Becoming More Engaging

Revising the blog a bit

Becoming More Engaging

Those of us who create content, whether for fun or for a living, are always worried about what we call “engagement.”

The worry is pretty easy to understand once it’s explained to you.

You see, none of us want to create stuff that people don’t read. If we spend the time and energy to work on a project, we hope that others will derive some sort of satisfaction from our efforts.

This also means changing course when it’s obvious that things are either unsustainable or just aren’t working right.

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Project Changes

With that in mind, I’m making a few brief changes, both to this blog and to my YouTube videos.

I’ve actually already made a few alterations, though you might not have noticed them. For example, my earlier blogging efforts relied on writing this blog first, and then sometimes creating videos to accompany the blog posts.

I quickly realized that this wasn’t all that sustainable. You see, my problem is that I really like to dig deep into subjects that I come across. This uses up quite a bit of time and energy, as you can imagine. For example, I spent hours on this piece about Harry Pattee:

Now, there’s nothing wrong with spending hours doing a deep dive; in fact, I want to do more of those, not less. However, to be able to do more, I realized that I needed to try to kill two birds with one stone.

As a result, for the past few weeks I have focused on making YouTube videos and blog posts together, rather than trying to do two separate things.

Similarly, I’m going to put an end to the “Let’s Replay” YouTube videos. As fun as they are to make, I’ve found it almost impossible to form coherent storylines while playing games on the fly. Videos that exceed 20 minutes in length wind up with very low view counts. Additionally, there are games that I play off camera that I realize after the fact would have resulted in great videos. I want to capture more of those, and I want to stay away from taking the best games and having them wait for some future day when I get around to writing the summary.

We’ll try to make everything as current and as up-to-date as possible. It does mean that there are a few game summaries that I wanted to write that we’ll end up skipping. However, my hope is that we will wind up with more engaging writing and videos in the end.

You might not have noticed this, but I actually changed the way I write game summaries a few weeks back. I realized that I often didn’t have the energy to write a blow by blow account of a game. I also discovered that it was a lot more fun and more interesting to approach individual games from the standpoint of the general replayer: rather than focusing so much on how this or that player performed, for example, I’ve tried to focus more on situations that we all encounter and what solutions are possible.

Now, none of my projects are being shelved. You’ll still see games from 1908 and 1949 here, as well as games from my “secret” 1986 Mets in 1962 time travel project with OOTP 24. I’ve got another project coming up soon as well — one that should give us plenty of talking points and intrigue.

I’m also going to spend more time working on a few longer term projects that I’ve temporarily shelved. This includes expanding the offerings in the member’s section. Stay tuned!

Are you in favor? Are you opposed? Do you have advice for making things more engaging? Please let me know in the comments!