Social Media is more challenging than I thought...

Without even trying I've created the content for a post about posts. I could probably try and squeeze an Inception joke in here somewhere but hey, it's not 1983!

Anyway, it has occurred to me that a particularly important part of being an independent RPG developer is generating and maintaining a social media presence. This post is about what that means for me.

I personally find maintaining a social media presence to be the most challenging aspect of game design (aside from getting playtesters). I've always enjoyed my own company and nowadays the "lonely fun" I used to have drawing dungeons no one would ever walk through and making characters I'd never play has given way to writing games people will never play. The problem is that if I want people to play them and talk about them I need to engage. To be clear, I'm not comparing my situation with the struggles of people with genuine social anxieties that make even answering the phone a challenge.

So for prospective designers, if you're like me this may be a large part of the job you'd not banked on. I also don't want to create the impression that I don't want to get to know people, quite the contrary. It's just that I struggle with the initial getting to know you bits, the social supermarket shopping ritual of reading the ingredients on a food label and from that making a decision about whether you'll like the taste of the whole thing. To put it another way, I hate cilantro by itself but in curries and other dishes it's part of a flavour I really enjoy. I can't make a decisions based exclusively on its presence or absence in the same way I shouldn't write off a person that is opposed to vaccinations or who likes Creed.

So...

What am I going to do? Well, this is part of it. I'm going to try to maintain a social media presence for a month, engaging, writing, musing, and sharing and see what happens. Maybe it'll be easy or maybe it'll be a banal stream of liking people's vegan quinoa selfies. Either way I'm going to give it a shot.

How am I going to do it? I've invested some time in setting up If This Then That "recipes" that can post things about the place without needing to type the same thing everywhere. An early lesson I've learned is that it is possible to set up infinite feedback loops by creating a circle of post and repost. Consequently you'll want to sort out your primary input point and set up some kind of chain that doesn't feed back.

I'll update you as I go along.

You can find me at

g+
https://plus.google.com/107819547306552793583/posts

twitter
https://twitter.com/hzdgmg

facebook
https://www.facebook.com/victoria.rpg

web
http://www.hazardgaming.com
http://www.fatihrpg.com
http://www.pennyredpodcast.com


Daniel