As I was recently cited by SUWT as a bastion of privacy on the internet, I think I should link to this perfect example of one of the risks of blogging about your life: Ixobelle blogs about some recent changes he made in his life, gets an anonymous comment on why his choices are bad and how he should do better, and promptly explodes with understandable anger about people telling him how to live his life.
The demographic of MMO players, and MMO blog readers, has a high concentration of young adults. By nature this is a time in life where consciously or not you make a lot of choices which have a huge impact on the rest of your life. These choices are often complicated, and depend on many factors, so describing your complete life situation on half a page of a blog entry is nearly impossible. So even if you want to blog about your life, the picture other people get from your life is necessarily incomplete and fragmented. And then you get some anonymous troll making a snarky comment. Great!
I do sometimes mention some of the life choices I made. For example that my wife and me are dinks (dual income, no kids), which explains where I find the time to play so many games, and the money to pay for them. But I certainly don't want to preach the advantages of more disposable time and income versus the advantages of parenthood. There are many different and totally valid life choices you can make. Games were not the reason why I made my choices, and I'm not going to discuss all the details of how I arrived at my choices and my current situation with a bunch of strangers, some of them hostile. I already get enough flak from people who think that having children is the only way to live. And then I'm still lucky that many of the choices I made in life were rather conventional (9 to 5 job, opposite sex marriage). You imagine what a blogger with more unconventional life choices would have to endure for comments if he blogged about his life!
So in spite of some people expressing a desire to get to know the person behind the blog better, I think it is preferable to not blog about your life. Unless of course you *want* to discuss the details of your choices with a bunch of strangers. But this is the internet, a place where you can get death threats for a bad game review. Do you really think this is a good place to discuss your private life?
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