Last month I gave a talk at the Queerness and Games Conference. I took it as a chance to reflect on the relationship between queerness and hegemony when writing histories that include marginalised perspectives. To build histories that challenge authority rather than creating it, I think we have to dismantle not just great men, but also the idea that there is a main stream of history to which some stories just don’t belong. People seemed pretty excited by it, but I think there’s a lot of work still to do developing the points I wanted to make, so I’m hoping there will be an opportunity to publish something on this topic in the future. Nonetheless, if you’re keen on seeing where I’m up to so far on this you can read the text of the talk on Medium.
Memory Insufficient is part of that attempt to change the way that I do history, to accommodate the fluidity and fragmentation of human experience. The latest issue, on disabilities in games history, has done very well and has been shared with about 1,500 people. Even though it’s short, the content there is very powerful, challenging us to think about representation not just in terms of ‘is this depiction sympathetic’ but also in terms of what games tell us about the meaning of our bodies and minds.
Like the issues on imperialism and hardware, the latest call for submissions takes on a topic title that diverges from identity-oriented labels to nonhuman bits of the network; it’s about marketing in games history. As always, I’m open to anything coming back, but I’m really excited about the possibility that people will go find some old game-related ephemera and historicise the shit out of it. I’m going to be regularly posting links to interesting resources on the Facebook page, which you can ‘like’ and share to bring the project bounteous digital merit.
The issue on Hispanic Heritage in Games has been delayed. There weren’t enough submissions, and also I want to better learn how to navigate the intersections with things like class, race, gender etc. My tentative plan is to look for oral history interviews, and publish the issue as a special edition that is entirely interview-based. I would be very grateful to hear any criticism of this idea, and even more grateful if any Spanish- or Portuguese-speakers came forward to help (my rusty Castellano just isn’t up to the job).
In general, I’m super happy about how Memory Insufficient is going, but I’m also getting itchy feet. I’m keen to find a funding model that will allow me to pay writers one day, without paywalling the content. There are some things I will never compromise on, and keeping Memory Insufficient free is one of them. I assumed at the start that I would eventually crowdfund it, but when I spreadsheet it out it looks like the average donation per backer would have to be around $100. It would require some pretty amazing product design to hit that average while allowing everybody to continue to get the ezine for free.
One part of the solution is to get a larger audience for Memory Insufficient, to lessen the burden that has to be carried by each backer for the crowdfund to succeed. I want to work more at finding the potential reader base, and that means learning about the kind of contexts in which Memory Insufficient is currently read. My first stop is going to be games education. Do you teach about games? If so, I’d like to hear from you about what it would take for Memory Insufficient to be a useful resource. I’ve made an anonymous Google form here, but if you want to write a more casual email about it then my address is rupa.zero@gmail.com.
