Digital Terrarium, part two

[rynling]

I’m still daydreaming about the Digital Terrarium magazine, and this is what I’m considering:

What we’re looking for:
- speculative fiction
- essays and analysis
- comics and illustrations
- visual art

What we don’t want:
- poetry
- reviews
- fanfiction
- photography

Themes we like:
- video games
- plants and nature
- LGBTQ+ identity
- quiet joy
- creeping dread
- the strangeness of everyday life

Essentially, Digital Terrarium is meant to be a space inspired by the worlds of video games that’s soft and green and a little strange. LGBTQ+ and BIPOC authors are especially welcome.

Part of my motivation for creating a magazine like this is that, as someone with a female-coded name, it’s 99.99% impossible to get anyone to respond to my pitch emails, even when we’re mutuals on social media and I send them a direct message to ping them about the pitch.

To give an example, I got zero response for my pitch about “How Final Fantasy VII Confronts Capitalism: Tifa Lockhart vs Medical Debt.” This was a well-crafted and original pitch about an important but completely unexplored aspect of a high-interest topic, and it also happens to be *cough* Luigi *cough* extremely socially and politically relevant at the moment.

On top of that, this pitch is coming from an Ivy League professor with an established record of publishing popular-audience articles and a decent presence on multiple social media platforms. Also, despite all the social media discourse, I don’t think anyone actually cares about non-Western cultures; but, if they did (for “woke points” or whatever), this pitch takes an intriguing cross-cultural approach crafted by someone who’s skilled in handling such topics with nuance and sensitivity.

This is wild to me. I’ve read a lot of pitches, and the vast majority are either garbage, delusional, or highly dubious (ie, sent by someone whose existence can’t be confirmed and likely originating from a content mill). If I were an editor and a pitch like mine fell into my hands, I would be delighted, especially if it were coming from someone I’ve worked with before.

I eventually convinced my editor at Sidequest to take the essay, and hopefully it will come out soon. So all’s well that ends well, I guess. Still, the pitch for this essay was made of solid gold, and it’s insane that it was completely ignored.

If there’s still to this day no real space for soft and queer (and vaguely female-coded?) voices in video game writing – and if there’s no space for someone like me specifically – then there needs to be more space. Simple as.

Comments

[scrawnytreedemon]

That sounds like an INSANELY good pitch. Misogyny continues to be a blight upon spaces of analytical cultural discourse (and society at large) (: It's mad that even now, after a solid decade of highly-visible mainstream social justice advocacy and mountains upon mountains of statements from institutions in response pledging to value "diversity and inclusion" that there are so, so many places where people like us are either invisible or outright unwelcome.

Best of luck on the essay! It sounds fantastic, and I'm itching to get my eyes on it, lol. If and when you do manage to pull this magazine off, I think it'll be a tremendous boon to marginalised gaming spaces.

[rynling]

THANK YOU.

I get really annoyed (and, tbh, a little hurt) by “men are all stupid and bad” conversations, but gender bias is real. I’m sure it’s not conscious or malicious, but still.

And it’s very odd, too. If, statistically speaking, cisgender women are responsible for roughly 3/4 of all book sales, magazine sales, and Patreon subscriptions... Why exclude them? Excluding a clear majority of the market from “mainstream” platforms only ensures that the market will fragment and go elsewhere.

I suppose that the general readership of gaming websites used to be large enough for gender bias not to matter; but, now that videos and podcasts dominate the cultural conversation, platforms that depend on writing need as much support as they can get. Capitalism enshittifies everything, of course, but I also think the sad fate of sites like Kotaku and Polygon (ie, being bought out and having to release the bulk of their staff) is partially their own fault for taking so long to unstick themselves from an absurd “girls don’t play games” mentality.

But what can you do... Besides start another gaming website lmao. In any case, I can’t even begin to tell you how much your encouragement means to me. Seriously, thank you!