A Green Mushroom

A Green Mushroom is officially one year old today!  That went by fast.  I didn't know if I was even going to survive the first month of blogging, much less an entire year.  I must say I'm proud of myself and I'm very happy with what the site is becoming. In the first year I've had 40,077 pageviews from 17,664 visits and at least 11,975 unique visitors.  That's simply amazing to me.  My posts are thoughts I'm writing down for myself because I enjoy gaming, but you internet citizens keep coming back to see what I write.  So, thank you readers!  I love your feedback, comments, and discussions.  Thank you for finding and returning to the site over the course of this last year. When I set out, I wanted to write about gaming with a side of media analysis.  My goal was to average about 3 posts per week.  I currently have 225 posts on the site.  This means I've actually averaged 4.33 posts per week, something I'm very proud of.  T...

As a group activity for the 2010 Wordcount Blogathon bloggers were encouraged to write about blogs they can't live without.  I missed the May 10th date when we were supposed to write on the subject because I was out of town.  I think it's a great idea so I'm going to do it anyway. Here we go, my top 5 blogs: Professor Beej - Extremely intelligent writing about all things media.  He covers a wide breadth of knowledge about books, movies, television, technology, gaming, and the internet.  Variety is the spice of life when it comes to the topics Beej covers. Bio Break - Syp is a MMO gamer who likes to share his thoughts.  Half of his posts are random thoughts throughout his day, but they are always interesting and worth reading. Tobold - One of the most well known MMO bloggers currently.  He always gets a ton of comments and is great at generating discussion.  Read the posts and the comments when you visit Tobold's site. Copyblogger - As I tr...

There were two great posts by Syp this week.  The first discussed escapism .  He slants his post towards Lord of the Rings and LOTRO but I think the same concepts apply to all gaming.  Very worthy of your time. At the very least, take a look at his arguments for investing in a fantasy world.  It will give you some ammunition next time someone says playing video games is a waste of time. The other post is about explaining a MMO to a non-gamer .  Syp's mom asked him to explain what he does with blogging, which in turn led to an explanation of MMO gaming in general. Spinks had a rant which turned into a really interesting analysis of where social gaming is taking us .  Spinks' posts tend to be longer, but they usually have a unique take on a given situation. There you go, some Sunday reading for this week.

I'm keeping an eye on Ubisoft and their DRM.  I really hate DRM because it ends up hurting customers who pay for the product and basically adds incentives for pirates to acquire games illegally.  Ubisoft launched their new DRM with Assassin's Creed 2 for PC last month.  It requires an active internet connection to play.  This makes no sense since AC2 is a single player game. Syp had a great summary of the situation up over at Bio Break.  Also worth looking at are the two Joystiq articles about Ubisoft DRM running into some trouble already. All worthy of your reading time.  Also, Penny-Arcade's cyclical argument with a literal strawman .

Syp from Bio Break had a post up about a month ago about playing multiple MMOs.  Some people do it, some do not. I am one who does not, generally.  I'll make an exception, from time to time, when a new MMO is released that I am excited about.  I'll give it a month of my time even if I am currently invested in another MMO.  I'll only play the first (free) month before I make a decision and choose one MMO over the other. My problem with playing multiple MMOs at the same time is that I feel like I'm wasting money.  If I have 60 hours each month to play an MMO and can pay $15 for that month of play time, then that is great.  If I add another MMO to the mix I end up paying $30 each month for the same 60 hours of entertainment. I understand the desire to have different gaming experiences.  I play (and pay for) all sorts of games.  Some months I buy multiple new games.  I treat MMOs differently because of their recurring subscription fees. ...