad at it was often pointed up as a problem or a drawback, even for those characters who clearly found the entire idea an anathema.

In retrospect I recognize this probably says more about the authors than it does about either the characters or about small talk itself, but as a teenager I found a lot of adult life looked like that: opaque, mysterious, worrying. Then, when I finally worked out what the grown-ups were talking about it often often turned out to be an anticlimax; usually it was something I already knew how to do, had been doing all along, without even thinking about it.

Writing a blog turned out to be very much the same. It took me a good while to decide to start one and even when I'd picked a platform and a title and a layout it was well over a year before I found the nerve to upload my first proper post.

Once I'd got started, though, it ended up being just about exactly the same as several things I already knew how to do and had been doing for a long time. As I've mentioned before, blogging is really nothing more than the internet-enabled version of the APAzine scene that took up so much of my time and energy throughout the 1980s. All I was doing was picking up where I'd left off about a decade before only now I didn't have to keep buying glue.

Writing a blog is also not a huge step up from commenting on the blogs of other people or even on pontificating or arguing on Forums, which is how I'd bridged the gap between my last zine and my first blog. Honestly, now I look back it's like I started with my first fanzine in 1977 and never really stopped.

Blogging is an activity that also fits extremely well into the Bartle gaming schema . Bloggers can be Explorers, Achievers or Killers (that would be an interesting way to subdivide a blogroll) but they pretty much have to be Socializers. 

Or do they? Certainly the kind of blogs that puzzle Gevlon are very heavy on the socializing, which is, I guess, why he finds them so puzzling.

Posting pictures of your mini-pets is the blogging equivalent of small talk and as such it's both trivial and essential. The success of any social gathering (and for many of us doing it, blogging is a kind of social gathering) often relies not only on preparation and organization but on the willingness and facility with which those attending are able to engage with each other by finding common ground on which to stand. Small talk is the grease on the party wheel.

Which is all very well as far it goes...only there are some of us who really do love to talk about the weather - not because it's a safe, neutral topic but because weather is bloody amazing!

I grew up in a house with a barometer in the hall. My grandfather would tap it every day and tell us
what the weather was going to be. It wasn't a very good barometer so he was mostly wrong but I grew up with an understanding that talking about the weather was just something people did because weather was something worth talking about.

I love weather. I could talk about it for hours. Mrs Bhagpuss would tell you I do talk about it for hours. It's still my go-to topic for small talk but if I sense the slightest flare of interest then "small" drops out of the picture.

When it comes to MMOs and blogging about them, storylines, mini-pets and everyday busywork are exactly like weather. Yes, they provide a simple, uncontroversial backdrop for a little mild socializing, which is what many people want from their blogging, as well as their MMOs, but to some bloggers and readers they're not the sauce but the meat.

I do want to see pictures of other people's mini-pets. I do want to hear their accounts of quests they've done and how that turned out. I find reading this stuff and looking at the pictures entertaining. The fact that it also gives a warm burr of social inclusion is a welcome bonus.

It is indeed a warm, pleasant feeling and as I  blog, I increasingly feel an obligation to pay it forward. When I began Inventory Full I was writing almost entirely for myself but as the years pass I have come to accept that, as Ravanel says, all of us who publish blogs are "writing for (some sort of) an audience". 

An audience is not compulsory. There is an option in Blogger to make your blog accessible only to people you permit to read it or even to make it entirely private. There will be people out there writing MMO blogs that no-one has ever read but them.

If I truly only wanted to keep a diary of my MMO adventures then I'd be one of those people. When I took the plunge six years ago and submitted my first post for the approval or otherwise of the entire world (I got 13 page views) I was crossing the threshold to join a party already in full swing.

The party's still going on and having chosen to hang around it's on me as much as anyone to help keep the plates spinning. Some days I just feel like slumping in a corner of the kitchen, letting the buzz of conversation filter through from the next room. Other times I find myself talking too loudly and spilling my drink over someone's photos of their mini-pets.

So, I try not to bang on too much about the weather or how we lost Garrison last night because it was Reset in four hours and everyone was goofing off. I try to think of interesting conversation starters but I always have my wallet-full of pictures of the pets to hand in case there's an uncomfortable silence.

Whatever it takes to keep the party going.