Happy new year! Changes coming to Strat Packer's blog in 2025
Happy new year to anybody who stumbles across this site and this article. I genuinely wish you and the people you love a pleasant 2025.
For more than three years now, this blog has existed in an ambiguous state. Is it a gaming news and reviews site? A place for retrospectives covering old games? A collection of thoughts on general geeky interests? An intermittent travel blog?
This probably also raised some questions for the few people who gave my identity any thought. “Who is this Strat Packer guy?” you might have asked. At various points you’d have been forgiven for categorising me as a wannabe video games journalist, an indie gaming connoisseur, a pseudo-intellectual rambling about social science, a semi-serious runner, or some sort of wealthy globetrotter.
It probably didn’t help that I drifted between each of those identities myself (except perhaps the wealthy globetrotter one - I can only wish). Depending on where my personal interests sat at any particular time, the content and tone of this blog has varied massively. There has been very little consistency.
The blog has garnered a decent audience - I received about 40,000 visitors last year. But that’s largely down to a few articles that have performed consistently well in search engine results, rather than any kind of community of readers who enjoy my writing specifically, engage with me, and return on a regular basis. That “stickiness”, as it is sometimes termed, is something that has so far eluded me.
Heading into 2025, I put some thought to this. Did I want to narrow my scope and churn out more regular gaming articles, even when I didn’t feel like it, in the vague hope that traffic might one day be substantial enough to sell advertising? No - commercialisation was never the objective of this blog, and I don’t need another job on top of the one I currently spend 40 hours or more at each week.
But if not gaming, then what? The other things I write about are too disparate to appeal to everyone who lands on the site looking for EA FC tips. But writing is an important creative outlet for me, and I don’t want to pack it in altogether.
After some contemplation, I came to a realisation: This is a blog for people like me. It doesn’t need to appeal to everyone. It doesn’t need to mimic the tone of professional websites. And it doesn’t need to have strict bounds on its subject matter, because if you’re curious about the same things I am then there’s a good chance you’ll want to read about both The Dark Knight and locus of control.
Therefore, I’m going to stop emulating the format of news and journalism sites and style the site more as a personal blog. I’ll write articles from a more personal perspective, and share updates from my own life alongside my thoughts on games, books, films, and so on. I’m just one of many techy city dwellers trying to simultaneously navigate and balance professional, intellectual, spiritual, and family lives. I hope that by refocusing, I’ll find others to connect with.
So expect a few changes over the coming months. I look forward to sharing more of my personal life with you, both in terms of events and my internal thoughts. And my inbox always remains open should you ever wish to share your own.
- Strat Packer
