Why I Still Log In After Everything That Has Changed

Day 31. I made it.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I've signed up for Blaugust before and I have never once finished it. Not close. I'd get eight or nine days in, life would do what life does, and the whole thing would quietly stop. Thirty-one straight days of posting has been on my list of things I'd get to eventually for years.

This was the year. And this was the year for one reason, which I said on Day 1 and will say again on the last day. Bel built this thing, Bel isn't here, and finishing it properly was the only tribute I actually had to offer.

So let's close it out with the question the whole month has been circling.

Everything about my situation has changed. Not gradually, either. In the last twelve months I've retired out of a thirty-five year career, sold the house we raised our kids in, watched the youngest leave for college, become a grandfather for the second time, and moved most of the way across the country into a string of short-term rentals with everything I own in a storage unit. My playtime went from 40 to 60 hours a month to 3 to 5. Every single structural reason I ever had for playing this game has been taken apart and put somewhere else.

And I still log in.

Not much. But I still do it, and I've spent this month trying to work out why, and also whether I want to continue.

It isn't the content. Let's be honest about that. I've written eleven expansion posts this month and there are maybe three I'd call great. The game has been up and down for nineteen years, and I've quit it once, for about a year, and I've been bored by it more times than that.

It isn't the achievement either. I finished Loremaster on Joar last week and it was satisfying for about an hour. I have 52 max-level characters and I could not tell you what most of them are for.

If it's anything, it's continuity.

That's the closest word I've got. Almost nothing else in my life has run unbroken for nineteen years. Jobs ended, houses sold, kids grew up and moved out, the whole architecture of who I was for three decades got dismantled in about eight months. And in the middle of all of it, there's a dead warlock in a hood who has been the same the entire time, standing in a game world I know better than the town I now live in. I can log in from an AirBnB in a state I've been in for a few months and be somewhere completely familiar in about ninety seconds.

I don't think I understood that was what I was buying. I started playing this game to stay connected to my oldest son. He was ten or eleven, living with my ex-wife 450 miles away, and an MMO was somewhere the two of us could actually be in the same place on a Tuesday night. That was the whole reason I made an account. For most of the years since, I'd have told you I kept playing because the game was fun, and it was.

But fun isn't what keeps something in your life for nineteen years. Fun runs out. And my son stopped playing a long, long time ago. What kept it was that it was always there, unchanged in the ways that mattered, while everything around it got rearranged.

That's not nostalgia, either. I'm not logging in to remember 2007. Joar's not a relic, he's just still going, and so am I, and that turns out to be the point.

There's a version of this where I'm the guy who couldn't put down a video game for nineteen years. Some days that's exactly what it is. And I don't know whether I'll still be logging in a year from now, in whatever this new stage turns into. But I've come to think that having one long unbroken thing in a life that changes this much is worth more than it looks like from the outside, and I've stopped needing to defend it. Everybody's got a thing. Mine has an auction house. 

So that's Blaugust 2026. Thirty-one posts, eleven expansions, six other MMOs, and a fair amount of stuff I've never actually written down before. Thanks for reading it, all of you who did, and thanks especially to the people who've been reading this blog since the very beginning.

Bel, this one was for you. I finally finished the thing.

Cheers,

Joar