Do we want to discuss a theme now? Get some ideas going?
My first thought was Springtime Memories or something
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I like it! Itās a substantial and inspiring theme. Maybe Iād leave it as Spring, to open up the possibilities, like:
-Games set in or about springtime.
-Memories of playing games in that season.
-New beginnings of all kinds.
-Nature in games in general.
-Nature in a particular game.
-New trends in games that make you hopeful for the future.
Enough people have expressed interest so maybe we can keep brainstorming in this thread and come up with things organically and when there is need for it we can move it to Discord.
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I love it. Having a bunch of original ads would make it stand out against more ādesignedā, premium attempts at this kind of idea which in my opinion end up being a bit too coherent(samey) most of the time. And yeah a great tribute to the format of old game magazines.
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are we brainstorming other ideas or potential submissions? also, iām curious about formats for submissions - critical writing, art, fiction, poetry?
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Yes! No? You decide! I would make it as open as possible for now.
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Off the top of my head:
Certain forum threads, discussions or long posts from the forum could be turned into articles. That would be a completely different zine, but you could pick a specific post on say, the Outside Kids thread, and ask that person of they could expand it and find visuals for it to present it in a zine sort of way.
The theme could be something quirkier and more obscure. Alternatively, it could have no theme, and just be an amalgamation of whatever people are interested in, but we give it a title that sounds like something, like the IC showās episodes.
It should absolutely have different formats, visual styles, and fake ads, and cover a wide array of topics like the forum does.
Maybe instead of traditional pages it could be an interactive format, and you could browse it with a controller, Iām picturing some sort of ethereal, original Xbox interface. it could be published on itch.io
Then you could really have all kinds of formatsā¦ video, music, even games!
Ok I think thatās enough dreaming for now. would be cool though
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This is a really awesome idea!
Brand new to the forums, butācame here largely to see who else is doing/interested in like, literary criticism of games. Iāve worked in magazine editorial for many years and though video games are not my beat historically, I adore really thoughtful games writing like the series that the Cleveland Review of Books did on āGame-World Literatures.ā Also the whole Critical Hits collection that Greywolf published last year is excellent. I want more of that in the world and would like to make some of it.
I have a sprawling essay about open world games that I started a year ago and havenāt touched in a while; would love to resurrect that. And I would be interested in an article about ātaking a break from video gamesāāwhether self- or externally-imposed; perhaps a roundup with responses from a bunch of people?
Just some ideas. I, personally, am oldschool and exist in the world of print media, but have no qualms about contributing to an online/online-only project if thatās the way others want to do it. (Though I do think it would be kinda funny to do a print-only pub about video gamesā¦)
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Yup. A seasonal theme also opens up the avenue about several themes, like you said.
As for what @badd_ribbon said, I wanted to do that for a while. I read a review for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on Backloggd, and I wanted to make not an analysis per se (although I could make one), but write an article or a kind of a manifesto about how videogames could be more bold instead of what we have now (although it sounds cheap coming from someone who didnāt make a game).
Let me think about what we can do. Doing a seasonal one for four volumes would be great for starters, but Iāll do a brainstorming and see what can I bring out. One thing that I can say, though: the itch.io format would be something far more different to what people usually do, so it has a chance to stand out and be coherent, but with much leewy about what we can make.
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Have been thinking about this for a while and we can try to approach this from a different set of answers by doing very short essays in a free-form type of context, if itās okay with everybody.
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I like this - picturing something akin to a forum written version of the asynchronous podcast episodes they do around holiday times where everyone records their responses to the prompt/question
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