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Reviews and Potential Inspiration

This blog I have created is for an English class that focuses solely on video games as literature. With that said, there are other students who have been up-keeping similar blogs that I am going to review today and potentially use their success for future inspiration.

The first blog I am going to discuss is written by David Eyring. David's blog has some strengths that I enjoyed. One thing specifically that I like is the simplicity and the ease of navigating. The blog utilizes a format which is a vertical column of his posts with the titles standing out. To go along with this, I liked David's effort to make his titles stand out by using a different, fancy font that is different from the rest of each individual post. With that said, I think he may want to re-think which font he chooses. I think the idea to use a different font is good,  but maybe one that is not as difficult to read. 

Another aspect of his blog I enjoy is the personality he has been able to generate throughout each post. David has a clear voice on who he is and who he wants the readers to see him as. He always has welcoming words that make the posts feel more conversational, which is an attribute I hope to include in my blog moving forward. To go along with though is something he may need to look at further, which is who his audience is. In his more recent posts, David has made it clear that his readers will be "fellow gamers" as he uses that same greeting consistently. However, prior to his last three posts, there was no greeting, so maybe making it more consistent who he hopes his audience will be is something for David to think about. Overall I enjoyed his blog, but there are a couple things that I believe David could add to improve his blog, 

The second blog I am going to be discussing today is written by Jennifer Steward. Jen's blog stood out as one of the more unique blogs I came across, which is why it caught my eye. The reason it appears unique to me is because Jen chose an atypical theme that has all the blogs she has written, vertically displayed in three columns all on one page. While this definitely makes her blog standout as unique, I think it is a bit clustered because you are unable to decipher which post is most recent from the home page. In some cases, we have written blogs about the first half of a video game, then the second; with this layout a reader may read the second one first by accident due to confusion. 

Something I really like about Jen's blog is her creative titles. She uses rhymes, play on words, and other fun techniques to develop eye-catching post titles. This is a weakness of mine and seeing hers definitely makes me want to attempt to make mine better because I can see how effective a good title is with a blog. 

Another aspect of her blog I enjoyed was her voice in her posts. The voice sounds like the same person in all her posts, which is refreshing because writers do not want readers to think two posts are written by different people because the voice is drastically different. Additionally, Jen successfully utilizes pictures throughout her blog. 

One thing I would recommend for Jen is also to do with voice in a way. In some of her posts, she refers to "the player" as in the person who would be controlling the main character. This is a totally acceptable approach, but in some of her other posts she uses "you" or "I" to describe the character she is controlling. Consistency would be good to see throughout her posts.

Overall I enjoyed Jen's blog. She utilized elements I am probably going to use as inspiration for my own blog. 

Up next for me is a discussion of world on Bioshock Infinite, and how the world developed compares to the world of Rapture from the first Bioshock. Talk soon. 

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