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...

It's time, once again, for some Sunday reading.  I haven't written a Sunday reading post for a few weeks, but I saved up some links that are particularly insightful. Church of Pangoria has some interesting thoughts on the questing conventions that we all take for granted.  He has some great ideas about minor tweaks to questing in MMOs that could improve the experience substantially. I have two articles from Kill Ten Rats for you.  The first is about balancing the new quest system in Guild Wars 2.  It's a solid analysis of the problems that might happen because of public/organic quests that GW2 aims to have. The second is about how niche the MMO market truly is.  He has some great advice that developers should keep in mind while creating MMOs. This last link is my favorite.  It discusses how to win with a marginal advantage in competitive gaming.  It applies to everything from Mancala to Chess to StarCraft.  Thanks to Systemic Babble for...