I do regard people who loudly declare that they have no regrets in life to be a bit tedious.  I certainly don’t believe them.  Also, they might possibly be drunk… or malignant sociopaths like Marc Andreeson.

Still, if you’re putting it out there that there is no decision in life that you might have made differently, that there were no moments where you might have done something different in retrospect… well, as I said, I don’t believe you.

Certainly the more than 60 year stream of accidents and encounter and sheer lucky breaks that have added up to what is, in the rear view mirror is, to my so-called life is chock full of points where I likely made the wrong choice.  Or, perhaps worse, where I am not sure what might have happened if I had made a different choice.  There are a myriad of inflection points in every lifetime where a seeming simple choice made differently could have sent you down a completely different path.

My brain likes to revisit those when I am awake at 3am.  That is the witching hour for regrets and self-recriminations.

But maybe I am being too pedantic.  Never go full pedant.

While there are choices I would make differently with the help of hindsight, it is perhaps the general outcome that people are on about.  In the end I’ve made it this far and am happy, healthy, and reasonably content in life.  I don’t wake up every morning ruing the day I made some ill-advised choice that ruined my life.

Perhaps that is “no regrets” enough… though that drunk person loudly declaring it still gets on my nerves.  And don’t get me started on Marc Andreeseon.

All of which is just some noisy groundwork to bring me around to today’s topic, part of the blog 20th anniversary week, which is regrets.

20 Years… see what happens when you let me use Canva?

Overall I have no regrets.  I haven’t woken up 20 years down the line and felt this experiment has all been a waste of time.  I mean, if has been, it has certainly been no greater waste of time than most hobbies.  Would the world have been better off had I watched sports or read a few more books or joined a bowling league or became obsessed with creating model train layouts that fit in a suitcase?  Likely not.  Hobbies fill the time, and in the end time washes us all away.

But were there choices I might have made differently given the reflection of time.  Let’s take a walk down that list.

The Name

The name of this blog pains me 20 years in.

We need a name that’s witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it

-Seymour Skinner, The Simpsons, Homer’s Barbershop Quartet episode

This one comes up every year, and each year I get more strident about it.  Also, that quote comes to mind every time.  The name/title of this blog, which is still as of this date “The Ancient Gaming Noob,” is one of those things that seemed funny at the time, but in hindsight I am kind of lost as to why it was funny.

There are multiple problems with the name that irk me.  So let me go through some rules for blog naming I have formulated over the last 20 years.

Don’t start your blog name with “the,” and probably avoid “a” and “an” as well, though the latter two at least have an alphabetical advantage.

Avoid a blog title that implies a moniker for you.  People ignore my nom d’plume and refer to me as “the noob”… or they used to.  Almost nobody references me 20 years down the road, and the few that do tend to refer to me as Wilhelm or TAGN… though the latter, while preferable, is still not my name.  I recall a few instances when somebody attempted to use “noob” in the title as a pejorative… to which I tend to respond, if at all, that it is in there for a reason.

Being bad at video games is something of my brand as well.

I am also going to suggest you select a name that is a bit more on point.  Wilhelm’s MMORPG Explorations might have been a better choice for me.  Or Wilhelm’s Online Life, since it isn’t all about MMORPGs here, and hasn’t been for quite some time.  Or any one of a million variations on the theme.  I could create a blog naming Mad Libs.  Virtual Wilhelm, Wilhelm in The Matrix, Wilhelm and the Ono-Sendai Experience, Wilhelm’s Digital Existence, This Digital Life, and so on and so forth.  I don’t even need to resort to AI for that shit.  I could keep going and going.  I took a whole course back in college about brainstorming and other methodologies for idea generation.  My instructor would be depressed my meager efforts I am sure.

I also remain a bit exasperated with the idea that I felt I was old enough to be “ancient” back in 2006.  As one might paraphrase, “I’m 41, I’m not old.”  But that is the perspective from 20 years down the line.  Also, there was a bit of the “I’m going to write about games old enough to have that moniker,” which did come to pass.  So I guess I’ll concede the point… also, I kind of grew into the term.  I am now old.

However, given all that time, I have never seriously considered actually changing the name.  To a certain extent it does have an “its so dumb it kind of sticks with you” aspect to it.

Also I do like the acronym TAGN.  The one rebranding I have considered is just making all the header art say “TAGN” rather than the name of the blog.

And I can’t think of anything worse after two decades than changing one’s URL, so even if I did change the name I’d need to keep the acronym and I have yet to come up with an acceptable replacement.  My brain gets stuck on Trans-Apline Gaming News or something like that and is unable to proceed.

If I have a regret but I am not going to do anything to change it, is it really a regret?

The Hosting Choice

In the end, there isn’t anything completely intolerable about WordPress.com.  I am still here after 20 years.  That says something.

It is more the series of annoying changes over the years as whoever is in charge at Automattic Inc. keeps chasing trends in an attempt to keep the line going up.  The company fosters a culture of “new is obviously better” and trying to explain to them that you just want something like the blog you’ve had for the last two decades is like trying to explain calculus to a dog.

They are completely incapable of understanding a world where you do not want to upend your online existence every two years with a new way to drive featured content that is written, approved, and illustrated by AI.

Seriously, you can pay for a hosting plan to have a blog that practically writes itself.

So I spend time kvetching about their dumb changes in the month in review post on a regular basis.  I rather suspect they hate me… specifically me… because I open up a forum post every time they break some old feature I use with their new stuff because the idea of testing something before pushing to production is a completely foreign concept to them.

As with the blog name, the obvious question is “Why don’t I leave?”

And the obvious answer is “leave for where?”  Is there some place better?  And changing URLs and feeds and whatever after 20 years feels like a good way to lose the small readership I have acquired.  I think Google sends me traffic mostly out of habit.

In the end, the regret is that, when I had the choice back in 2006, that I didn’t just set up shop over at Blogger.  I’d have a blog layout like Bhagpuss or Noizy Gamer, with over active side bar content and a my posts in the center and Google would have mostly left me alone for the last two decades, making incremental updates at longer intervals and I would have little to complain about.

But that is a counter factual I cannot really test.  I might have been annoyed about any number of other things over there.  The grass might merely be a different shade of off-brown.  But I wouldn’t have some twenty something trying to tell me that uses AI to write for him that really, blocks are how REAL writers work.

Again, I won’t be changing anything… except my blog theme at some point when WP.com finally breaks support for it… but I do wonder what that different path might have looked like.

Not Starting Sooner

I bring this one up a lot too.

If I had started two years earlier, if I had gotten the bug and kicked off in August of 2004, I would have possibly had a whole series of post with contemporary accounts of the launch of EverQuest II.

That, of course, is the key to this whole site; having accounts written in the moment.  Recalling things five or ten years later is cool and all that, but your brain edits, your memories distort, your view softens, and you end up with a compromised recollection that is driven as much by you biases as your actual recollection.  I tell myself I had a lot of fun in early EQII, but it would have been nice to have the notes.

Though why stop there?  Technically Blogger has been around since 1999.  It landed in August of that year, which is a little too late to for early EverQuest, but there was still a lot of stuff I might have written about.  I could have had a rich commentary about the revival of TorilMUD in 2003 or things about Diablo II or Age of Empires II: Age of Kings.

Wouldn’t that have been grand?

Of course, this presupposes the idea that I would have wanted to blog back then, that I was ready and able, or that I would have written things of value.  Would 2002 me have diligently recorded my travels in TorilMUD?  Would 2004 me have noted down any valuable insights into post-cataclysm Norrath?  It is hard to say.

Again, a counter factual that one cannot test.  Also, there is the next topic.

Not Having a Plan

So, given the above regret of not starting earlier, I am going to complicate that by acknowledging that I launched into writing the blog when I did just because I felt like it at the moment, that it seemed like a cool idea, and so off I went.

My first post back in 2006 has the sketch of a plan, a list of things I might like to write about.  But that wasn’t an actual plan.  I had no idea what I would really end up writing about, what would seem worthwhile at the time and have value in retrospect.

I had no format in mind, no cadence of posts planned, no structure on which to build a journey of nearly 8,000 blog posts.  I was just winging it.  And it shows in the early posts.

Yes, some things started to gel fairly early.  The WoW instance group formed in that very first month and writing about our adventures became a staple of the blog then and there.  But how to write about even that was something which evolved over time.

I don’t think I had a real plan… well, I am not sure I have one now.  One might suggest I have less of a plan and more of a habit.  But a structure didn’t really form until maybe 2009 at the earliest.  And even then things were often chaotic until at least 2012.

Then I go read something from 2015 or 2018 and I wonder when did I get going.  When did I settle down and have a regular routine?  At what point was this blog something of intention and not just spasmodic response and “hey, let me tell you about what I just did in a game?” sort of things.

Do I even have a plan today?

Maybe not.  But I am better at recording things that I think I’ll find have some value a year or five years down the line.  Still, I kind of wish I knew what I was about on all of this.  But maybe having a plan is overrated

Things Not Written

My drafts folder can get pretty deep at times.  Right now it holds just shy of 200 potential posts.  It is about time to go prune it back again.  While there are a half dozen items in there that I will eventually publish, and maybe a dozen more I might revive, the rest are likely never going to happen.

That post about Star Trek Online going free to play isn’t ever going live.  I have a couple hundred words invested in a 2013 post about finally finishing the Wheel of Time series.  Spoiler: Matrim Cauthon is the only character that was at all interesting to me in the end.

I have a quote of the day swiped from a blog that was a repost of something from a forum that I wanted to run with.

No one will be able to see where WoW is a great game and *why* it fixed so much of the stupidity deep-rooted in the mmorpg genre.

That was in 2014 and I have forgotten what I was even going to say. (Though you can read the source here still.)

There are also a dozen or more starts at posts about EVE Online, some of which were picked up in other posts.  Others just went nowhere and were abandoned.

I mostly delete these after too much time goes by, though I clearly hang on to some of them.

So there is one from 2009 with the title Colonel Paddlehopper to the Rescue! which was post I started about playing Toontown Online with my daughter.  The body of the post is blank.  I write the title to remind myself to do the post, then never did it.

I don’t think I played more than four hours of the game, tops and, as such, I remember very little of it.  I didn’t attach any screen shots.  There is just an empty text field where I should have put some notes.

That is the one I regret not finishing.  That post and a few others like it that really depended on knowledge I had in the moment, knowledge which slipped away as the draft lingered and aged, waiting for me to return.  What was I going to say?  What did we do on that day back in 2009 that I set out to write about?

Tags and Categories

After 20 years I am mildly dissatisfied with my organizational scheme for posts.

In hindsight, I might have made categories related to specific genres of games, things like MMORPGs and Survival Co-Op, or First Person Shooter, or whatever, then left all the game names as tags.

Then again, that would have required me to have a solid and developed structure early on in the life of the blog… that elusive plan… and 2006 me probably would have just filed everything under MMO or some such and have ended up here wishing I had categorized by game title instead.

The annoying bit is mostly that WP.com has both tags and categories.  If I had gone with Blogger as a platform it would have been just tags and that would have been at least one step back from the problem.

The Interaction between Blogging and Gaming… and Life

Now we’re past the tangible and deep into ideas about paths not taken.  We’re also somewhat past regrets as well I suppose, but we’ll get to that further down the page.

I have posted in the past about the tension between blogging about video games and just playing video games.  Do I play to blog or blog to play?

I have no doubt that the path of my gaming would have been different over the last 20 years had I not been blogging about it.  Potshot will occasionally comment about something being good for a blog post and the need to keep the blog fed.

The influence of the interaction has been real.  I have, at various times, not played a game because I wasn’t ready to write about it, because I had too many other things going on related to the blog to introduce a new element.

But more so are the titles that I have played due to the blog.  I strongly suspect that I would not have gone in on Warhammer Online had it not been a blogging things.  I am absolutely sure I wouldn’t be playing the comically unfinished Stars Reach in early access had I not started writing about Raph Koster and Playable Worlds since before the game was announced.

Things like that gain momentum, get a life of their own as you follow them in your writing, keen to fill in the next stage of the story.

I am also pretty sure I wouldn’t have played EVE Online for most of the last 20 years had I not been blogging about it, and especially null sec, where I have felt the need to keep updating the ongoing story of that drama.

Then there is WoW and the instance group.  Does that even happen if the blog isn’t a thing?  I can’t even remember the details now of how Potshot and I ended up getting that going.  There are some long lost email messages somewhere that set this up.  I mention the interaction somewhat obliquely in an early post on the site, but what really happened?

And does the group keep going if I am not driving the weekly dungeon content posting?  Do we go play the other titles we do?  Are we playing Valheim or Palia or Planet Crafter if there is no blog?

Are Potshot and I even in regular contact here in 2026 if the blog doesn’t happen and the instance group fails to become a thing?  Do I even have my current job, the referral for which came though Bung in our group?

There is a whole chain of events, of coincidences and near run connections, that weave in and out of not just my gaming life, but my real life here.  It is almost a bit eerie.

Am I even me if there was no blog started?  What path do I take if not this one?  Do I become some shitposter on Reddit or angry guy on Massively OP or somebody who keeps their Facebook feed loaded with whatever it is I end up doing?  Do I still play video games, or do I not even care?  Am I happier?  Lonelier?  Or just different?

Summary of Regrets

Does any of that even qualify as regrets?  Does exploring the path not taking and wondering where it might have led without any real plan qualify if you’re still reasonably happy with how things ended up?  Has this post just been an elaborate, verbose version of that “No Ragrets” tattoo?

I don’t even want to think about it.