I definitely feel this. There’s absolutely a time and a place to all scenes, and while I think we live in one of the many golden ages of gaming, the OSR and adjacent ecosystems definitely feel distinctly different. In some ways that’s a lot better. It’s always difficult to deal with chuds and reactionaries in gaming, but I think lately we’ve gotten WAY more diversity in gaming than ever before.
But there was definitely an excitement during the earlier and mid eras of the OSR that I just don’t feel about most blogs nowadays. There’s still excitement, sure, and practical topics, but so much (and I’m as much at fault for this with my blog) of the topics are discussing the “meta” - the cultures, the times, and various personalities in the scene, with a lot more theorizing that seems to remove itself from the table. Not all, of course, but its definitely more indicative of the modern era.
We also have a lot of revisionists who try to point to specific eras as “THE OSR,” so I want to be very clear I am not doing that, just agreeing that blogs from 2010 and earlier had a different kind of energy that I am nostalgic for.
Personally very nostalgic. I have to say crawling through those old blogs does feel very OSR in-and-of itself (aesthetic of ruin eh?) Seeing old ruins and rooms (links) one cannot enter because the roof has fallen in.
Might I inquire…revisionists? I can see blurry “periods” in the same vein of the “ages” of comic-books.
Oh yeah, just people who try to solifify one particular era as “the” OSR, often significantly ignoring other aspects to the communities that don’t align with whatever model of history that they are pushing.
An easy example of this would be the whole “the OSR died when G+ died” crowd. Yes G+ was very important to the OSR on a broad level, but there was nothing inherent to G+ that defined the OSR - it started before it, and a large part of it didn’t interact with G+ at all.
I’m one of those who has a blog from the before G+ migration times and I definitely agree that it was a bit different before. While a lot was taking place on forums, there were a few people blogging about these older games and a lot of the conversations ended up being blog-to-blog. Web-rings were still a thing! I remember when the term OSR began to get bandied about, and found it useful mostly just to find others who enjoyed these older presentations
I missed out on the OSR in the Google+ days and just barely, I wasn’t very involved with tabletop at the time and wanted to be and I ran across microlite d20 and then into OSRIC and I was interested but I think it being based on AD&D which I had read and sorta but not really played back in the 90s/ early 00s kinda pushed me away. Definitely a regret these days.
Poking my head out of the gopher hole to agree with this – I was around on my (first) blog before the great G+ migration, and I only looked at the G+ migration long enough to know it wasn’t for me (i.e. once or twice) and never interacted with it.
To be honest I felt at the time like the OSR scene (that I knew) died then, with the migration, which just goes to show how all the divisions and timemarks really are just subjective and arbitrary.
