new year, new rambling
It's been two years and I'm still mad about Xenoblade Chronicles 3 not winning any awards at the Game Awards.
Whether or not I actually do anything with this blog, I wanted to throw myself at it just in case it's worth something. Sometimes a person's gotta yap, you know? And with the decay of the social platforms you know the names of, and the microscopic life cycle of sites like Cohost, who knows what the internet will look like by the end of this year. And if it all crumbles, where else am I going to yap? Reddit?
Strangely enough, despite having an internet pseudonym with net in the name, implying I'm some kind of internet presence, I didn't actually do a lot on social media throughout the last year. This can mostly be attested to having been digging my teeth into Final Fantasy XIV (which I might write about at a later date), which resulted in a daytime routine of not doing anything else on the internet except for logging into FFXIV and attempting to cleave through the entire main story from May thru August. Obviously I love the game, and with an otherwise empty schedule to spend my time with (disabled NEET moment), it was nice to have that outlet to interact with people and feel like I'm accomplishing something, even if it was as miniscule as beating a story dungeon.
However, the fixation on the game did leave me feeling... empty, for lack of a better word. I'd look at my journal and realize that more than two weeks had passed since I last wrote anything in it because I hadn't been doing anything I considered worth journaling about. In hindsight, I know it's not productive to balance my self-worth on whether I did something worth writing down in a book in a day, but I still feel the urge to do something... more.
Enter blogging. I've had a couple websites in the past few years, with their continued upkeep being to little success. My first proper go at webmastering had me using a personal website to post creative fiction, but the story I was creating didn't end up going anywhere and still sits unfinished. I would also post poetry here and there, but I haven't been writing much poetry lately.
But a new bizarre goal has entered the ring. On one fateful night, while I was on a random wikipedia rabbit-hole dive, I discovered the existence of cyberanthropology, the anthropological study of the internet. There's a few different names for the field from what I gleaned — netnography, digital anthropology, and more that are probably me woefully misconstruing a line of text from some overworked wikipedia editor. But the concept gave me an idea.
On one of the pages I ended up stumbling onto, there's a citation for an anthropological study of World of Warcraft, of all places. The book is "My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft" by Bonnie Nardi, and while I still need to read it through, I think doing something similar for Final Fantasy XIV would be an interesting use of my time.
Admittedly, there would be nothing scientific or academic about the task. I am not an academic, nor do I have any academic resources or connections to call on to assist or scrutinize my work. Furthermore, I would be going into the effort with pre-existing biases, having played the game for over 1400 hours this year. While I think I could go through with it regardless, I know I'm going in on the back foot, so to speak.
Additionally, I have absolutely no intentions of attempting to document and study the entire player base of FFXIV. My focus would most likely be limited to the North American data centers, as I don't believe my internet would enjoy me attempting to connect to the European DCs, nor am I a polyglot to play on the JP DCs and attempt to parse through discussion in a language I do not speak. That being said, my work would most certainly be cut out for me in interviewing and observing players just from the North American data centers, as well as attempting to note and document the numerous different player styles, from roleplayers to hardcore raiders to PVPers to casual sprouts.
I think another big inspiration for me going into this is the blogger Cryptotheism. Similarly to myself, they are not an academic, and yet they spend their time researching the occult without the boon of a university library or archive at their disposal (presumably). They once posted about how all their research is done at home, which I imagine looks like them scrounging through PDFs and whatever journals their local library might have buried somewhere. And yet, despite their limits, they've written some rather astounding stuff on the subject.
So I want to do something similar, I suppose. And while I probably don't need to say that the fields of a silly MMORPG video game and Real World Historical Witchcraft And Alchemy are two very different domains with very different importance, I still think this would be an interesting excursion.
Plus, I just love Final Fantasy XIV. Probably my third favourite game of all time, following short behind the Xenoblade trilogy and 1000xRESIST. By the way, go buy 1000xRESIST. Now.
Anyway. I don't know how to close this out. If I do end up going down this rabbit hole of research into FFXIV's community and anthropology, I'll probably write about it here, opening with a post about my pre-existing knowledge and then going into fully-fledged "research", if one would be willing to call it that. I do want to read the book I mentioned before, so I'll probably do that first and then start digging.
In the meantime, thanks for reading. Happy New Year.
— net-banshee