Happy Birthday Out of Games - Join Us For New Activities

Happy Birthday!

It's crazy to thing it has been 7 years since we first turned on registrations to Out of Games. In that time, tens of thousands of folks have made accounts on the website and participated in the community. Whether it was lurking, voting on cards and funny posts, or using our platform to create content, you've done it all!

If you don't have an account on Out of Games, why not? Go sign up!

Websites

Websites are a funny thing. You see a lot of people start a project, and after a few months they maybe lose interest in it or life just happens. After a year goes by, they don't renew their domain registration for one reason or another and the internet loses a piece of its history. Us humans, we are always creating history as we walk about our home we've called Earth, and that's an incredible thing to be able to document it.

One could argue not everything is worth documenting, like yes Shelly, I did read your latest blog on the length of your toenails, and no I don't want to link exchange with you but I'm glad you're having fun documenting something. The internet largely has given the people the power to choose what gets preserved, and that's a beautiful thing. People with niche interests can just start a website. That landscape has changed a lot in the 23 years that I've hosted websites, and it's incredible to see how the way we create changes every year.

I've lost websites too. I've had backups of sites that were taken down get lost to dead hard drives, a lot of of my very early writing online isn't even on Archive.org's Wayback Machine... which maybe is a good thing. But damn does it suck to lose history, and when you've got large websites that get bought out by a competitor, and a few years later they get turned off with no notice, there's a good chance we're losing history there too.

Who remembers GameTrailers? Just a couple of years after the site was acquired by Defy Media, they shut it down and the brand was sold off to IGN where it goes unused as a website and instead is just a YouTube channel. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, YouTube is great and hosting media is damn expensive! But, we did lose something a bit more unique. YouTube isn't really customizable like a regular website is because it needs to be a very generic platform. They also put so much clutter in front of your experience to keep you on the website, so if you just want to see the latest game trailers, enjoy also seeing other things YouTube thinks you might want to see. The Game Trailers forums, also a great gem of early gaming culture, gone. We've lost a lot of forums to "social media" and that sucks. Luckily, we do have a decent archive of the Game Trailers website.

Speaking of IGN, it's very cool that you can still visit GameSpy even though it was shut down back in 2013, which, starting next year, the website will have been online with no updates for longer than it was online and being updated which is crazy to think about. Do you remember how awful "The War Z" was? Hahahahhahahahhahahaha.

Did you know that Myrient, a massive gaming archive with over 390 Terabytes of content is going offline in just under 3 weeks? March 31, 2026 is when the site is going to be shutting down. That sucks.

AOL's Joystiq bit the dust back in 2015, though most if not all of the content was moved over to Engadget Games so that was at least done with grace. The sub property, WoW Insider which was a common sight in the World of Warcraft community vanished with content also moving to Engadget, and that team went on to start their own site, Blizzard Watch which continues to create content and cover news surrounding all of Blizzard's titles. We lost having a fun WoW-themed website though and it went to become a soulless dumping ground. Which for the record, Engadget didn't even care to keep the domain name, so now it just goes to a generic for sale page. You can't see much of their content on the Wayback Machine because of crawling errors. Sad times.

That's not to say Out of Games is a particularly fun looking website, we're modernized, no crazy textures all over the place, but we do try and spice things up a bit where we can! I really miss the old web, it was filled with so much charm and algorithms we're driving our discovery, forcing stuff down our throats to drive a certain message. Everyone has bias, but the modern social media platforms everyone relies on so much now are so shit.

This was peak webdesign.

Modern Mediocrity

The web was supposed to be democratic. Ruled by the people. Mega corporations shouldn’t have this much influence over what people see, think, and discover online.

I've got this kinda out there / tinfoil hat theory that we've figured out humans without knowing it. What if the prediction algorithms we've built have gotten so good at understanding how we think as a species, that they can anticipate what we're going to go looking for even days in advance which in turn is fed into advertisements. Or, it could be a bit more basic and something they've shown us is placed into our subconscious and they know our cravings.

I know, this is a bit of a crazy tangent but it's a fun thought experiment. People feel that they can have a conversation with someone about cooking tacos, and then suspiciously they start seeing advertisements for tacos. Was this because your phone was listening to you? I don't really think so, I think that there is a pretty good chance that the way our brains are wired, if you were talking about shoes an hour ago, tomorrow we're going to crave tacos.

That's not a factual example but I hope it illustrates my point. Maybe all of this is just a big simulation and we don't truly have free will. We like to think that we are unique creatures with our own thoughts, but are we? Or are we predictable and as artificial intelligence gets better are we all just going to see how similar we all actually are.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another place where this ideas shows up in an interesting way. Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive collections of human writing created over hundreds of years. When an AI generates an idea, it isn't just inventing something out on thin air but rather it's identified patterns in how we communicate (woo statistical relationships!) and spits them out at us. And it's really good at it.

Human creativity works in the same way really. Our ideas don't appear in a vacuum, they grow out of our experiences, culture, and knowledge around us. Art is a part of that too. Your senses take in data day and night and when you put your brush to a canvas, you're painting your experiences. When you put a group of people together, you get a nice brainstorm taking place, pushing everyone's collective knowledge together and LLMs are doing that at an insanely fast speed.

Consider that the theory of evolution was independently discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Parallel ideas are commonplace and its because of the way we observe the world. When you have the right conditions, multiple people can arrive at the same idea which is what makes things like patents frustrating. Why are people able to patent video game mechanics? It ruins our collective knowledge. Jeff Bezos certainly didn't come up with the idea of a 1-click checkout by himself, he was just rewarded for doing it first.

Look at Palworld, they didn't do anything unique with the game, it's super fun and maddeningly addictive, but its literally just Pokemon with Guns. Does not make it bad, but it's not "unique".

Most ideas aren't completely original, that's alright. They are an evolution of us as people. Maybe though, our brains are more predictable that we think and this whole current world run by a select few is simply exploiting that fact. So what is Out of Games' goal? To continue to be independent, to give power to our own voices without being a slave to the algorithms. We talk about what we want to talk about, even if there is a chance our influence comes from the patterns we are beholden to.

Always fighting for something better. A fight for independent journalism and platforms.

Editorial Standards

Algorithms decide what people see. Editorial standards decide what people can trust.

Earlier this year, I published a new page on our website, a set of editorial standards for us to adhere to. This is one of the ways that Out of Games tries to uphold its independence.

We aren't a content mill that just pumps someone else's content into an LLM to post hastily. We believe in transparency, proper sourcing, and making it clear when something is opinion versus reporting. Our writers are encouraged to show their voice, cite their sources, and respect the community that reads and contributes to the site.

We also make our standards public. Anyone can read them. If we make a mistake, we correct it. If something needs clarification, we update it. We need to be a part of the good side of the internet, the side that is meant for people.

Independent journalism only works if readers can trust the people writing it.

What About Preserving Out of Games?

Out of Games almost certainly won't last forever, nothing in this world does. At some point, we'll cease to exist for one reason or another. I can't even fathom that day because I want this to go on for generations, but thinking about preserving the website, that's an important consideration, especially when its not only my work that has built this website.

I'd hate for all that work we've poured into the site, the history we've created, to just vanish one day. When that day comes though, we'll be prepared.

One option we have is to ensure our articles can live on as a publicly distributed archive on the high seas. Just a simple torrent floating around can help be one aspect of knowledge preservation.

Right now we not only maintain database backups of the website, in several locations as any responsible webmaster should, but also static content backups. These are basic versions of our major pieces of content that could be hosted extremely cheaply. Since we're talking about a relatively small amount of content, a static archive would be trivial to host comfortable on a CDN such as Cloudflare.

Another practical step is to ensure that the Out of Games domain, and our other domains, are owned and maintained for as long as possible. Keeping the domain active prevents it from falling into the hands of bad actors who might try to exploit the name or misrepresent our project. I've lost domains before and I've seen them get scooped up and turned into adult content websites that promote other content; It's disheartening to see.

Longer term, I'd love to see some kind of foundation created to preserve our work. That could mean dedicated a small portion of our profits toward maintaining an archive so all the contributions of our staff and community can live on and remain accessible for decades to come.

Because the web has already lost too much history. Out of Games should not become another forgotten piece of it.

Fresh & Fun Updates

Now that you've indulged my brain, we can talk about our daily announcement for Birthday Week!

This comes to us a bit later today, yesterday's Hearthstone patch took longer than expected to solve some issues, so the finishing touches on getting today's deployment ready did not get to take part until today.

Activities, which you first knew as word searches, have made their glorious return with a fresh coat of paint and leaderboards! Activities are a way to earn experience to level-up on the website, and just generally test out your brain.

Trivia!

Oh, I'm sorry, do word searches not test your brain enough? What about Trivia? Yup, our first new activity we are debuting today is a trivia system!

Trivia is a way to test your knowledge about video games. The very first trivia that we've got for you is Hearthstone's Humble Beginnings, and it contains 10 questions about Blizzard's digital card game including history that you may not know making for a fun test of knowledge. You will see at least one new trivia game make its debut each day for a while as we start to build up our collection of activities for you to complete; It wouldn't be fun to unleash them all at once.

And no, they aren't all going to be multiple choice either. We may ask you to write in an answer as well.

If you're ever wondering if there are new activities available, just check out the sidebar on the website which will let you know when there are activities you haven't yet seen.

Scavenger Hunts

We've also got Scavenger Hunts! If you've been around Out of Games for a while, you are almost certainly familiar with our events system where we'd run our yearly Oozefest for Halloween and Snowpocalypse for Winter. The event system hasn't made its return yet, but we've brought out one of the best systems we developed for them and made them available all year round.

What's cool about this new system is that you can track your progress much easier. When you activate a scavenger hunt, it will travel with you across the website letting you know when you solve clues, how close to done you are, and if you need a reminder of what you're searching for, it has that too.

We've kicked things off with a brand new Scavenger Hunt featuring Hearthstone's new Cataclysm set, but you can expect to see more hunts to take part of in the future and we will also be bringing back all of our old ones as we convert them into the new format and make sure all their clues are still appropriate.

Scavenger hunts were one of my favourite website features, and I know our staff members always had fun putting them together, so its great to give us a more powerful tool to create them. The biggest thing that I loved about them was it was a way for us to get everyone to explore the website and in a way, it can be a way to highlight new features. We'll also be opening up suggestions for clues for future scavenger hunts too, allowing the community to get involved in their creation. Stay tuned!

And More?

Later this week, we are debuting "daily challenges" which are activities that can be completed on that day and count towards your daily streak, which yes, we've gamified activities by having overall leaderboards too. There are a couple of other big activities we also have cooked up which I'm the most excited about, but you'll have to wait for us to introduce them properly...

Celebrating 7 Years of Out of Games

And Out of Cards, and HearthStation, you should never forget where you're from.

It has been an amazing journey and one that we're going to continue to push on with. The plans for this entire year are massive and I'm happy that we're actually making big progress on them with the backend. Our primary goal going forward is to create the best tools possible to support the games that you like to play. We want to make tools that not only will help you in games but we want to build more tools that allow people to create content for and interact with the games they love.

Consider our deckbuilder for Hearthstone. Sure, someone can upload a YouTube video about a deck or they can start a website and post images of their decklists directly from the Hearthstone client along with some text. Those are both completely valid experiences, but a deck can be so much more than that. Consider our new draw a hand/mulligan feature. Decks are living, you should be able to interact with them. We all experience content so passively these days, let's add interaction to everything where possible.

Gaming is interactive by nature.

That's my philosophy about tools for games here on Out of Games. We want you interacting with content. It's okay to just consume, but taking part is so much more fun even if it is just drawing a hand to check out what a deck has to offer.

Our new website is allowing us to build new features and support more games at a faster pace than every before while delivering a higher quality experience for everyone. It's no longer a huge lift to just try a fun new experiment or side project, which is one of the things that built the entire web.

Our celebration is not just one singular thing this year, it's a collection and it's just the start of putting our set of legos together to build the best website and community in gaming.

It's funny how seven years in, we're just getting started.