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

[lassarina]

This reminds me, actually, of the place where I got the original idea for my what are you playing Wednesday posts, a blog called The Border House that was specifically about intersectionality and marginalized voices talking about games. I started the posts after the blog went defunct, but I miss its content still. I love the idea of having something like that again.