Our main goal has always been to talk about gaming here at KeenandGraev.com, but we’re interested in hearing what you, our readers, think about our idea of adding the occasional blog posts about TV and Movies.
These blog entries would be tailored specifically to our interests and hopefully match yours as well. We would not talk about shows like The Daily Show, Bones, or NCIS (all great shows), but rather shows like Merlin, Robin Hood, Psych (maybe?), and movies like The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. These shows/movies interest us enough that Graev and I speak about them on a regular basis – as we do with gaming. An example of the type of commentary you can expect would be similar to the following snippet:
Last week’s episode of Merlin was titled “Excalibur”, yet it never once mentioned the sword’s name.  Merlin is told by the Great Dragon to take the sword (supposedly Excalibur) far from Camelot, so he takes it to the lake in the Royal Woods from episode 7 “The Games of Avalon”. At first we thought he was going to take it out and place it into a stone, but throwing it into the lake (where no mortal man may go) does set the series up for the Lady of the Lake to reintroduce the sword sometime later when Arthur is king. …. The series is really starting to take off now that Uther’s past is starting to unfold. For the first time we felt that sense of attachment and excitement. The series is finally getting some story arcs that will last longer than an episode or two and that’s what keeps us wanting more. …
Our hope is that we can discuss episodes of shows or movies that a few of you might be interested in and maybe strike up interesting conversation and a group of loyal followers wanting to share their thoughts and ideas like we’ve been able to do with gaming.
If the idea interests you, repulses you, or you find yourself not caring at all please let us know.
Gaming posts are great but some times it will be days in-between posts and a movie or TV show from time to time to mix things up would be great.
It could get some good discussion as well. I say go for it.
How about talking about the latest WoW movie deal and why it would be better than the last Street Fighter movie.
Will movies based on video games always suck?
I have mixed feelings about this. Maybe now that we are in a real slump of games we could fill some of the time with movies / books / whatever, but I would be afraid that it would take time / quality away from your gaming posts. That said, I’m all for recommendations of good entertainment other than games.
i pop in every so often just to check what ya think of things. sure, the more “crap” 🙂 you can put up here for us to read would be cool, so a seperate thread of movies and tv stuff would be nice,, also something like where you get some obscure but memorable movie quote, and we all guess it, just for kicks or one of your give aways you have every so often..then the next day you could reveal the source 🙂
My god no.
You can’t please everyone all the time. I say blog about what you like to. But personally I’d love to read and discuss movies. I already like how Oakstout has been doing that lately. I guess I shoulda done one on “UP” and “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” but anyways “UP” is awesome, “Twilight” is for girls and “Harry Potter” was decent but coulda been better. IMO of course.
I may unsub if the content on this site is further diluted. If you post about movies/TV in the place of occasional MMO-related posts, I’d probably lose interest in this site. You have trouble holding my interest with your MMO-related posts, even when I have a lot of interest in MMOs. I doubt you’ll make a post that I would want to read about topics I don’t care about like movies and TV shows.
It’s annoying enough to hear people in real life talking about TV and mediocre mainstream movies all the time. I don’t need to get that from here, too.
Feel free to ignore me, though, because I’m much pickier than most of your audience… and I actually know what I want and why I read your blog.
These posts would be sporadic. At most you would see 1 or 2 a week on top of our regular posts. Personally, I don’t watch a lot of TV and I don’t go and see a lot of movies. I’m more into watching DVD’s or older series *shrug*. The TV that I do watch (Merlin, BBC’s Robin Hood, stuff like that) seems to fit the fantasy/sci-fi gamer mentality around here quite well.
It would be *extra*, and not a “should I blog about TV or games today?”, on top of gaming.
We’re wanting to see what people are interested in besides games. We may even extend it out to gadgets, hardware, and other things down the road (we’ll make one of these “what do you think about this idea posts before we do).
Nope !
There are so many sites/blogs about movies/tv already…
I’d prefer if you sticked to MMO-type games 😉
Our general theme has always just been “gaming”. For a long time I’ve been the main one blogging and as a result the games that interest me the most (MMORPGs) have been getting the spotlight.
Graev is going to make a return and start blogging a lot more now, so you’ll be getting a very wide spectrum of gaming, instead of my little niche. We also have a new project in the works that Graev has been putting together which should bring a great new asset to our blog and readers.
Expect a lot more diversity in our gaming coverage once Graev begins blogging actively again. At no point do we plan to just stick to MMO-type games.
Well you guys havn’t let me down yet. Sounds good.
For me, I’d read posts on any topic.
But I’m also nigh aware that focused blogs get more attention. That’s just the nature of most people’s reading habits, they aren’t so much interested in you per se, but they segment their time into “I think I’ll read about games for 20 minutes”.
As I mentioned on Twitter recently, I find posts more fun to read where you’re more personally involved. IE: posts about experiences in this game or that, rather than speculation on future games you haven’t played yet. I think a few people here would agree it’s always interesting to read your perspectives, even if our opinions differ.
So you’re in a dry spell for games at the moment, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Ultimately, do whatever makes you happy. Screw the traffic, unless the traffic itself makes you happy.
Wouldn’t interest me at all. Haven’t watched TV for ten years (not at all co-incidentally, I’ve played MMOs for ten years).
I love film, but I’m going to go to full-time film critics for that fix. I wouldn’t pay any attention to what they say about MMOs…draw your own conclusion.
In these days of gaming wastelands you can talk about chickens farming – it will still be more entertaining that watching a countdown to Aion ticker.
In fact, if it’s so hard to find stuff to write about. How come the guys at Arstechnica has new, interesting articles every day?
arstechnica.com/gaming/news/
You run a serious risk of marginalizing yourself if you go in this direction, as some people who like this site because of the particular discourse over gaming will feel like the site is just turning into yet another hyperbole of blog ego.
On the other hand, if the posts have a gaming element to them (which some of your past ones have had), and have a more direct focus on how such movies have an impact on the culture of gaming (and vice versa), then I think it fits.
My fear here is the coinciding of this ‘new’ idea precisely when you are in a gaming drought.
My greater fear is of the wave of people waiting for ‘the next big thing’ can really act like lemmings and miss lots of fun things happening under the radar.
Anyone can write their movie opinion, if you want to be a respected journalist – do the deeper research instead of just milling around, ‘bored’, and keeps the game posts coming. Kind of old school I know in this twitter reality, but I think it is what most people who come here want.
BTW I can’t believe how many old gamers I have run into recently who really want a more hardcore EQ style game. There is certainly some momentum out there.
Thanks guys 🙂 We’ll keep the TV talk to ourselves for now.
Appreciate the feedback.
I don’t think it’s marginalizing yourself at all in doing that. Given the in-depth nature of your gaming posts, I fail to see why doing the same thing regarding TV and movies would be a bad thing. There are hundreds and thousands of writers whose opinions on TV, movies, and games I couldn’t really care less about, but when finding a duo who writes as consistent quality as you guys do, I can’t help but wish it were about more than just gaming. There’s more to you guys than just gaming, so posting here about that doesn’t seem like it would be out of place. Just don’t do it half-heartedly as was mentioned earlier.
Of course, that’s kind of the route I take with my own blog, so I’m kind of biased.
I don’t think it could hurt, and it’d be some good practice at reviewing films. Games don’t happen in a vacuum, either – there’s a lot of overlap. People who don’t play games don’t watch films in the same way.
Not for me. This is a great gaming blog, and will be all the better for staying that way.
It’s your blog. I would write about whatever I wanted to…your audience might change a little bit, but it will adapt.
Yeah I think that would be cool. Also since I have found my mmo of choice that will last me for at least a year it will be fun to see something a little different here and there.
I like the odd review of movies or TV shows so please fire away with them 🙂 My primary interest is in gaming though if that helps! 🙂
Love gaming and am DYING to read more stuff from Graev since my MMO burnout has me playing tons of other games.
I also love movies and tv shows and seeing some insight or reviews about shows might introduce me to some stuff I didn’t know was out there or hadn’t grabbed my attention at first glance.
Go for it!
well sounds like it would make too many waves to change anything, there is always the option of keeping “everything the same” to keep the “oh no, change” people happy, and just add a thread for “nongaming thoughts…” and drop that stuff in there,,would give us something to read off topic while keeping main page for the game stuff…
TV talk is always welcome in the videogame dry season.
My opinion:
This is your blog, blog about whatever you want. If you want to blog about the dead cockroach your cat brought to you in the middle of the night then do it. No one is being forced to read your blog.
Another idea might be to have separate sections for your blog. Like tvmovies.keenandgraev.com, mmo.keenandgraev.com, games.keenandgraev.com. That way if someone comes to your site for specific topics they can jump straight to those. Of course, I have no idea how your site is set up and if this is even an option for you.
Personally, I didn’t like the little review of Merlin, but whatever you want on your blog… If you reviewed movies like The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Firefly, Push(just saying coz a lot of my MTG and DnD friends loved it, and so did I), that would keep the posts sporadic. Though I dunno if you’re into any of those types of movies, besides obviously the LOTR. Connecting these reviews to gaming somehow would get bonus points :P.
In your videogaming drought I would suggest Rise of Nations, or Warcraft 3 custom games, since I can play those forever with breaks. But those are my personal favorites, and maybe not yours. It’d be interesting to see your take on WC3 games since you have good written opinions. The world editor is an excellent way of designing and developing games.
Keen, this is a pretty straightforward “signal vs noise” issue. A lot of the people here wouldn’t like additional content because, from their point of view, it would detract from your main gaming content (which is what attracted these people to your site in the first place).
The thing is though, the main issue here isn’t the extra content you want to add, it’s the injection of the content into your existing blog format. To get around this issue, you just need to 1) maintain the feeling of the existing social space you’ve created for your gaming community, yet 2) create new social spaces for other things you’re interested in. What I’m talking about here is something that’s becoming pretty common on the Web lately, the creation of “lifestyle magazine” sites.
So just imagine all of the content you want to relay as different sections in a magazine. So you could have Gaming, TV & Movies, Comics & Books, Technology, and more. Again each “section” of the magazine is it’s own social space so that it’s content “signal” still remains strong within the greater “lifestyle” community site. So if people just want to follow your gaming stuff, they bookmark your gaming section. If they want to see what you’re talking about relating to TV & Movies, they jump over to that section and so on.
Really I think there is only one drawback to this though. Increased traffic. No, I’m not joking. Right now you have a great community of people here where most people feel like they can contribute to a conversation to some degree. But imagine if you had 100 or more comments on every post? Again it relates to the “signal vs noise” issue. When you attract a lot of traffic, your comments can suffer with too much “noise”. Again the problem isn’t so much the increased traffic, it’s the limitations of the blogging platform to handle the high volume conversations.
All said and done, I’d recommend you taking the leap and going for it because of the unique way you communicate. If you take that same approach and apply it to other types of content, I think you could be on to something big. That said, if you stick with WordPress as your platform, you’ll probably need to look at getting a premium WP magazine template. Alternatively, I’d suggest looking at other platforms with more integrated features (i.e. blogs, forums, photo gallery, etc) that make it easier to put together different content streams. Squarespace (squarespace.com) is one such platform that I use myself for development. If you decide to try it out, give me a shout if you need any help.